Zoe Denison has a front row seat to the perils of traveling on U.S. Highway 550.
Drivers have crashed through the wildlife fence separating the highway from her home between Billy Creek State Wildlife Area and the Pa-Co-Chu-Puk entrance to Ridgway State Park.
She’s witnessed more than a decade of cars colliding with wildlife and multi-car wrecks.
The same panic surges every time an accident shuts down the narrow, two-lane corridor for hours.
“You’re always thinking, ‘Is it someone I know?’” she said.
It’s reached a point where she’s considered moving.
In the past five years, she’s totaled two cars herself after hitting wildlife near her house — a bear by Billy Creek and a deer by Dallas Creek. After that, she gave up driving at night, and tries to limit how much she drives on the highway. She was nervous about her kids getting their driver’s licenses and hesitates to move her mother into her home, concerned about her driving the road.
Denison is one of many Ouray County residents calling on the Colorado Department of Transportation to tighten safety measures on the narrow highway after consecutive head-on crashes this month along the stretch of highway by her house. Two more accidents happened south of Ouray, on Red Mountain Pass, on the same highway in the same time period.
Those accidents are part of a spike in fatalities this year on U.S. Highway 550 in Ouray County. Five people have already died in wrecks in the first eight months of this year, after eight were killed in accidents on the highway between 2021 and 2024, according to state data.
CDOT says the amount of accidents on U.S. 550 isn’t out of the ordinary, but that it’s already pursuing two separate measures to address safety concerns: a speed study along a 10-mile stretch north of Ridgway toward Montrose and a construction project to broaden highway shoulders by the Billy Creek State Wildlife Area, where two of the head-on accidents occurred this month.
Data source: CDOT Graphic by Lia Salvatierra
It’s unclear what changes, if any, may emerge from the speed study and when they could be implemented. Work to widen the highway shoulders isn’t scheduled to begin for three years.
There are no new safety measures planned on Red Mountain Pass. In both accidents earlier this month, vehicles went off the side of the road into the canyon. In one case, an eyewitness said they saw the car appearing to back up before it went off the road, rolling down the cliff and landing more than 300 feet below in a creek. Two adults died and an 11-year-old girl survived.
The numbers
Ouray County’s crash count is standard, compared to the amount of crashes forecasted for the area, according to CDOT Regional Transportation Director Julie Constan.
“It’s not elevated. We don’t have an extreme situation going on in Ouray County, with all the highways going on there, it’s pretty close to average,” Constan said.
Data source: CDOT
Graphic by Lia Salvatierra
But CDOT officials said they are receptive to public concerns and they’re considering ways to address them.
“We do take all their concerns very seriously. For the last accident along the Billy Creek area, we have a running log of the specific concerns from public callers, and those were sent out to the engineers in our region,” CDOT spokesperson Adair Christensen said.
According to public records the Plaindealer obtained using state open records laws, the state agency received 20 complaints about highway safety after the recent crashes on the highway.
Speed study in progress
A CDOT speed study and shoulder-widening project at some of those hotspots are underway.
After formally requesting a speed study last fall, Ouray County entered into an agreement with CDOT for the study between mile markers 103 and 119, including the area by Billy Creek, at the beginning of this year.
Ouray County Commissioner Michelle Nauer initiated the process and first approached CDOT in 2023.
A local government must approach CDOT in order for the department to conduct a speed study. Constan said CDOT receives four to five requests for speed studies each year in Region 5, which encompasses 14 southwestern Colorado counties, including Ouray County.
Nauer said she wanted the study to focus on the northern section of U.S. 550 to account for the increase in traffic traveling to and from Montrose. She hopes the study will support lowering the speed limit in the area and removing the passing lane until wider shoulders can be built on the highway by Billy Creek.
Constan said a CDOT team kicked off the study by looking at existing data earlier this year, but it has not yet visited the area during peak summer traffic to take field measurements. Constan said she expects the report to become available within the next few months.
A speed study can result in multiple types of safety measures. Implementing a radar speed sign to inform drivers of their speed could happen in a couple months, Constan said. Larger projects, such as building shoulders or creating new signs to try and influence driver behavior, could take up to a year, Constan said. There’s also the possibility of altering the speed limit.
Constan said the Federal Highway Administration recently changed the rules for conducting speed studies and making changes. In the past, officials primarily set speed limits based on the observed flow and speed of traffic.
Now, the studies can consider other factors like driveways and developments, Constan said.
But because speed studies still consider the average observed speed of traffic, some studies can result in raising the speed limit instead of lowering it, though 65 mph is the maximum speed on a two-lane roadway in Colorado, Constan said.
Overall, she said speed limit changes are relatively rare, and usually only result in a 5 mph increase or decrease.
Separate from the outcome of the speed study, CDOT said it is working to design wider shoulders and other safety measures near the wildlife underpass near Billy Creek completed last October. The $7 million project took roughly nine months to finish. The shoulder-widening project is part of the department’s 10-year strategic plan and slated for construction in 2028, which will cause delays along the corridor to and from Montrose.
Constan said the shoulder project wasn’t included as part of the wildlife underpass construction because of funding constraints. She said the department prioritized efforts to mitigate vehicle-wildlife collisions, since they are the most common cause of accidents in the area.
Wildlife mitigation features consistently result in an 85% to 95% decrease in wildlife crashes, according to Lisa Schwantes, a CDOT spokesperson. The department is still collecting data on the new wildlife underpass at Billy Creek to determine its impact.
“So it’s really worth adding that, as many crashes we’ve had in that area, it was worth adding that feature of the wildlife underpass first,” Schwantes said.
Constan said the department doesn’t currently have any safety improvement plans for mile marker 105 — the biggest crash hotspot from 2021 to 2024, located between Terrace and Riversage drives north of Ridgway — but has flagged the area for potential improvements.
It’s not clear when the speed limit on U.S. 550 was last changed in Ouray County.
After two head-on collisions near Billy Creek earlier this month, Ouray County Sheriff Justin Perry called for CDOT to review the road near the state wildlife area. He also asked for an open discussion about safety concerns, adding there might be options for making the roadway safer.
“I don’t know if it’s a matter of widening the road or slowing the traffic down,” he said.
“But it definitely warrants an open discussion, talking with State Patrol and (the Colorado Department of Transportation) to see if there’s something that could be done.”
This data shows accidents from 2021-2024 on Highway 550 in Ouray County, using data from CDOT. Graphic by Lia Salvatierra
Enforcement
Colorado State Patrol Capt. James Saunders, who heads the troop office covering Ouray County, said his troopers have pulled over 512 drivers for speeding on all of U.S. 550 so far in 2025. Of those, 312 stops happened in Ouray County. His troop covers the highway from mile marker 127 in Montrose to mile marker 84 in Ouray County, on Red Mountain Pass.
Saunders said most of the speeding stops in Ouray County happen around mile marker 116 just south of Colona, where his team most commonly patrols.
The office always has one trooper on duty who is responsible for dividing duties between the south end of Montrose County and Ouray and San Miguel counties, including state highways 145 and 62 in addition to U.S. 550. Roughly once a month, the team will perform “saturation patrols” where a group of troopers will concentrate in one area. The State Patrol is also responsible for investigating all accidents involving injuries on the highway.
It’s not clear how much the different sections of highway are patrolled, overall. But Saunders said data collected daily, including crashes and DUI arrests, guide where the troop allocates resources.
“With the data, it does direct us, and it does direct them to split their time as much as possible, to focus on 550. That’s just where we’re needed and that’s just what the data shows us,” Saunders said.
His troop has four sergeants and 17 troopers.
In some spots along the narrow highway, it’s not possible for troopers to park their vehicles on the side of the road as traffic goes by, monitoring speeds, as they do in other areas.
Saunders said troopers work around the limitations of the narrow roadways.
“If it takes 10 miles before we safely catch up with the vehicle and make a traffic stop, that’s what it takes. … We work around it. I mean, it hinders (us) but we work around it to where we keep everybody as safe as possible,” Saunders said.
He directed his team last week to increase their coverage of U.S. 550 in Ouray County due to the recent crashes.
“(The troop) will make a presence, (an) even bigger presence, if possible,” he said.
He said the troop is also helping coordinate a sobriety checkpoint with the Ridgway Marshal’s Office and Ouray County Sheriff’s Office on Aug. 22. The checkpoint is one of four planned across the state this month.
Red Mountain Pass
There are no new safety enhancement plans for the steep, perilous stretch of U.S. 550 on Red Mountain Pass, despite ongoing public concern.
There are no guardrails along multiple sections of the pass, including at mile marker 88, where two people died earlier this month.
Constan said those sections of highway don’t have guardrails because the road isn’t wide enough to engineer rails strong enough to prevent a car from slipping over the edge. Guardrails would also impede snow plowing, because plow operators push snow over the edge, she said.
Constan said if new technology to allow for better safety measures becomes available, the department would be open to experimenting in the area.
She said her department has focused on educating drivers about how to safely navigate the pass through communicating with the public with messages provided online and on the road.
“We’ve kind of come down to the point right now up there, that the best mitigation measure we have is educating the public on how to drive it … that’s where a lot of our focus has been, is really just getting people to try and be safe out there,” she said.
Lia Salvatierra is a journalist with Report for America, a service program that helps boost underserved areas with more reporting resources.
_________
More about the accident data
Accident data the Plaindealer was able to obtain from CDOT shows a total 344 crashes on U.S. 550 happened from 2021–2024 within Ouray County. Eight crashes resulted in eight fatalities.
In just the first eight months of 2025, four crashes have resulted in five fatalities. Complete crash data for 2025, including the locations and cause for crashes, is not yet publicly available.
The most common type of accident for 2021–2024 was single-vehicle collisions with wildlife.
The data from this time period shows crashes were most common at mile marker 105 and between mile markers 112 and 115. Two head-on collisions this month happened at mile marker 114 – in one of those accidents, a driver was killed.
– Lia Salvatierra
_____________________________
Editor’s note: The online version of this story has been updated to include public records of communications to CDOT after the recent crashes on Highway 550. The Plaindealer filed requests for these records on Aug. 11 but did not receive them until Aug. 22, after the article was printed. State open records laws require government officials to respond to requests within three business days, and either provide the information or ask for an extension to provide the records, which did not happen in this case.
