Schofield Pass Pucker
Colorado 4-wheel drive Jeep backroad adventure

By Louis Dawson

Built in 1883 as a wagon route between mining towns Marble and Crested Butte, Schofield is a classic Colorado "shelf road." Much of the track is blasted into solid rock on the sides of stupendous canyons that are something special even by Colorado standards. Sheer cliffs rise thousands of feet. Dozens of waterfalls decorate the crags like fine drapery hanging on the walls of an ancient king's castle. As you drive, the Crystal River rushes nearby, often a few steps away, living up to its name with an extraordinary turquoise coloration.

Schofield is awesome -- and dangerous.

Speak with local officials, and you'll hear words such as "that awful thing should be closed," or "anyone who drives that is stupid," or simply "don't go...you could die."

Fourteen people have died in automobile accidents on the Schofield Pass road -- all from going over the edge in various places on the many miles of shelf road. The accident that's become legend happened in July of 1970. Driven by an inexperienced driver, a five passenger GMC Jimmy went off the Punchbowl Cut, plunged 300 feet, and sunk in 20 feet of water. The vehicle was packed with twelve people -- only three survived (they were either ejected or had left the vehicle before it went over the edge). One of the victims, an eleven year old boy, was taken by the river and never found.

Even if your rig is over-built for the task (Schofield is doable for a small, stock 4x4 such as a Jeep Wrangler), it's still possible you'll encounter a poor driver bouncing towards you on a narrow section of shelf road -- with the nearest turn-out 400 feet behind you. Boulders can tumble down the mountainside any time. And mechanical failure such as steering or suspension breakage could have you singing with the angels in seconds. There are no guard rails here...

Adding to Schofield's edgy aura, the road's exact opening date is always a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes. Each winter, snow avalanches fill the canyon with a huge plug and the road usually stays snow-blocked until July. There is no phone number you can call. If you ask around, the reports you get will vary from "it's closed by a rock slide," to "someone drove a Saab over the thing last week."

Combine danger with mystery, and a road can achieve mythical status. In my view, Schofield is one such track on the backroads of Colorado.

My first trip over Schofield was thirty years ago. Since then I've hiked it, skied it, mountain biked it, flown over it -- and driven it dozens of times in Jeeps. While the danger is often exaggerated (it is driven by hundreds every season), I still feel a tiny clench in my gut the day before we 'wheel it.

Our family wheels Schofield Pass road at least once every summer. It's a family tradition. Rather than boredom or contempt, familiarity has brought us to deeper appreciation of this improbable backcountry offroad track. In a day when anything proclaimed "dangerous" may be sanitized to destruction, mythical Schofield stands out as Colorado heritage with a messy vitality all its own. Whether your'e offroad in a truck, hiking, or astride a mountain bicycle, in this place we engage creation up close and personal. Here on this back road jeep trail most "accidents" result from mistakes and errors of judgment -- here self reliance wins over complacency.

On the Saturday morning before Father's Day we set out for Schofield with "Rumble Bee," our yellow 1947 Willys Jeep we've re-built from scratch. While you do not need a customized 4x4 for this run, taller tires and a flexy suspension like ours make the trip safer and more fun. (A caveat that bears repeating is that long wheel-base "full sized" vehicles do not belong on Schofield. The road is too narrow and twisty, with too few turnouts, for anything but nimble Jeeps, quads and the like.)

Our first stop is Beaver Lake in Marble, where we unhitch the Bee from her tow vehicle. We don't drive our Jeep on the pavement much anymore, as drivers cruising the road at 70 mph can't cope with someone doing the 55 mph in an antique. While being tail-gated by a road rager waving a handgun can be an adventure, we're here for other forms of excitement. We load the Bee with our picnic supplies, rain gear, sturdy shoes, and other accoutrements of mountain exploration, slather on the sunscreen, and begin the adventure.

About a mile from Beaver Lake we encounter Daniel's Hill, the first backcountry driving of the trip. The jeep road is smooth dirt here, but it mules up 600 vertical feet in under a mile -- a good place to see if your vehicle has any overheating or traction problems. An odd fin of rock separates the fall-line from the canyon bottom, your first hint the geology in this area might be less predictable than most Colorado canyons -- and thus something special.

At the top of Daniel's Hill you have a choice: straight ahead is the Schofield Road, while a left takes you up over a lofty pass to Leadking Basin, then down to the Schofield Road. We take a left on the scenic option, which climbs via a series of smooth but amazingly sharp switchbacks. Even in Rumble Bee, with the shortest wheel base around, I must set up for each turn or I'm making a 2-pointer. The views open up. To our left the jutting peaks of Chair Mountain look like something in Glacier National Park. Sheep Mountain stands to our right, cloaked in thick conifer that you know hides elk and perhaps a bear or two.

We cross the first of many snow avalanche paths. Timber on the mountainsides here grows in vertical stripes on the flanks between gulches where avalanches scour everything but the most flexible willows and young trees. The slides are cyclical, meaning years may go by without them running at their largest, while trees grow larger and more breakable. A heavy winter comes, larger avalanches fall, and the arboreal carnage looks like a mad logger's dream. Huge evergreen trees are piled like match sticks on the valley floor, while the cut-lines at the sides of the avalanche paths resemble the sides of a lawn mower swath in overgrown turf.

The Leadking Road crests at 10,800 feet. You can picnic here with unrivaled views which remind my wife of the Switzerland where she summered as a young girl. The summit of Arkansas Mountain is an easy hour hike to the north.

We've got Schofield on our minds, so we drop into the steep and seemingly endless series of switchbacks leading down to Leadking Basin. Engine braking is the key, as controlling our descent with the foot brake would result in brake overheating and possible failure. We drop a gear and the tiny 6-banger engine whines as it lowers the Bee. A pod of mountain bikers is peddling towards us, so we move to the side and make a few stops to let them pass. Even with all the emphasis on single-track riding, mountain bikers still love jeep trails, and we don't mind sharing the track. Indeed, we welcome the chance to show that different types of users can recreate on the same ground.

Need a perfect lunch spot? Try anywhere in Leadking Basin. We stop at the Geneva Lake trailhead, where climbers and hikers leave for Snowmass Mountain and the grand Maroon Bells Snowmass Wilderness. Considering all the hype about our crowded (some say "threatened") National Forest, it's remarkably peaceful here, especially for a Saturday. We've counted three other vehicles so far, a few bicycle riders, and eight cars at the trailhead. Not bad for the fifty or more square miles of terrain you can access from the Leadking area.

The descent out of Leadking is rough, but still within the limits of a stock 4x4 if you're careful. We roll down a few ledges, jostle over classic Colorado cobble fields, and wind through dense spruce and fir forests. A huge tree has fallen over the trail, leaning at a precarious angle to form a portal we pass under with inches to spare. All the while the North Fork of the Crystal is our companion, running full and proud, bursting down a series of cascades in a display straight out of a wilderness dream.

A section of loose shale and small boulders, next to a steep drop to the creek, gives us a sample of things to come. The driving is relatively easy, but a roll-off would be total disaster. Soon we turn left onto the Schofield Road.

The first danger point looks like nothing to the inexperienced eye. You're in lush aspen forest where a small creek burbles across the road. Look closer, and you notice the road narrows considerably, the rock is slick, and the drop to your right is certain death. Protocol is to have the passengers walk, then ever-so-slowly crawl your rig across so you don't bounce to the side. A few hundred feet later you encounter another small stream. This one looks better; but it's worse. The water flows over slimy rock that tilts the wrong way: down to the canyon. Look down from the edge and you'll see the wreckage of several vehicles. I drive slowly across while Lisa and Louie walk.

A few hundred yards later we broach my favorite section of the route. You're in dense aspen forest, you round a blind turn, and exploding before you is a huge canyon replete with a booming cataract, gothic cliffs, and a meager trail that appears painted into the terrain as an artist's afterthought.

We place ourselves in the painting. A few hundred yards, and we're on the first technical section of the route, a steep double-track with solid ground for your left tires but loose scree under your right. It's narrow, with a scary drop-off edge. Our rear axle is locked, meaning we get traction from both rear tires, so Rumble Bee climbs the scree like a goat. Again, you could climb this section in a stock 4x4 vehicle, but your fingers would be white knuckling the steering wheel as you balanced wheel-spin and momentum with the chasm on your right. Doable, but not pretty.

The other challenge with this section is a major lack of turnouts for passing, combined with blind turns that hide people coming the other way. To prevent bottlenecking, Lisa hikes ahead with a two-way radio. Her all-clear crackles. I drop into first gear, let out the clutch, and enjoy the crawl.

About style: If you've never 4-wheeled you might have a mental picture of Jeeps bashing their way up miles of dirt and rocks, spitting huge wads of terra firma, with a high-rev custom motor howling 90db into the wilderness. While some trail obstacles require aggressive driving for short distances, such style is the exception. It breaks expensive parts, may cause erosion, and can kill you in a roll-over or roll-off. The norm for experienced 4-wheeling is a gentle crawl on soft and grippy "aired down" tires. In compound low gear, Rumble Bee cruises at walking speed or slower. As Louie and I ride up the scree hill, it feels like we're astride a summer camp horse: the nag you could drop the reigns on and she'd continue up the trail half asleep. In this case, I keep my hands on the wheel.

Lisa climbs back in and we motor up to a primitive bridge at the bottom of the Punch Bowl Canyon narrows. Above us is the technical crux of the route. The "Devil's" Punch Bowl is a stunning pool at the base of a waterfall pounding down the narrow defile. Legend holds that during pioneer days a horse's skeleton was found tied to a tree on a sketchy foot-path high above the cataract. It was assumed the hapless horse owner had fallen to his death, and his tethered horse had died a cruel death by starvation -- hence the canyon's eerie moniker.

Indeed there is no natural place for a road or a foot trail here, so the 1800s miners blasted a shelf into the canyon wall above the river. It's amazing this sketchy engineering still exists a century later. A 4-wheel-drive club from Gunnison does maintenance on the road, but they don't have the money or time for major construction, nor do they want the road improved out of character. Sadly, the Forest Service also does some "maintenance," which merely succeeds in spending tax money, moving a few rocks around, and destroying the historical challenge of this classic backcountry track.

Consider 4-wheel-drive roads for a moment. You want such roads to be rough but passable; reasonably safe but challenging. A road such as the Punch Bowl Cut could be crow-barred and blasted into submission, but it is left to its own devices most of the time, and stays rowdy enough to pucker anyone but the most jaded wheeler. Even without major work, you can vastly "improve" a rough road by stacking rocks in depressions and adding ramps to lead up over ledges. Doing so has its place when passage is essential, but often rock stacking is just a substitute for lack of driving skill. Most importantly, rock stacking ruins the fun. Yep, even 4-wheeling has its ethos.

My wife wants some exercise and it's best for passengers to walk the cut, so she grabs a radio and hikes to the top (a half mile that takes about 15 minutes). While small 4x4s can bypass in a few places here, doing so is more high-wire act than prudent transaction. Indeed, aside from the fatal accidents, the worst horror stories coming back from Schofield tell of three hour epics while a dozen 4x4s encounter each other in the middle of the Punchbowl Cut.

A former forest ranger told me of one such incident: "Someone tried to climb the cut in a full-sized pickup, with mondo camper!" he said. "The driver would spin wheels and spit rocks, the camper would sway, the tires would bounce ever closer to the edge, I was trying to direct traffic, we had jeeps stacked up all the way to the top and back down around the corner, we eventually got everything straightened out -- but it took half a day."

With the all-clear radioed from above, Louie and I start up the first section. It gets steep just after the bridge, and you're climbing over a bunch of boulders with fairly sizable holes in between, (depending on who's been ruining the challenge by stacking rocks). Turns out I'm moving too fast in second gear -- I feel a few bounces. Such jostling sends you closer to the edge. I ram in the clutch, come to almost a dead stop, and slip the stick up to first gear. Relief. We're in nag mode again. I let Louie ride without a seat belt, standing on the rear seat gripping the roll bar. In an open Jeep, if you're on the uphill side in a roll-off you have a chance to exit the vehicle and survive. Belted in, who knows. Thus, I never take more than one one passenger on this section, and make sure they know the drill: jump if we go over!

After the rubble hill we're at the first turn. Drop-off is to our left, but the road is wide by trail standards, and I place my front right tire on the good side of a bed-rock rib protruding from the roadbed. No way I'll go off here. Up around the corner, then turn number two, where the GMC went off in 1970. I call this crux “the Slab Turn." A rock wall blocks you on the right. On your left is a cliffy gully topped by rock slab. Drop a wheel off here and you're not coming back. I've got my head hanging out left, watching my tires, and even little Rumble Bee, with the shortest wheel base around, walks her left rear rubber a foot or so from the edge. I don't know how you get a full-size rig across here. I guess you do a 3-point maneuver with that rear wheel hanging halfway over the edge. Please take pictures...

After those sections the driving eases off. It's still narrow with no turnouts, and you want to crawl to avoid bouncing, but nothing here requires the care of the Slab Turn.

Lisa joins us at the top of the cut. Next obstacle: a normally shallow creek ford that ends up sluicing over our floorboards. Again, a stock vehicle could make such a ford, but to do so without possible damage you need things like extended axle vents, floor drains, and a freshly greased chassis. To a 10-year-old boy such as my son, the best thing about a deep ford is watching the exhaust glug up from submerged tail-pipes. "That was cool," he testifies.

I drive slowly, with my foot on the pedal to dry our wet brakes.

The rough 4-wheeling is now over. We enter Schofield Park, an old townsite situated in beautiful alpine meadowland. Wildflowers carpet the trail side. Lisa and Louie walk with our flower chart and identify a half dozen.

We enter dark timber at the end of the Park and motor up a few switchbacks to Schofield Pass. Unlike most other Colorado road summits this high point is nondescript, buried in forest with no views.

Soon after Schofield Pass we break out of timber, and we're perched on yet another shelf road. Emerald Lake sparkles below as we crawl the descent, staying as far as we can from the edge. By now we're thinking about goodies in Crested Butte, but we're still awed by the stupendous peaks forming the Emerald Lake cirque. Mount Bellevue looms to our left, while the 2,000-foot rocky walls of Baldy dominate over the lake to our right. Again we notice the ragged effect of massive snow avalanches. Trees broken by winter avalanches are scattered everywhere; scoured paths lead up mountainsides to mysterious hidden cirques. Most years the road here remains closed with slide debris well into July. Just as Punch Bowl Canyon opened early this year, so is this section weeks, if not months, ahead of schedule. We pass easily. Past the lake is another small section of shelf, then we're on 2-wheel-drive surface.

We stop to flip up our windshield, free our front axle hubs, and shift to high-range. Fifteen mph is light-speed compared to the pack-horse pace we've been in for most of the day. The summer town of Gothic flies by. Soon we're descending pavement near the Crested Butte ski area, then park in Crested Butte after sussing out the bakery location.

I sit down at a frilly table, munch a big sticky something and gulp a bucket of fancy coffee. Visions of rivers, mountains and forests roll through my mind. I remember the walks we took, and lunch under huge 14,000-foot peaks. Wheeling can be fun, but the driving is not the only reason we go. We explore the offroad backcountry, we return refreshed. Weekdays whittle that feeling away. But next Saturday is only a few days ahead. Is Schofield Pass open?

Keywords: Jeep,truck,automobile,4x4,four wheel drive,four-wheel-drive,driving,off road,off-road,colorado ,road,back country,outdoors,outdoor, colorado backroad,offroad.

(Author Lou Dawson is our CODE4x4 webmaster and a well known Colorado outdoor writer who's first drive was his dad's flatfender Jeep. Article copyright Louis Dawson, WildSnow.com )