Progress surged, benchmarks broke, and West Portal found its voice in music, machines, and memory in May 1925 at the Moffat Tunnel.
Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago
As spring gave way to early summer in 1925, the Moffat Tunnel project surged forward with unprecedented energy—and with it, a mounting sense of inevitability that this long-promised engineering marvel would soon become reality. News outlets across Colorado praised the Lewis traveling cantilever girder (see last month’s post), and Charles Wheeler of the Moffat Tunnel Commission confidently stated, “there is no question about the tunnel being completed and trains running through it by December 1926.”
Progress on the East Portal remained the backbone of this momentum. Fifty-four men worked there in rotating shifts of eighteen, each earning a $57.30 bonus on top of their regular wages for their performance between April 16 and May 1. These weren’t empty rewards—each shift was part of a record-breaking push. Crews were averaging fifty feet per day in the twin headings, and in the last fifteen days of April alone, drillers claimed a world record by completing 771 feet—261 feet beyond the contractor’s projected maximum.
Newspaper headlines told the story of this blistering pace. On May 8, 1925, the Wet Mountain Tribune reported, “Never has better progress been made in the drilling of a tunnel, so far as engineering knowledge runs.” Just over a week later, the Routt County Sentinel confirmed, “65 feet [had] been driven in one day.”
But conditions at the two portals could not have been more different. While East Portal crews battled increasingly dense granite gneiss with discipline and routine, the West Portal crews contended with fractured, unstable biotite gneiss—blocky, talc-seamed, and often wet. Despite working through “running ground” that resisted support structures and never yielded more than 20 feet in a day, crews developed ingenious systems to accelerate progress. Specialized tools—such as the drill carriage, overhead muck car switcher, and timber framing machines—were developed or adapted on-site to meet the unique demands of the tunnel’s shifting geology and high production pace.
Foremost among these innovations was the Lewis traveling cantilever girder (or needle-bar), a mobile device designed by General Manager George Lewis to support overhead timbers while excavation continued below. Unlike its stationary predecessor, this traveling cantilever could adapt to shifting conditions in real time, safeguarding both men and timber while expediting excavation through heavy, unstable terrain. It became a defining piece of equipment in the tunnel’s most unpredictable zones.
Adding to the complexity, the two portals employed fundamentally different excavation methods tailored to their geological realities. At the East Portal, a twin-heading system was used, with the same crews alternating between the water tunnel and main center heading, combined with ring-shooting enlargement. By contrast, the West Portal required a top-widening and benching method—slower but better suited to the shattered and unstable ground. This divergence in technique highlighted not only the engineering ingenuity of the project but its operational adaptability in the face of radically different conditions just miles apart.
As thousands of feet of unforeseen bad ground were encountered—requiring far more tunnel lining than the 1,500 feet engineers had projected—the immediate need for concrete became pressing. Rock excavated from the tunnel face was crushed and stockpiled near each portal to supply aggregate for concrete lining operations underway inside the tunnel. At the same time, material was also being set aside as ballast for future track construction—forward-looking preparation for the day when rails would be laid through the completed bore. Construction was beginning on approach grades across the Fraser River valley to the west and down South Boulder Creek to the east, linking both portals to the Denver & Salt Lake main line.
Dressed granite ashlar masonry was envisioned for the tunnel portals—appropriately massive and ornamental, meant to echo the permanence of the mountain itself. These monumental entrances were intended to serve not only as functional thresholds but also as symbolic markers of achievement, carved with the hope that they would endure.
The human scale of the project was immense. By mid-May, 426 men were employed on the West Portal and 286 on the East—a total of more than 700 individuals working in shifts, around the clock, to bore beneath the Continental Divide. And driving all of it was more than rock, wages, or schedules: the project was breathing life into David Moffat’s long-delayed dream of a direct, year-round rail connection between Denver and Salt Lake City—a bold alternative to the costly and snowbound circuits over Rollins Pass.
Meanwhile, life at West Portal was evolving beyond the industrial rhythms of drilling and blasting. The local school closed the week of May 22, ushering in a summer season unlike any before. The recreation hall was undergoing improvements in anticipation of visitors, with a remodeled dance floor setting the stage for community gatherings. On May 28, the West Portal Jazz Orchestra would inaugurate the season with a Grand Opening Dance—an event heralded in the Middle Park Times as the social debut of the summer. The announcement extended an open invitation to all, signaling that this rugged work camp had, for the moment, become a place of celebration.
Adding to this sense of transition, a notable number of West Portal residents were reported to have purchased new automobiles—a reflection of modernity and status arriving even in this high, remote valley. In a place once defined solely by labor and logistics, a cultural identity was beginning to take hold—one where permanence, progress, and personal pride were becoming just as visible as the granite itself.
That same weekend, West Portal’s baseball team—the Tunnel Diggers—was scheduled to face the Granby Giants in Fraser. Spectators from across Grand County were invited to witness the matchup, as work crews took their places on the field rather than the tunnel bench. In Steamboat Springs, the film “The White Desert” was shown to local audiences—a dramatic portrayal of snowbound railroads, shot not far from the actual tunnel’s western approach.
Community outreach extended beyond entertainment. Moffat Tunnel Commission Engineer Clifford Betts presented a lantern-slide lecture featuring 100 images explaining the tunnel’s construction—bringing visuals of the underground work to a public hungry to understand what lay beneath the mountains. Thanks to Walt Higley, a motion picture photographer from Longmont, new footage of the tunnel’s interior was finally captured. After several failed attempts by other crews—who declined the assignment due to extreme dust, moisture, and visibility hazards—the Du Pont Powder Company, eager to document its dynamite in action, turned to the Colorado Photo Company. The company sent Higley into the tunnel with arc lamps and a Pathé camera, one of the few portable and durable models capable of withstanding such conditions. Using hand-cranked exposure and powered only by the intense glare of arc lighting, Higley filmed the narrow, dust-filled bore from within. His footage, developed that same day in Denver, marked the first successful moving images from inside the mountain—and stands as a rare and remarkable testament to the conditions under which explosives, human effort, and engineering precision carved the Moffat Tunnel into being. To see a sample of this footage, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMKZY7jCZH0
Tragedy, too, marked the month. On May 14, 1925, Orville J. Markham, just 25, died of pneumonia after contracting the illness while working at the tunnel. Yet even this fact became muddled in the speed of public reporting. Some newspapers stated he had worked at the East Portal, while others identified his post as the West Portal—a discrepancy that underscores how quickly information was moving and how often the public narrative lagged behind the facts on the ground. The Moffat Tunnel project was vast, complex, and logistically divided; errors like these reveal the difficulty even journalists faced in pinning down the particulars of a man’s final days in the shadows of the Divide.
Markham wasn’t the only one whose story was mistold. John Flueckiger, age 33, died in May as well. Early headlines—based on information relayed from Denver—claimed he had died at the West Portal, where he had “been working for some time.” But by the following evening, the Boulder Camera issued a correction: that account was incorrect. Flueckiger had not been employed on the Moffat Tunnel project at the time of his death. The misattribution, though quickly amended, illustrates how swiftly misinformation could be published—especially in a time when telegrams, word-of-mouth, and hurried deadlines shaped much of the public’s understanding of major undertakings like the tunnel.
Even technical data fell victim to this pace. For instance, published figures as of May 1 detailed linear footage of excavation progress with scientific precision:
- The pioneer (or water) tunnel had reached 9,326 feet from the east portal and 7,431 feet from the west—totaling 16,756 feet, or 52 percent completion.
- The main heading stood at 9,320 feet east and 6,936 feet west, for a combined 16,256 feet—50 percent completed.
- Cross cuts totaled 693 feet overall—53 percent completed.
- And the full-sized railroad bore had advanced 7,769 feet (5,987 east, 1,782 west)—just 24 percent completed.
Yet by May 11, newspapers were still circulating these same figures with little to no revision—despite ten full days of continued drilling and substantial daily progress. The omission wasn’t merely clerical; it reflected a broader pattern of delay between field realities and public reporting. In a project advancing by fifty feet per day on the East Portal alone, the difference between up-to-date figures and outdated ones could obscure hundreds of feet of achievement.
These discrepancies are not just footnotes, they are reminders. Reminders that amid the roar of drills and the rhythm of jazz orchestras, behind every milestone and percentage point, were real people whose stories could be blurred as quickly as they unfolded. By May 1925, steel drills and dynamite were as much a part of daily life as baseball gloves and saxophones. In this remote corner of the Rockies, men and machines weren’t just reshaping a mountain: they were reshaping their identity. Progress was measured not only in feet driven and concrete poured, but in community dances, new automobiles, and a growing pride in two towns finding their rhythm beneath the weight of a monumental task. Preserving this history with clarity is not just a scholarly exercise—it’s a responsibility to those who lived it. Because what they built wasn’t just a tunnel—it was a legacy. After all, the tunnel was no longer a dream—it was becoming inevitable.
B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | May 24, 2025
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