The Canyons: Oil and water could mix in Colorado River country known for its

BURNS, Colo. — Beneath the limestone cliffs, the trunk of a lone, dead lodgepole pine stuck straight up from the brush along the riverbank, looming over a remote stretch of the Colorado River in northern Eagle County.

Inside the train cars passing by on the opposite side of the river, a voice came over the loudspeaker, pointing out to passengers the dark shape perched inside the nest atop the barren tree.

“The two bald eagles are gone, but that’s one of the younger ones that hatched this year,” the Amtrak conductor said. “They won’t get their crown of white feathers on top of their head until they’re almost a year and a half old — they look like giant crows, really, the younger ones. Maybe we’ll see mom and dad fishing down here in a little while.”

No part of the 51-hour journey between Chicago and Oakland is more vital to the appeal of Amtrak’s California Zephyr than the 100-mile segment between stops in Glenwood Springs and Granby. Few passengers opt for the Zephyr because it’s an efficient mode of cross-country travel; they’re in it for the scenery, and the high country of the central Rocky Mountains provides that in abundance.

The Dotsero Cutoff, as this part of the Union Pacific’s Central Corridor is known, became in 1934 the last major segment of the current route to be completed. It ended a 75-year struggle by Colorado leaders to establish a relatively direct east-to-west rail route over the Rockies to Utah, finally eliminating the southward detour to Pueblo and the Royal Gorge that had added nearly 200 miles to the journey between Denver and Salt Lake City.

With Union Pacific’s closure of the Tennessee Pass line to the southeast in 1997, the Dotsero Cutoff became the only way to travel from the Western Slope to the Front Range by rail. It’s the route that as many as five fully loaded, two-mile-long crude oil trains from Utah’s Uinta Basin could soon take on their way to refineries in Texas and Louisiana, drastically increasing the flow of hazardous materials on some of the most rugged stretches of railroad track in the country.

The project, backed by a partnership between seven Utah county governments and private industry, has received several key approvals from the Biden administration, despite mounting protests from Colorado officials. The railway’s backers have signaled they will soon apply for $2 billion in tax-exempt Private Activity Bonds that must be approved by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

By the time eastbound trains pass through Glenwood Springs, they’ve already gained nearly 2,000 feet in elevation since crossing the Colorado-Utah border, and they will gain roughly 3,000 more as they continue their charge upwards through the Colorado River Valley, nearly as far as the river’s headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park.

After turning to the northeast at Dotsero, leaving Interstate 70 behind, the Central Corridor mainline winds through narrow gorges and sensitive wetlands along little-traveled dirt roads, and even into remote corners of wilderness where there are no roads at all. Amtrak conductors, pulling double duty as tour guides, tell passengers of the only two ways to pass through a four-mile stretch of Gore Canyon southwest of Kremmling: in comfort on the California Zephyr, or over the dangerous Class V rapids on the Colorado River below.

This was the region where the historic Denver & Rio Grande Railway, which ruled Colorado’s railroads for over a century before being acquired by the Union Pacific in 1996, earned its boastful motto of “Through the Rockies, Not Around Them.” And it’s where many Coloradans fear the Uinta Basin Railway’s crude oil trains would be most likely to cause an accident.