Roads built as statements
10 on the map · 3 more worldwide ·
Checked
Mountains are where roads go to be difficult, and a road that climbs to a summit and stops has no destination beyond itself. Somebody has to want one badly enough to pay for it.
Austria wanted the Stelvio to prove that Lombardy was theirs, and Carlo Donegani spent five years and more than two thousand labourers building it. Spencer Penrose wanted tourists in his hotel, so in 1915 he turned the old Pikes Peak carriage road into a motor road and invented a race to advertise it. And the Catalina Highway up Mount Lemmon was dug over seventeen years by federal prisoners, nearly eight thousand men working with picks and wheelbarrows, among them Japanese American draft resisters whose camp, named now for Gordon Hirabayashi, you ride past on the way up.
None of these roads had to exist. Each one is somebody's argument, in asphalt.
The roads, oldest first
Passo dello Stelvio 1820–25 · Donegani, for AustriaThe Giro's roof: the defining venue of the Cima Coppi, first raced in 1953 when Coppi went over clear and dropped into Bormio to seal his fifth Giro.
Pikes Peak Highway 1915 · Penrose, for his hotelSpencer Penrose's 1915 tourist road, made famous by its auto hill climb and fully paved only in 2011, the year bike racing arrived: the Broadmoor Cycle to th…
Mount Blue Sky (from Echo Lake) 1923–31 · Denver Mountain ParksThe highest paved road in North America, topping out at 14,130 feet, and the American reference test for racing at altitude: the hill climb first run in 1962…
Trail Ridge Road (east side) 1929–38 · National Park ServiceThe highest continuous paved road in the United States at 12,183 feet, built by the Park Service in the 1930s and listed as an All-American Road.
Haleakalā (sea to summit) 1929–35 · Territory of HawaiiWidely billed as the longest paved climb on earth: 58 km from the beach at Paia to 10,023 feet, the shortest ride anywhere from sea level to 10,000.
Beartooth Pass (from Red Lodge) 1932–36 · Park Approach ActThe highest highway point in Montana and Wyoming at 3,337 m, on the Depression-built road Charles Kuralt called the most beautiful drive in America.
Mount Lemmon (Catalina Highway) 1933–50 · built by prisonersThe reason most riders come to Tucson: 29 miles from saguaro to pine at a metronomic 4 to 6%, built over 17 years by a rotating workforce of nearly 8,000 fed…
Mount Graham (Swift Trail, AZ-366) 1930s · Civilian Conservation CorpsArizona's hardest road climb by PJAMM's rating, and its state hill-climb championship for more than four decades: 5,689 feet of gain the race bills as the th…
Kitt Peak 1960–67 · built for the telescopesThe observatory climb: a highway finished in 1967 to haul a four-metre telescope to a summit the Tohono O'odham hold sacred, gated open only from 9 to 4.
On the map
Not yet on the map
Verified members outside our covered regions — each joins the map when its region does.
- Sa Calobra Antonio Parietti's 1932 road down to the Torrent de Pareis, the one that ties itself in a full loop under its own bridge because he was designing scenery as much as a road.
- Vršič Pass Built in 1916 by Russian prisoners of war, hundreds of whom died in an avalanche during its construction; the chapel they built stands beside the road.
- Grossglockner High Alpine Road Opened in 1935 as an Austrian make-work project on the same logic as the American ones, and still run as a toll road with its own visitor economy.
Most mountain roads were never anybody's project. They grew out of mule tracks, or were widened a little at a time by the people who lived on them, and there is no engineer's name and no opening date to point at. That is the normal case and it is not a lesser one. These are simply the roads somebody wanted credit for.