JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colo. (KDVR) — With part of the Interstate 70 mountain corridor closed Wednesday night and Thursday morning due to a winter storm, some drivers found themselves on a dangerous dirt road detour.
Golden Gate Fire Protection District Chief Damian DiFeo contacted the Problem Solvers in February about traffic issues, accidents and pileups his department was dealing with on Douglas Mountain Drive.
The 13-mile stretch just west of Golden connects Colorado highways 119 and 93. It is mostly unpaved, steep and has numerous hairpin turns and drop-offs as high as 300 feet.
He believes map applications on cell phones are suggesting the mountain road as a detour when I-70 is backed up or closed.
“Yep, that’s exactly it. It rerouted them because I-70 was closed and rerouted them over a road that had 15 inches of snow on it and had not been plowed,” DiFeo said.
He said every time it snows and he gets a call from dispatch about an accident on Douglas Mountain Drive, it makes him cringe. That happened Thursday morning.
“The people that crashed today were going to Winter Park to go skiing,” he said. “A brand new Nissan Pathfinder four-wheel drive and just started sliding coming down the hill approaching one of those sharp hairpin corners and went off the side and rolled two and a half times.”
Luckily, the vehicle rolled in a relatively flat part of the roadway, away from the cliffs. He said no one was hurt.
“If they were injured, there is no way I could get an ambulance up that hill this morning. It would not have happened. We would have had to be putting them in the back of a pick up or something,” DiFeo said.
He said he has tried numerous times to work with Jefferson County and Google Maps to get the app to stop suggesting it as a route and to install signage warning drivers to turn around. However, DiFeo said he has not had any success diverting traffic away from Douglas Mountain Drive.
“It’s very frustrating. I don’t know what else to do,” he said. “Somebody’s going to get killed up there.”