This weekend’s severe storms brought mudslides that temporarily blocked the Colorado River Road and turned the Colorado River red in Eagle County.
Heavy rains on Friday and Saturday washed red mud and trees from the hillside across the road into the river.
Landslide washes away Colorado River Road
Around 1 p.m. Friday afternoon, Nicole Bradford, who lives near McCoy, was driving home from Gypsum on Colorado River Road through a rainstorm. “It was pouring rain and then I hit a truck that said it was skidding and I couldn’t get through,” Bradford wrote in a Facebook message to the Vail Daily.
Bradford, who has lived in Eagle County her entire life, decided to continue down the road to see the damage. Before turning back, she took a video of the washed-away road, railroad tracks and reddened Colorado River and shared it on Facebook.
Although the scene looked dramatic, it was not Bradford’s first encounter with such a landslide. “I have seen something like this before,” Bradford wrote. “A downpour this heavy will cause something like this. It has happened several times on the river road near this area and elsewhere.”
In cases like Friday’s landslide, Eagle County is responsible for clearing the road and railroad tracks.
The Colorado River is red
Eagle resident Tommy Harris learned of Friday’s landslide on Colorado River Road from a friend who spotted it on his way home from Steamboat Springs. The friend suggested they drive up the road on Saturday to check out road conditions a day later.
When they reached the road on Saturday around 5:30 or 6:00 p.m., they saw that the road had already been cleared and was passable.
However, as the friends continued up the Colorado River Road, another storm hit, causing more landslides. The road remained clear, but the mud flowed into the Colorado River, turning it red.
“In the middle there were logs and branches and thick mud, and on the outside there was red clay water with little mini rivers in between leading around clearer water,” Harris said.
Harris, who has lived in the area since 2003, said: “I have never seen anything like this in my life.”
Harris made a video a few miles up the dirt road on Colorado River Road, around the 22-mile marker, about 4 miles past the scene of Friday’s landslide. “It was so heavy with mud that I had to take the video,” Harris said.
“The mudslide was insane. The river looked like that all the way back to Dotsero,” Harris said. “I don’t know if you can see many in the video, but it looked like there were quite a few trees down between State Bridge and Burns.”
The Eagle River was also affected by the mud at its junction with the Colorado River after the boat ramp in Dotsero, Harris said.
Landslides caused by rain also led to the closure of Colorado Highway 82 south of Glenwood Springs on Saturday.
