Berthoud Pass open again but weather still threatens new avalanches
Berthoud Pass re-opened Wednesday night after being closed for four days amid snow slides and repeated snowstorms. More snow Wednesday night continued to create new risk, but crews pulled in from around Colorado helped to get the 11,300-foot pass open again.
"We understand that this is a unique snow event here. There's a lot of wind load up on the pass. We're getting a substantial amount of snow right now," said Winter Park Mayor Nick Kutrumbos.
In town, snow kept falling. Kutrumbos, who also owns a restaurant in town, noted after four days of road closures over the pass the town was getting closer to shortages.
"It certainly impacts deliveries to the community fuel to the community. You know, typically, we can't go five or six days without those critical resources being brought back in," Kutrumbos said.
The problem for CDOT workers trying to clear Highway 40 over the pass was the volume of snow and the frequency.
"It's definitely pretty challenging, having changing conditions and clearing snow over and over again from the same location," said Colorado Department of Transportation spokesperson Elise Thatcher. "This is part of what keeping Berthoud Pass clear is like. It's part of the environment."
It wasn't the long avalanche chutes that caused big slides. Some on the pass run 2,000 feet or more. Instead the problem was snow piling on top of other layers of snow close to the highway.
"Often we do have what's called bank slides, where snow comes down from right next to the roadway down onto the roadway," said Thatcher. "We do a lot of planning to address these areas," said Dr. Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. "We don't want to minimize the danger at all. But you know it's going to be hard to push a car off a road, or break out a window, or something in a path like this."
Often the slides happen in areas around the hairpin turns on the pass, where there are steep inclines near the roads. Some of the longer avalanche paths have permanent avalanche mitigation equipment that creates blasts to set off avalanches. Layers create natural slide points.
"The slabs actually start at to break away and then run down the hill until they reach low angle terrain and stop. So you can see how big that avalanche path is," said Greene.
CDOT planned to close the pass for about 15 minutes again Thursday morning at 5:30 a.m. to assess the situation and look for overnight slides. Kutrumbos was thrilled with the idea of the road being open after days of people routing to Denver north to Granby, west to Kremmling, south to Silverthorne then back down I-70. A journey of many more hours.
"I think you could see in the background these are big flakes," he explained on Zoom Wednesday night. "Not a lot of wind right now. The skiing is going to be incredible."