Vail Pass Highway U.S. 6, Colorado, circa 1940

About this postcard

A paved highway swings along a mountainside, edged by a white guardrail and a low stone or planted border, with dense evergreen forest filling the middle ground and layered, hazy ridges rising behind under a pale blue sky. The printed caption names it as the Vail Pass highway on U.S. 6, billed as a new short route to Colorado's Western Slope. Vail Pass carried U.S. 6 over the Gore Range at roughly 10,600 feet and opened to traffic around 1940, giving motorists a more direct crossing to Glenwood Springs and the Western Slope than the older route by way of Tennessee Pass and Leadville. Sanborn Souvenir Co. of Denver supplied much of the linen-textured view stock that tourists bought at mountain curio shops and filling stations in the same years.