The Crookedest Road in the World

Rim Rock Drive in Colorado
National Monument

Back when unemployment was twenty-five percent and money seemed all gone—we’re talking Depression here—FDR established the CCC to spend money the nation didn’t have on things people didn’t need for the most part, and to put men back to work.  So it was that a minor road from Grand Junction, known as the Crookedest Road in the World, was replaced with a tourist highway called Rim Rock Drive in Colorado National Monument.

CCC workers in the
Depression

The same place today

And I, a beneficiary, drove its curves and tunnels today without incident, and walked in otherwise inaccessible beauty.  Of course, the whole idea seemed ludicrous to conservatives back in the thirties—no relationship to today’s monetary issue.

Serpent's Trail in the 1920's

Serpent's Trail today

Serpent’s Trail, as the road was called before the Depression, is still there in remnants, as I walked part of it today.  Construction began in1912, completed in 1921.

How does a rock weighing many tons stand upright on its point without a Ventura artisan placing it there, perfectly balanced?

Here we have an ancient sculpture in sandstone, about three hundred feet high and adorned with a backdrop of variegated stripes.  The subject is clearly some ceremony where people gather before a dignitary on a higher seat.  Some say the dark brown stripes are streaks of desert varnish—iron, manganese or clay deposited by water, but the ancient artist did not know those words.  The white stripes, they say, are calcite coating which precipitated from seeping water.  

I see waves lapping on a beach in this sixty-million-year-old sandstone.  But since nobody believes that waves solidified into rock, geologists say it was windblown sand.

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