An interesting trip...

We'll be celebrating our 10 year anniversary at our Lowry location in September. I still remember the excitement of our first day in our new offices. Our old location in the Galleria Towers on South Colorado Blvd. was nice but to be able to move into a brand new facility was a once in a lifetime experience for most of us. One of the design features in our building is that all of our conference and meeting rooms are named after Colorado mountain passes. Many of them you would recognize - Loveland, Vail, Berthoud, and Boreas for example. Others are lesser known and with the advent of super highways such as I-70 are drifting into only vague memories of old-timers since most of us will likely never actually cross most of these passes ourselves.

Through the years I've often driven over well-known Monarch Pass on my way from the Arkansas River Valley to places farther west like Gunnison, Crested Butte, Telluride, and Durango. Near the western end of Monarch Pass there is a small town called Sargents that if you blink you'll likely miss at 65 mph as you fly by on smooth asphalt. If you bother to glance to your left at Sargents you'll see a dirt road heading southeast with a sign saying Marshall Pass. For years I had wondered what was up that road, and this weekend I finally had the chance to find out. I had always been intrigued with this particular pass because one of the meeting/interview rooms in the Human Resources area is named after this particular pass. So my wife and I loaded up the bikes and the camping gear and off we went.

Like most places in Colorado, Marshall Pass had a rich and vibrant history long before I set foot on this planet but little did I suspect when I pulled off Highway 50 and went from 65 to 20 mph on what turned out to be a dirt road suitable for most passenger cars. The pass is named after Lt. William Marshall who was part of the 1873 Wheeler Survey. In the Fall of that year finding himself struggling with a painful toothache he looked for a quicker route back to Denver than the normal, but longer route over Cochetopa Pass (another one of Human Resource's conference rooms). Struggling through deep snow he finally reached the pass and realized that he had discovered a route over which a road or rail line could easly be built.

Upon reaching Denver Lt. Marshall and a group of citizens promptly formed the Marshall Pass Toll Road Co. and the following year a wagon road was completed. Just a couple of years later, in 1881, a rail line was built as part of the Denver & Rio Grande's narrow guage route from Denver to Salt Lake City. At the top of the pass a small settlement, railroad station, and Post Office were established and by 1948 the 'town' boasted a population of 11 souls. Time magazine recognized the Post Office as America's smallest while the postmark bragged that it was the highest Railroad Post Office in the world. Interestingly, the elevation claimed on the postmark is 10,845 ft. while today's Forest Service sign at the top of the pass shows a slightly lesser 10,842 ft. Marshall Pass even has a ghostly legend associated with it regarding a phantom train that was seen chasing the real train ahead of it.

On this trip I didn't see any phantom trains but in the wind and the sporadic rain I experienced as we mountain biked up the manageable 3-4% grades I could easily imagine that I could hear the distant whistle of a train pulling itself higher and higher through the thin air. Evidence of the railroad, save for the rail right-of-way on which much of the current road sits, is scant. The rails were removed when the line closed in 1955. However, if you get out of your car, or off your mountain bike, and look closely in the fine cinders of the roadbed you will still find old railroad spikes left behind. If you interview with us, and your session happens to be in Marshall Pass, you'll now see one of these spikes on the side table, a silent testament to our conference room's namesake.