Colorado National Monument

For its first years the monument had no road at all, only the trails John Otto cut. Between 1912 and 1921 Otto, the Grand Junction chamber of commerce and the cattle ranchers of Glade Park, who wanted a shorter way to town, built one up the wall of No Thoroughfare Canyon: the Serpents Trail, fifty-four switchbacks climbing about 1,500 feet in two and a half miles. It was the way up to Glade Park until 1950.

In November 1931 the National Park Service engineer Thomas Secrest walked the rim and laid out the route for a scenic drive along the canyon edges, and preliminary work began on November 21. The Civilian Conservation Corps arrived in May 1933, when Company 824 set up camp at the Coke Ovens, and a second company came that November from Mesa Verde to a camp at the mouth of Fruita Canyon. Local men skilled in masonry trained the enrollees. They blasted three tunnels, two short curved ones on the Fruita side and a longer one on the east, and laid the stone guard walls and culverts in the Park Service's rustic style. The CCC work ended in 1942 for the war, and the road was not finished until 1950.

Rim Rock Drive runs about twenty-three miles between Fruita and Grand Junction, past overlooks into Monument, Ute and Red canyons and above the freestanding spire of Independence Monument; it is listed with its stonework on the National Register. The Serpents Trail is now a footpath, and walking its switchbacks is the best way to feel how much the old road asked of a car.