Pikes Peak Region Trail Finder

A switchback on the west side of Wolf Creek Pass - where there are 200-foot drop-offs.  Jerry McBride, The Durango Herald

By Joe Hanel, The Durango Herald

Anyone who has spent a winter in western Colorado has been there: wheels spinning on the ice, no visibility past the hood and miles of 7 percent grades to the bottom of the hill.

Jaws are clinched. Fingers strangle the steering wheel. But survival brings a story to be told over and over to those timid souls who will never know the exhilaration of a white-knuckle drive over one of Colorado’s famous mountain highways.

Now, Four Corners denizens can brag about surviving not just a bad mountain drive, but the worst drive Colorado has to offer.

Seized by the journalist’s desire to categorize, quantify and rank everything, the (Durango) Herald assembled a list of Colorado’s paved, year-round mountain passes and rated them on all the problems that make winter driving such a scare: snow, switchbacks, steepness, traffic, elevation, distance from help and frequency of accidents.

The winner:  Wolf Creek Pass.

Red Mountain Pass was a close runner-up, and the Coal Bank/Molas duo ranks in the top 10, so Durango drivers are hemmed in from the north and the east.

It’s journalistic pseudo-science in all its glory, but who could doubt the ferocity of Wolf Creek Pass? After all, it was immortalized in a country music song (C.W. McCall’s 1974 narrative about hauling a load of chickens over the pass).

“You better slow down or you gonna kill us. Just make one mistake and it’s the Pearly Gates for them eight-five crates a’ USDA-approved cluckers,” McCall sang.

Find out which pass has the highest number of accidents, which pass is the loneliest in Colorado, and learn more pass trivia!