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.