In the valley where I live, along a quiet stretch of the Uncompahgre River, in southwestern Colorado, there is only one paved road, and, like most people around here, I don’t drive it south without a good reason. In that direction, the road—U.S. Highway 550—passes through the small mountain town of Ouray, and then it climbs more than two thousand feet in the span of six miles. This section of the two-lane road has been carved directly into the red-quartzite cliffs of the Uncompahgre Gorge, and almost none of it has a shoulder; in some places, the highway is only twenty-three feet wide. The speed limit is twenty-five miles an hour, and one way to identify locals is that they often drive faster than that. This is because they worry about what can happen above the road. Rockfalls are common, and so are avalanches. There are more than sixty named slide routes along this part of the highway, and residents refer to them in personal terms, like bad neighbors who are always home: Riley Boy, Mother Cline, Slippery Jim. Highway 550 is the most avalanche-prone road that’s open year-round in the United States.Visitors are more likely to be concerned with what lies below. Many sections of the road have a sheer drop of more than four hundred feet, and there are no guardrails, because of the need to push snow off after avalanches. When the route was constructed, in the eighteen-eighties, it was considered one of the greatest achievements in road engineering in the American West. Its purpose was to serve the silver and gold mines of the San Juan Mountains, but almost immediately the road also began to attract tourists. At some point in the early twentieth century, for reasons that are now obscure, the section above Ouray became known as the Million Dollar Highway.In 2013, USA Today featured the Million Dollar Highway; the Death Road, in Bolivia; the Highway of Death, in Iraq; and nine other infamous routes in an article titled “World’s Most Dangerous Roads.” Less than a year later, the paper’s “10 Best Bucket-List Road Trips” also included the Million Dollar Highway. Strictly speaking, there’s nothing contradictory about the same road appearing on both lists, although it helps explain why the Ouray County coroner used the phrase “attractive nuisance” when we talked about the road recently. People can behave erratically on the Million Dollar Highway. There has been at least one instance in which a driver got into a heated argument with her passengers, pulled over, kicked them out, and then, in full view of everybody, accelerated straight off the edge, to her death. One man travelled all the way from the Netherlands just to propel himself off the road. The G.P.S. data on the Dutchman’s phone showed that he had driven repeatedly up and down the highway before choosing one of the most dramatic drop-offs.Occasionally, a vehicle seems to vanish. Last year, early on the morning of August 5th, a tourist from Oregon named Adam Hynes was approaching one of the most treacherous sections of the gorge when he looked ahead and saw a silver Honda Civic moving in reverse. Hynes found it strange that somebody would be driving backward in such a spot, but then his view was obscured as he went around a sharp bend. By the time Hynes came out of the turn, the Honda was gone.Hynes dropped a pin on his phone. There was no signal, so he continued down the highway until he was able to call 911. Then he circled back and parked at a pullout not far from the pin. The gorge was so precipitous that Hynes couldn’t see the bottom, but he had a DJI Mavic 3 drone. He set the machine aloft, and its camera captured the Honda, which had fallen three hundred and twenty feet—about the height of a thirty-story building. The silver vehicle lay upside down in the Uncompahgre River, crumpled like an aluminum can.When an accident occurs on a steep part of the road, police and emergency services wait until skilled climbers arrive. On that morning, a call went out to the Ouray Mountain Rescue Team, a local volunteer organization that is staffed with many expert climbers. Two members, Jeff Skoloda and Tim Pasek, arrived and strapped into harnesses and helmets. They climbed down a rope that led to a Tyrolean traverse, a fixed cable that runs over the river to the other side of the gorge. After that, they installed a rope on the far cliff wall and rappelled down to the Honda. It took them about twenty minutes to reach the wreckage.As Skoloda approached, he couldn’t tell how many people were inside. He is in his fifties, a successful sculptor and metalworker who owns a large workshop in Ouray. Since joining Ouray Mountain Rescue, in 2000, he has helped recover more than a hundred bodies, often in treacherous terrain. Many have been climbers, skiers, or other recreationalists, but some were found in vehicles that tumbled off the Million Dollar Highway. When Skoloda kneeled beside the Honda, he heard a scream.Until then, the men had assumed that they were involved in a recovery operation. Now they tried to open the doors, but the Honda was too damaged; a handle broke off in Skoloda’s hand. The screaming sounded like a young girl, but the voice was muffled and hard to hear above the rushing river. They couldn’t see her face, because that side of the car had landed against a large boulder. But there was a small gap in the broken window on the other side, and Pasek reached in and touched a bare foot.“Can you feel that?” he asked.“Yes.”“Are you hurt?”“Yes!”Pasek used his emergency radio to tell rescue services on the road above that there was a survivor. They asked him to estimate how old she was, in order to figure out what size equipment might be necessary. The tumbling vehicle had left a long trail of debris across the sheer cliff—shoes, clothes, books, papers, luggage. Near the end of the trail, a children’s book was lying in the dirt. Pasek picked it up: “A to Z Mysteries: The Zombie Zone.” He has two children of his own. He looked at a page and made a guess—“I think she’s probably about ten.”In 2008, the public-school district of Ridgway, a town north of Ouray, donated a decommissioned school bus to Ouray Mountain Rescue. The team transported the bus to the Million Dollar Highway, where they shifted it into neutral and tied the steering wheel so that it wouldn’t turn. Then they positioned a loader behind the bus and pushed it off a curve in the road.Skoloda attended that training exercise, and he still has vivid memories of the school bus flying through the void and then sticking into the side of the mountain. “It kind of lawn-darted into place,” he told me recently. After the vehicle came to rest, the rescue team helped twenty volunteers climb down and position themselves inside the bus. The volunteers wore moulage makeup that resembled blunt-force injuries, and each of them had a script to follow. Two mannequins were also placed inside—fatalities. For the next two hours, the rescue team practiced cutting into the bus with extrication tools, and they made triage and evacuation decisions based on the role-played injuries of the volunteers. A temporary morgue was set up on the Million Dollar Highway.That particular training has not been repeated, but people still think a lot about school buses and children on the highway. A mass-casualty event would overwhelm the resources of a rural community. I coach the high-school track team in Ridgway, and on two occasions I’ve driven a busful of teen-agers to a meet via the Million Dollar Highway. The school has strict rules: If I’m driving a fourteen-passenger bus and the weather is good, I can take the highway. But, if we’re in a larger bus or the forecast is bad, we’re required to follow a longer route, to the west, that avoids steep drop-offs. The middle school used to take field trips south, in order to visit historical sites, but that stopped a few years ago, after bus drivers expressed concern. Nowadays, all field trips head in other directions. In essence, many residents live with their backs to the steepest sections of the highway.The orientation was the opposite in the old days, when all attention was directed to the highlands. In 1882, major silver deposits were discovered in the Red Mountain Mining District, south of Ouray. Government surveyors had declared that it was impossible to build a road through the gorge, and Ouray had tried twice without success. Another settlement, Silverton, lay on the far side of Red Mountain, and the communities vied to see which could become the main transport hub. In 1883, La Plata Miner, a Silverton newspaper, mocked the competitor’s ambitions: “The people of Ouray say they will build a road to Red Mountain. How absurd and ridiculous.”That summer, Ouray contracted with a man whose nicknames included “Hebrew Pathfinder of the New West” and “Moses Who Piloted San Juan out of the Wilderness.” Otto Mears was born in Russia, to Jewish parents, in 1840; his mother came from what is now Latvia, and his father was English. Both parents died before Mears was three, and he was passed off among relatives who didn’t want to care for him. At the age of nine, he was shipped on a lumber freighter from Russia to England; a year later, he was sent to the United States. He received almost no formal education, and he worked full time from age eleven, eventually finding odd jobs in California mining towns. He observed that miners and prospectors were usually poor, whereas people involved in transport and merchandise thrived.During the Civil War, Mears enlisted with the Union Army, which sent him to the Southwest. At the end of his service, he received an assignment to bake bread for soldiers, which allowed him to profit from the leftover flour. After saving some money, Mears opened the first sawmill in southwestern Colorado, along with a flour mill, both of which supplied the military. He was a genius at figuring out frontier businesses that complemented one another. He helped found towns in southern Colorado, and he started newspapers that promoted those towns; sometimes he also acquired government contracts to build their roads and deliver their mail. The Ute Indians were the dominant tribe in the region, and Mears was one of the few whites who learned to speak their language fluently. He served as the federal government’s translator in treaty negotiations, and he became a close friend of Chief Ouray, the tribe’s most important leader.Chief Ouray with Otto Mears, who developed the original highway.Photograph by William Henry Jackson / Courtesy Archives of American Art, SmithsonianMears’s greatest talent was for road-building. In Colorado, which didn’t become a state until 1876, there was little public money for infrastructure, and entrepreneurs could pay a few dollars to the local government for the right to build a toll road. In the course of two decades, Mears created a network of almost four hundred and fifty miles of roads. He had no engineering background, but he often laid out routes himself. South of Ouray, many sections had to be blasted out of eight-hundred-foot cliffs. Workers were suspended by ropes: they drilled holes in the quartzite, packed the holes with dynamite, lit long fuses, and gave a signal to be yanked up to safety as quickly as possible. According to “The Road That Silver Built,” a history of the highway’s early years, there were reports that five of Mears’s workers died.The road was open for traffic in less than six months. Mears set up a tollgate, charging a dollar for a horse and rider and five dollars for a team and wagon. He reportedly collected more than a hundred thousand dollars from his roads in a single year, and Ouray boomed. After Silverton lost the race to Red Mountain, local officials contracted with Mears, who then built their road, too. For good measure, he purchased stock in a silver mine near the pass where the two routes came together; for a spell, the mine paid an annual dividend of forty-five per cent. After four years of operating the Ouray road, he sold it to the town.Mears was, by all accounts, unsentimental about his origins. When dictating his autobiography, he covered his childhood—the dying parents in Russia, the orphan shipped off to England and America—in fifteen sentences. He became heavily involved in Colorado politics but usually behind the scenes, and he seemed to hold no high ideals or scruples. He often paid bribes, and he did everything possible to resist organized labor. When most of the Utes were inevitably driven out of Colorado—after every treaty had been broken by the Americans and violence had ensued—Mears helped negotiate the terms of their departure. As the Army escorted the Utes out, Mears charged them tolls for using his roads. He also acquired contracts that allowed him to profit from developing a supply chain that served the Utes’ new home, in a part of Utah so desolate that even the Mormons didn’t want to live there.In 1911, a motorcar drove up to Red Mountain Pass. The dealership that sponsored the journey described it as “one of the most remarkable, perilous, and daring trips ever undertaken by an automobile on the American continent.” By the following decade, people had started using the phrase “Million Dollar Highway.” This didn’t refer to the cost of Mears’s original project, which had been about a hundred and forty thousand dollars. In the nineteen-twenties, a series of road improvements were made for a total of about a million dollars, which may have been the source of the name, although some maintain that it came from the spectacular views. Mears died at the age of ninety-one, and the end of his life seems to have been as unsentimental as its beginning. According to the biography “Otto Mears and the San Juans,” there were conflicting stories about where his ashes were scattered. Some reports claimed that they were tossed onto the road near the site of his former toll booth.From the moment that emergency services arrived in response to the wrecked Honda, it was nearly two hours until rescuers saw the girl’s face. Climbers had to assist two firefighters carrying extrication equipment into the gorge, and then Pasek, who is also a member of the Ouray volunteer fire department, used the tools to tear off the driver’s door. He and Skoloda removed the body of a middle-aged man, who had been driving. Then Pasek took off a back door. “As I pried it open, we could see the girl,” he recalled. “Her skin looked good. She wasn’t pale. She was just looking at us.”She said her name was Rachelle, and she was eleven. She complained of being cold; the river had soaked her legs and jacket. She had found herself upside down, suspended by her seat belt. Even after unclipping the belt, she could hardly move, because she was crammed atop the body of her great-grandmother. As Pasek and Skoloda carefully extricated the girl, they could tell that she had sustained serious injuries to her pelvis and to one arm. They placed her on a vacuum mattress beside the river and covered her with blankets and the firefighters’ jackets.They weren’t equipped to check for internal bleeding and other major injuries, but Rachelle’s vital signs seemed good. She told Skoloda that she had never lost consciousness. “It was shocking how clear she seemed,” he said later. Rachelle explained that she had been on vacation with her father and her great-grandmother, and they had been returning to their home in New Mexico when her father had suddenly decided to stop and drive in reverse. Rachelle described in detail the way that the Honda had backed off the cliff, flipping multiple times.On the highway, Mike Gibbs, a Ouray Mountain Rescue member, was figuring out how to get the girl out of the gorge. The hillside was too treacherous for anybody to carry a litter up it, and a helicopter couldn’t descend in such a narrow airspace. Rachelle needed to be transported along two axes: first, straight up, to a height that would clear the entire cliff. Then she would have to be moved horizontally to the roadway. The rescuers needed to construct something that functioned like a four-hundred-foot crane.Gibbs runs a company called Rigging for Rescue. He has a large climbing wall and warehouse in Ouray, where he often hosts trainings. He also travels around the world to work with mountain-rescue teams, specialized military units, and others who need technical rope skills, including windmill installers, and bridge and skyscraper builders.On the cliff, Gibbs decided that the best solution was to construct a complicated series of tensioned ropes known as a Kootenay Highline System with a Norwegian reeve. This consists of horizontal tag lines that transport a series of pulleys, which, after moving into the proper position, can descend straight down to receive a load. For more than twenty years, Gibbs had been teaching people how to build a Norwegian reeve, but he had never before used one for an actual rescue.The first step was to find a large tree next to the highway that could serve as an anchor. Then, with a pair of binoculars, Gibbs spotted a similar tree on the opposite side of the gorge, four hundred feet away. One team member was a sharpshooter, and he aimed a line-throwing device that was shaped like a rifle. It used a .308 cartridge to fire a projectile connected to a monofilament line. Other climbers scrambled up the far side of the gorge and secured the line. The monofilament was slightly heavier than a fishing line, and it was strong enough to pull a light cord across the gorge. Then the cord dragged heavier lines that were capable of supporting large loads. The ropes moved across one by one, and every time somebody tied a knot, it had to be double-checked by another person, according to team protocol. It took about three hours to build the network of tensioned ropes.Far below, Skoloda, Pasek, and another team member tried to keep Rachelle comfortable. Skoloda talked with her about family and school; she said that she liked reading and that the book on the cliffside had been a new one. She referred to the driver of the Honda as Dad, although later the rescuers learned that he was an uncle who had become the girl’s legal guardian. Periodically, Rachelle asked whether her dad was alive. Skoloda and Pasek had been careful to cover the bodies and keep them out of sight. Each time Rachelle inquired, Skoloda gently evaded the question. “You know, we’re just going to worry about you right now,” he said, and changed the subject. Finally, Rachelle stopped asking.The month after the accident, Skoloda drove me to the site in his Dodge pickup, pointing out locations along the Million Dollar Highway. “This right here is where people will do it intentionally,” he said, passing the Ruby Walls, a section of cliffs that were purple-red in the afternoon light. “A few years ago, a woman committed suicide right here. She had a seat belt on. But she had a suicide note in her pocket. Her husband had shot and killed a police officer in Montrose. I think she was in a pretty hard spiral.”People who die by suicide on the Million Dollar Highway often wear seat belts. Glenn Boyd, the county coroner, told me his theory is that they don’t want to be annoyed by a dinging sound in their final moments. Occasionally, the suicide seems to be spur of the moment; a depressed person sees a high section without a guardrail and goes over. Skoloda drove higher into the gorge, where every bend seemed to trigger a memory. “Just around this corner, we had a young man who was racing his vehicle and just totally misjudged a corner,” he said. “He survived the crash. He went a long, long ways down. I don’t know what happened to him after. Severe head trauma. Multiple-system trauma. Wasn’t much left of his vehicle. We do spend a lot of time up here.”Skoloda parked at one of the few pullouts. Traffic was light, and we walked onto the road. Originally from Wisconsin, he is a tall man whose build has been shaped by decades of grabbing metal and rock: big hands, Popeye forearms. His wife, Nicole, has also volunteered with the rescue team, and they have two teen-age daughters. Other team members told me that they like having Skoloda interact with victims, because his calm air puts people at ease. Now he stopped at a series of white scrapes on the edge of the pavement. “This is the undercarriage marks from where they left the road,” he said. Just beyond the marks, the abyss fell away for hundreds of feet. We didn’t stand there long.Skoloda loaned me a helmet and a harness, and we scrambled down a fixed rope to the Tyrolean traverse. We clipped in and swung across the river. The water was mineral orange and flowing fast. “It feels wild in here,” Skoloda said, after we reached the other side. We clambered over some boulders; above us were a couple of gnarled limber pines, which are famously long-lived. Skoloda noted that they could be more than a thousand years old. He pointed at a dark tangle of trees across the gorge. “Right in there is a nineteen-eighties-era Subaru,” he said. “It’s got snow tires on it. It’s wrapped around a tree.”Nowadays, crashed vehicles are removed promptly, in accordance with the law, but there are still some leftovers from when this wasn’t always the practice. Travellers sometimes spot them and call 911. One year, two rescue-team members hiked through the gorge with cans of orange spray paint, drawing a large “X” on every vehicle they found.Skoloda climbed to a ledge directly above where the Honda had come to rest. “Here is a real good place to envision which way it fell,” he said.He pointed across to the debris field, which was still scattered across the steep slope. Pieces of metal and plastic glistened in the sunlight; otherwise, there were no signs of civilization. The road wasn’t visible, and if any cars were passing by I couldn’t hear them over the river.The San Juans are among the most impenetrable mountains in the West. Spanish explorers likely named the region after John the Baptist, because he wandered in the wilderness. Even in modern times, this quality has captured the imagination of outsiders. In the nineteen-fifties, the author Ayn Rand spent time in Ouray, during a move from Hollywood to New York City. Like Otto Mears, Rand was a Jewish Russian émigré with a distaste for organized labor, and she turned Ouray into a fictional location called Galt’s Gulch in her polemical 1957 novel, “Atlas Shrugged.” In the novel, the industrialist John Galt and other magnates have retreated to the hidden mountain town out of disgust with labor strikes and overregulation in a dystopian America. “We have no laws in this valley, no rules, no formal organization of any kind,” Galt proudly tells the novel’s heroine when she visits the alt-Ouray. “So I’ll warn you now that there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word ‘give.’ ”Above town, on a granite pillar, citizens have erected a three-foot-tall dollar sign of solid gold. The Million Dollar Highway, however, was written out of Rand’s fictional landscape, probably because she wanted Galt’s Gulch to be as inaccessible as possible.Self-reliance and personal responsibility have always been prominent local values. It’s rare for residents to complain about the highway’s lack of guardrails or other safety measures; the general idea is that you need to adjust your behavior according to the risks of weather and geography. Dack Klein, a lead worker for the Colorado Department of Transportation who lives in Ouray, pointed out that the vast majority of incidents on the road involve only one vehicle. “Most accidents are because the driver wasn’t paying attention or did something wrong,” he told me. Klein, who has a large tattoo of the words “We the People” on his arm, dismissed the idea of building guardrails. “A guardrail makes you feel warm and fuzzy, but there’s not a lot of room up there for it,” he said.On the day the Honda went over, Klein was one of more than thirty people from various government agencies who worked on the scene. He was there from 8 A.M. until after midnight, and, like Skoloda and others, he had many stories connected to specific parts of the road. Matt Hepp, an engineer and a climber who volunteers with Ouray Mountain Rescue, created a reference map that notes mile markers and some of the most notorious sections. Tuffy’s Corner, named for a local undertaker, is a frequent accident site, and Harley Corner is a reducing-radius turn that sometimes catches motorcyclists off guard. Part of the problem with Harley Corner is that bikers start the curve in front of a spectacular mountain backdrop. “They come around the turn, they look at the view, and then the radius hits them,” Hepp told me. “And the pegs catch and they go right over.” The drop-off there is only about forty feet, and bikers usually survive with non-catastrophic injuries. They tend to land in the same spot, as if the road were engineered to deposit them there. “We had a joke that we should drag a queen-size mattress over there,” Hepp said. Despite the repeated accidents, nobody has erected a motorcycle-specific warning sign on the road.Another section is known as Miracle Gully. In February, 2005, a man named Joe Sullivan was returning home to Montrose, a town north of Ridgway, after watching his daughter play in a high-school basketball game on the other side of the San Juans. Sullivan was driving a Pontiac Montana minivan carrying his wife, son, and daughter, along with one of his daughter’s teammates and her father. By the time they crossed the eleven-thousand-foot pass on Red Mountain, it was snowing. On the steep descent, Sullivan slowed to ten miles per hour. As he approached a sharp curve on one of the high cliffs, the vehicle lost all traction. A high-school wrestling match was playing on the radio. The car was moving so slowly that everybody had plenty of time to see what was happening. The last thing that Sullivan said, in a voice that was surprisingly calm, was “I’m sorry, we’re going off.”The minivan tumbled off the cliff and rolled multiple times, falling more than four hundred feet. When it came to a halt, Sullivan found himself alive, with snow inside the car up to his chest. The only person who needed medical attention was his wife, who later received a few staples on the back of her head. Everybody else walked out of the gorge under their own power, following a rope line that had been set up by Ouray Mountain Rescue. Initially, when the rescue team fielded the call, they worried that they didn’t have enough body bags in stock.The following week, Katie Couric interviewed the Sullivans for the “Today” show. In the years since, two other vehicles have gone off at the same spot, and, each time, everybody has survived with minor injuries. Once, a driver went over in a box truck loaded with Toyota parts, flipped multiple times, fell a total of four hundred feet, and walked away with a broken pinkie. These accidents have always occurred in winter, and Skoloda told me that Miracle Gully is shaped in such a way that it cushions the descent in heavy snow. When the Sullivans crashed, their Pontiac’s airbags never even deployed.Sullivan was cited for unsafe mountain driving, and he travelled twice to the Ouray courthouse in order to fight the charge. The second time, he was joined by the state highway patrolman who had issued the ticket and by a Catholic priest who had been on the road that night and testified that conditions had been treacherous. The judge retreated to his chambers after telling the three of them to work it out. With the priest officiating, the patrolman offered a reduced charge of unsafe tires, which Sullivan accepted. He paid a fifteen-dollar fine, but no points were added to his license. When we met recently, at his home in Montrose, he said that fighting the ticket had been important to him back then because he’d come so close to having his family destroyed. “You have an accident like that, you don’t want to be guilty,” he told me.His son, Tyrel, who was seventeen at the time, had been sitting directly behind his father in the Pontiac. Today, Tyrel is a thirty-eight-year-old architect in Montrose, with a young family of his own. He told me that he couldn’t remember the last time he had driven the Million Dollar Highway, and his wife refused to travel on it. For many years after the accident, Tyrel had nightmares. But these dreams never involved falling or crashing. Instead, it was always the same scenario: something unexpected had come up, and now Tyrel had no choice but to drive past Ouray. It was a San Juan version of the exam-anxiety dream, with the Million Dollar Highway representing a test that he wasn’t prepared to take.After the rescue team had constructed the highline ropes with the Norwegian reeve, Pasek ascended it with Rachelle. The girl was strapped into a litter, which was roped into the reeve’s pulleys. The pulleys allowed for a load to be lifted with less force, and the pace of ascent was controlled by a capstan, a motorized drum that pulled in rope from the road. It took about ten minutes to raise Pasek and Rachelle more than three hundred vertical feet. To keep her calm, Pasek described what they were doing, step by step. It had been five and a half hours since the Honda went off the road, but the child remained lucid. Partway through the ascent, she asked, “Is there a chance we could fall?”“No,” Pasek said.At the top, he clipped into a carriage that connected to the horizontal track rope, and they traversed the hundred and fifty feet to the road. Everything worked flawlessly; the carriage deposited them onto the highway. An ambulance rushed Rachelle to a helicopter that was waiting to transport her to Children’s Hospital Colorado, in Colorado Springs. While strapping Rachelle into the litter, Pasek had tucked in the children’s book that he had found in the dirt.For the next hour and a half, the system transported the five rescue workers and the two bodies that were still at the bottom of the gorge. When I talked with the rescuers, they all described a similar experience. Initially, there was a thrill at being lifted by the ropes, but then, as they floated above the site, they felt a wave of sadness. “The way my mind works, the rigging was so cool,” a fireman named Tom Fedel told me. “To see how it was put together, and to see what they had accomplished.” But then he looked down at the debris field. “Her little sweatshirts, you could tell it was kid’s clothes,” he said. “A suitcase split open. A lot of papers. Just people’s things—they’re nothing now. They’re just stuff on the side of the mountain.”Later that month, the coroner released details from the Honda driver’s autopsy report. His blood had contained a hundred and ninety-five nanograms of THC per millilitre, which is thirty-nine times the legal threshold for a driver in Colorado.Skoloda had ridden the ropes out of the gorge with a Ouray Mountain Rescue volunteer named Annie Quathamer. As they approached the top, he told her, “I’m getting a little sick of this.” Jenny Hart, who had volunteered since the late nineteen-nineties, told me that the Honda wreck made her think about retiring. “I’m carrying twenty-eight years of scars,” she said. “That rescue put an exclamation point on it for me. Because I’m a teacher, and kids are different for me.”The group, which has an annual budget of about fifty thousand dollars, is funded primarily by donations. Local support is impressive, as described in “No Individual Heroes,” a history of the rescue team. After somebody works on a traumatic incident, that member is contacted by a mental-health professional at intervals: three days later, then three weeks, then three months. Retired volunteers told me that you never know what might push you past the limit. Glenn Boyd, the coroner, grew up in Ouray. His stepfather was an E.M.T., whose moment came when he worked an accident and found two empty baby seats. The driver was unconscious; Boyd’s stepfather and his crew scoured the site desperately. It turned out that the man had been transporting the seats without any children, but the experience pushed Boyd’s stepfather to retire. “Just the trauma of searching and searching for kids was the final straw,” Boyd told me.Two weeks after the Honda accident, a sixty-five-year-old woman intentionally drove her motorcycle off the Million Dollar Highway. This seemed to have been a decision she made on the road: there was no suicide note, and the coroner told me he believed that the woman had not intended to kill herself when she left home that day. Another motorist saw her speed off a cliff without trying to turn or stop, and she wasn’t wearing a helmet. She was still alive when Skoloda and others arrived at the scene. She died while they were transporting her in a litter.A little more than a month later, the driver of a Ford F-150 reached down for a Bluetooth speaker, taking his eyes off the road. The truck rolled one and a half times and fell two hundred and thirty feet; the driver was fortunate to survive with minor injuries. It had been a bad stretch for the rescue team, but the Ford accident turned out to be the year’s last drive-off.Each winter, for the people who work and travel on the Million Dollar Highway, the primary worry shifts to avalanches. There are three highway forecasters who are stationed along an eighty-mile segment of 550: one in Ridgway, another in Silverton, and the third in Durango. They are posted so close together in part because the terrain makes for complicated weather; this stretch of highway crosses three passes of more than ten thousand feet. The forecasters are employed by the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, which is part of the state’s Department of Natural Resources. The Ridgway forecaster is named Troy Nordquist, and in mid-February I accompanied him on his early-morning rounds.It had started snowing the previous day, and it was still coming down softly. Nordquist stopped at a series of platforms that tracked the snow’s height. He carried a device that measured the amount of water in the snow, and he also relied on reading the landscape. “You can look at a slope and see if it’s been wind-sculpted,” he told me. “I’m looking to see if it’s loading from a fetch into a start zone. A fetch is the back side of a hill. A fetch is usually where snow is coming from. A lot of times, you can see big plumes coming off a peak.”We passed a slide known as Jackpot, and then we came to Mother Cline. This avalanche path had been named for the wife of a mine supervisor from the late nineteenth century. Some other avalanches are named for victims or public figures. One of the most satisfying slide names is Slippery Jim, in honor of a local politician.A snowplow driver stopped on the road to ask Nordquist a question: “Are they going to be shooting today? They were talking about it yesterday.”“Blue Point kind of had a natural runoff yesterday,” Nordquist said, referring to a slide farther up the highway. “And the sun is supposed to pop out. So we are waiting.”Along the road, red-and-white-checked signs mark where the Department of Transportation can set up howitzers. These guns have a range of about seven miles, and they can be shot at the upper reaches of avalanches to make them run. The Department of Transportation will close the highway, fire a howitzer, clear the snow off the road, and then reopen it. Three guns are kept in towns along Highway 550, and all of them are old; Ouray’s howitzer dates to 1954. Colorado has started to transition to fixed systems, one of which ignites a gas mixture that explodes and triggers a slide. Two of these devices have already been installed near Red Mountain Pass.Between Ouray and Red Mountain, there is a roadside memorial to snowplow drivers who have died in avalanches. Jobs that force people to travel in winter have always been dangerous; in the old days, mailman was a high-risk profession. In December, 1883, a Silverton-based carrier disappeared in a slide and wasn’t found until his body melted out, two and a half years later. His mailbag was still full of letters, which were then delivered.The Silverton cemetery contains the remains of more than a hundred avalanche victims. There are also many graves of people who died during the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed nearly one in ten Silverton residents. The cemetery sprawls across a rugged, beautiful hillside above town, and its tombstones may be the most efficient reading list for anybody hoping to understand what life was like in the high country during the old days:THOMAS BRENNAN1852—Feb. 2. 1883KILLED WITH 10 MULESSNOWSLIDEYANKEE GIRL MINE TRAILEdward MeschDied July 4, 1905Shot by Unknown PartyMAY RICKARD1899ONE OF BLAIR STREET’S“UNFORTUNATE GIRLS”DIED OF ALCOHOLISM/MORPHINEIN THE CABIN OF MOLLIE FOLEY“HAPPY JACK” SHAEFFER1844—JUNE 28, 1906BLOWN TO ATOMS IN A MINEIn modern times, the landscape has continued to claim victims. From 1950 to 1991, fifty-eight vehicles were caught by avalanches below Red Mountain Pass, more than five times the figure for any other mountain highway in Colorado. The most notorious slide, East Riverside, killed five people in fifteen years, including two snowplow drivers in the nineteen-seventies. In 1985, after many delays, the state government finally built a concrete snowshed above the road at East Riverside. But budget shortfalls meant that the shed was only a hundred and eighty feet long, less than a sixth of the proposed distance. The plan was to add extensions to each end of the structure after more funding became available.Most sections of the Million Dollar Highway lack guardrails or even a shoulder.Photograph by Jamey Stillings for The New YorkerOn March 5, 1992, two drivers were trying to move a plow that was just beyond the shed’s protection when East Riverside ran. Three other highway workers and a motorist stood beneath the concrete cover, and they saw the avalanche sweep the men and the plow off the road. The workers used their emergency radio to call for help. But the snow was still falling hard, and rescue personnel decided that they couldn’t safely search for the buried men. It took eight hours to evacuate the people who had sheltered beneath the snowshed.In fact, both drivers had survived the avalanche. They were buried deep inside a cavity that had formed around the vehicle. One driver, Eddie Imel, had a pair of pliers; his partner, Danny Jaramillo, had a flashlight. They tried to use these tools to dig out, without success. After nearly fifteen hours, Imel died of hypothermia. At that point, Jaramillo scraped his way to the hood of the buried plow, where he kicked out the front window. He found a Kmart shovel and was able to tunnel up through at least ten feet of hard-packed snow and ice.Jaramillo used the snowshed’s emergency phone to call the state-patrol dispatch in Montrose. He asked them to come as quickly as possible, and he also asked them to bring a dry pack of cigarettes. When rescuers arrived, they dug out Imel’s body. He had a wife and three young daughters in Ouray.Imel is one of the drivers honored on a plaque beside the highway: “This memorial is dedicated to those who have given the supreme sacrifice in the maintenance of Red Mountain Pass. The lonely vigil of the night is known only to these men of courage.” Jaramillo was reportedly so traumatized that he eventually quit the job and left town. In the wake of the tragedy, more than sixteen hundred citizens signed a petition asking for better protection on the road, and Ouray’s newspaper, the Plaindealer, ran an editorial that said, “Our state reneged on its promise to build a 1,200-foot-long shed.” In the years since, Colorado has vastly improved its forecasting, and there hasn’t been another avalanche death on Highway 550. But the snowshed was never extended, and there are currently no plans to do so.Recently, I spoke by phone with Manuel Genswein, a Swiss engineer and avalanche expert who gives safety trainings around the world. He’s travelled many times to Ouray, Silverton, and surrounding towns, and he told me that he’s amazed that people accept the risks of the Million Dollar Highway. He believes that the road should be reëngineered with better rockfall mitigation, along with a surface that has proper width and guardrails. I mentioned the need to plow snow, and he laughed: “If you have an avalanche running onto the road, isn’t that the problem?” He explained that in Switzerland roads with a high slide risk would be protected by a tunnel or a roofed gallery. He also noted that better engineering would allow drivers to move faster, which would be safer. In parts of Europe with a danger of rockfall or avalanche, there are often minimum speed limits rather than maximums.Julie Constan, the southwest regional transportation director of the Colorado Department of Transportation, told me that the annual budget for southwestern Colorado was about a hundred million dollars, and she said that it would be prohibitively expensive to widen the highway to the point where guardrails could be installed. “It would be thirty to fifty million, at a minimum,” she said. “Probably for a mile or so.”The initial anger over the snowshed’s length seems to have passed long ago, and nowadays it’s rare for anybody to complain. “We’re not hearing from the locals,” Constan told me, when I asked if there was any outcry about the highway.Genswein contrasted it with the Swiss experience. After a disastrous avalanche season in 1950 and 1951, which became known as the “Winter of Terror,” Switzerland decided to improve its road safety, regardless of cost. Genswein found it remarkable that, even after a Colorado public-works employee had been killed just beyond the snowshed, it had never been lengthened.I asked Genswein what might be the reason for the different approach in Colorado, and he mentioned traditions of individualism and opportunism in the American West. “You try to look out for yourself,” he said. I saw his point, but there was also a great deal of generosity by community members who risked their lives helping people along the road. The rescues involved a remarkable degree of ingenuity, and it seemed that similar energy could be directed toward finding ways to keep drivers from going off the road in the first place. But there wasn’t any evidence that this was happening. As a local, I believed that the natural environment of the San Juans was so powerful that people were inclined toward acceptance. Once, I asked Skoloda whether he would like to see anything about the highway changed. “It’s an inherently dangerous place and an inherently beautiful place,” he said. “Changes have their ups and downs. Maybe educating people about what to do up there would be the easiest thing.”In July, I drove south on the Million Dollar Highway. I crossed the trio of high mountain passes, and then I continued on 550 past Durango to Bloomfield, New Mexico, where Rachelle lives. In the accident, she badly fractured her pelvis and broke her arm, and sustained a concussion. But she recovered quickly, leaving the hospital after two weeks. Within a month, she had started to walk on her own.When I visited, she had just completed sixth grade. She was living with her aunt Ivy Martinez and her family; Martinez’s husband, Jesse, worked in nearby oil fields, and they had two young sons. The family lived in a small house on a quiet street not far from Bloomfield’s downtown. Rachelle sat on a couch in the living room, holding a stuffed alligator and wearing a pink T-shirt with large print: “God Got Me.” She talked about her interest in reading; her aunt had recently given her the “Twilight” series and C. S. Lewis’s books about Narnia. Rachelle said that she still had the book that Pasek had found near the Honda.There was no change in the girl’s demeanor when she talked about the accident. She never became emotional, and she told the story with a high level of detail. She explained that her father had stopped on the road after seeing a cave beside the Million Dollar Highway. He wanted to go back and take a picture, so he put the car in reverse. “We hit a bump,” Rachelle recollected. “That was half of the car going off the cliff. Me and my grandma were in the back. And my dad was, like, ‘Uh-oh,’ and he was trying to get us back on the road. But it didn’t work. We flipped once. That was the only time I heard my grandma scream.”Rachelle said that there had been a moment when the car teetered on the edge, and she looked out the back window and saw the cliffs on the far side of the gorge. She remembered flipping four times. After the first one, her grandmother went silent.Rachelle also recalled vividly the experience of being trapped inside the vehicle in the river. But she had no specific recollections of Skoloda, Pasek, or any other rescue worker; they seemed to be blurred in her mind. She had little to say about riding the rigging system to the top of the gorge. Unlike the others, she didn’t describe the ropes or the way the scene looked from above. Her one clear memory was that, as the litter approached the highway, she heard somebody on the side of the road say that they needed to load two body bags for the rigging system’s return trip. That was when Rachelle knew for certain that her father was dead.In New Mexico, I spoke with a few of Rachelle’s family members, and they explained that she had grown up with significant family complications. Her biological father had been an inconsistent presence, and her mother was incarcerated. Her uncle Louis—a great-uncle, technically—had become her legal guardian, and he was estranged from other family members. He had not told anybody about the trip to Colorado. If Adam Hynes, the tourist from Oregon, had not seen the Honda reversing, it’s likely that the car would not have been discovered for a long time.Family members told me that Leoba Valdez, the great-grandmother whom Rachelle called Grandma, had held everybody together during hard times. After her death, the family rallied around Rachelle’s recovery. Martinez and Jesse became her legal guardians, and Martinez communicated every day with Rachelle’s mother, Maddison, who is still in prison. Maddison stays in close touch with her daughter, and another aunt, Jessica Valdez, also provides significant support. Valdez commented that Louis had used marijuana so regularly that the autopsy results didn’t surprise her. “I would say it was a normal state,” she said.In Ouray, the results had been reported on the front page of the Plaindealer, and when people in town talked about the accident they usually referred to the driver’s drug use. But the detail about the cave had not appeared in the police report, because Rachelle had not been interviewed directly by investigators after she was evacuated. The previous year, when I visited the site with Skoloda, we had noticed an open adit, an old mine passage that looked like a cave, immediately next to the road. Neither of us had known that the adit had played a role in the accident, but Skoloda had commented on it. “I’m surprised they haven’t closed that one off,” he said. “You see people messing with them all the time.”After hearing Rachelle’s story, I realized that there were different ways to perceive the accident. One was to note that a habitual marijuana user had made some disastrous driving decisions. But it was also possible to say that on a narrow road with a sheer drop, a high risk of rockfall, and no guardrails, the authorities had failed to cover a mine passage in a location that could tempt drivers to stop.Less than a month before my trip to New Mexico, I had attended one of the Ouray Mountain Rescue Team’s regular trainings. On that day, Skoloda, Pasek, and others had diligently practiced constructing the Norwegian reeve, along with other rigging arrangements. I mentioned it to Rachelle and her family, and they asked me to convey their gratitude. Some of them wanted to travel to the accident site, as a way of finding closure. But Rachelle and Martinez were opposed. When Rachelle had come home from the hospital in Colorado Springs, she had insisted that her aunt find a route without high mountain passes.After the accident, Rachelle had received therapy for months. She was about to start seventh grade at a new school, and she was excited to have made the cheer squad. They were practicing four days a week. “I’m a flyer, so I have to stay tight,” Rachelle told me. She explained that the flyer is the team member who gets thrown into the air, and Rachelle had been chosen because she is small. I asked her if it was ever scary. She smiled and said, “Sometimes.” ?