UTV Trip up Jenny Creek and Rollins Pass Road June 24th, 2024

6/24/2024 - A good day on the mountain in Gilpin and Boulder Counties in Colorado along the James Peak Wilderness area west of Rollinsville, Colorado.
We took a UTV run up Jenny Creek to where the snow drifts turned us around. Then back to the Rollins Pass Road intersection for a Rally Race to the top where Jim got to do some snow bashing / trail breaking in his new RZR! After he broke the drift a bit for the people wanting thru to paddle board on Yankee Doodle Lake, we made our return to the trucks. All of the water you see in the video is snow melt from the top of the Continental Divide. The water crossing at Jenny Creek was flowing good and there was still quite a bit of snow at the top.
Rollins Pass Road is an old wagon/mining route over the mountains that connected Gilpin County Colorado to the West Side of the Continental Divide where current day Winter Park, Colorado is located. Needles Eye Tunnel at the top of the pass collapsed many years ago and has never been reopened.
At the bottom of Rollins Pass Road is Tolland Road that leads to The East Portal of the Moffatt Tunnel. This was the first bore through the Continental Divide and still provides rail service for hundreds of rail cars per day to include Amtrak, many freight trains, and hundreds of tankers of oil coming from the oil fields in northern Utah.
On top of the pass near Needles Eye Tunnel are some world renowned Native American Game Drive structures where ancient people would drive the migrating herds of animals along the divide at over 11,000 ft. elevation into areas where they could either drive them off the cliff, or surprise attack them at close range since from their blinds. Archeologists were still finding artifacts melting from the glaciers in the area as recently as ~10 years ago, possibly still today, but I have not heard recent reports.
If you want to know more about this, please visit preserverollinspass.org.
Please ignore my commentary above and in the video if you are an "expert".