When Sandy and I posed for a picture in the warm sun just before the group entered the tunnel at the summit of
Tennessee Pass no one had inkling of what lay waiting in the darkness ahead.
Tunnel of Ice!
Ken was first to head into the half-mile bore and I
followed a short ways before stopping to wait for
Dick, who was still at the entrance saying goodby to Sandy. A few minutes had gone by when I heard
a erie yell and the sound of a crash from deep
within the unpenatrable darkess. I knew Ken had taken a spill, but he answered my worried call that he
was OK. He had hit a sheet of ice about mid way
through the tunnel.
I called out to Dick warning him of the hazard and rode
warily into the blackness. The beam of my flashlight
was swallowed by the enormity of the darkness. The
temperature in the tunnel was below freezing and it was unbelievably cold. In the weak glow of my light I could no longer see the ties, but a smooth grey surface like glass extending from wall to wall. A few feet further on the rails disappeared entirely, and I skated to a stop with out mishap. Riding was out of the question, and trying to walk the bike over the slab of slick hard ice was next to impossible. Slipping and sliding and falling down many times, I decided carrying my bike
would give me more control. At least I was able to head in the direction of the "light at the end of the tunnel" which seemed an unreachable distance ahead. After a few more falls, Dick caught up with me
and helped me along past the worst of it. I had sprained my knee a few days before and the doctor told me to stay off of it entirely, and here I was trying to carry my bike in pitch blackness, against doctor's orders, over an ice slick in the middle of a railroad tunnel at 14,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies.
The tunnel is about a half-mile long. It took us over 30 minutes to get through it. The bright sun and warm air was like entering heaven when we emerged from the west portal. We stopped to recoup and, fortunately, there were no injuries or mechanical problems. Only Ken's shirt came away with any sign of our difficulties. As the water in the tunnel froze, the oil on the roadbed rose to the top of the ice, and when Ken went down he landed in a puddle of the freezing black muck.
Never would I have expected to come across a quarter of a mile of solid ice more than 10 inches thick in the middle of June. Not when the surrounding countryside was free of snow and covered with blooming wildflowers.
By the time we were on our way again, we had covered a half mile in 45 minutes. At this rate, I was beginning to wonder if we'd make it in before nightfall. To our advantage, the next 30 miles were all down hill!
Peter Hoffman
