How Long Is Colorado's Eisenhower Tunnel (And Is It Safe To Drive Through)?

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4 hours ago

The Rocky Mountains form the spine of America, coming down from Canada and reaching south all the way to New Mexico. In the U.S., they're most imposing in Colorado, home to the highest peak and largest area of the range. That made driving across the Colorado Rockies difficult, with drivers having to navigate both the roads swerving around the (of course) rocky terrain and, in winter and even spring, the snow and the ice.
So there was nothing else to do but drill a hole through it. In the 1950s, with President Dwight Eisenhower pushing the modern highway system as one of his signature domestic achievements, Colorado Gov. Edwin Johnson jumped on the federal willpower (and funding) for new routes to argue for a tunnel straight through the Rocky Mountains. In a feat of engineering that went way over schedule and over budget, two bores were blasted and drilled, one for westbound traffic, one for eastbound.
Named, respectively, the Eisenhower Tunnel and the Johnson Tunnel (after the president and governor), this incredible system is a whopping 1.7 miles long (coincidentally, about as long as Elon Musk's Las Vegas tunnel), taking around two minutes to drive through in light traffic. As a mountain tunnel (the highest part of the whole U.S. highway network), it features relatively steep inclines on the way in and declines on the way out. It's also narrow, with no shoulders. Given all that, is it safe to drive through?
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There has never been a fatality in the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel. Accidents happen, of course, and in winter, snow and ice can make them more likely. While it's relatively rare -- around three times a year -- a vehicle might even catch fire in the enclosed space (though that issue has been declining across the country for 40 years). That's all bad enough, but the main issue is that there's no shoulder for emergency vehicles to use to reach the problem.
To handle that, the tunnel has a metering system (essentially, traffic lights at the entrances, like some highway on-ramps have) that it can deploy in emergencies. That stops traffic while emergency vehicles, like the tunnel's fire crew, do what they need to do. The tunnel also has a fire suppression system throughout (including sprinklers).
In addition, the system boasts 28 fans, each 10.5 feet in diameter, pumping in fresh air and pumping out exhaust fumes. This also, naturally, helps get fire smoke out of the tunnel when necessary. Without this massive HVAC system, the tunnel's air would be unbreathable.
Given that the system's tunnels are inside a mountain range, where snow collects and then melts into rivers, it's not exactly shocking that lots of groundwater seeps into them. As water tends to do, that causes a lot of damage that has built up over time. If you drive through, you might notice crumbling walls and infrastructure. The state of Colorado is investing in long-term repairs to try to mitigate this issue, so for now at least, the overall structure ought to be safe to travel through.
And it's important that travel does continue through the tunnels. In peak season, up to 50,000 vehicles can pass through in a single day, an economic value that the Colorado government estimates to be worth $2 million per hour. In fact, the glamorous resorts of the upper Rockies, such as Vail, only exist in their current form because of the tourism this tunnel enables. The Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel, then, is a critical lifeline for the whole state. In other words, it's unlikely the authorities will simply let it decay into unuseability. Unless they'd rather just build new highways, of course.
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