Rollins Pass: Protecting What Matters
Over millennia, Rollins Pass has been crossed and engineered; protecting what matters today demands informed understanding and disciplined management.
PARTNERSHIP IN STEWARDSHIP
U.S. Forest Service staff who have seen this presentation remarked that it underscores the importance of partnership in the stewardship of Rollins Pass.
ABOUT THE PRESENTATION
Rollins Pass tells a story few American landscapes can match. This visually rich and rigorously documented presentation traces 12,000 years of human ingenuity along Colorado’s Continental Divide, beginning with Paleoindian hunting structures of international significance, rising through wagon roads zigzagging toward the crest of the continent and audacious high-alpine rail lines battling avalanche and grade, and culminating in the moment the Moffat Tunnel rendered “the top of the world” silent and permanently reshaped mountain transportation. Few places in the American West compress so much ambition, risk, and reinvention into so narrow a stretch of ground.
Drawing on rare photographs, archival film, contractor records, archaeological findings, and first-hand preservation fieldwork, B. Travis Wright, MPS—historian, author, State Honor Award recipient, and co-founder of Preserve Rollins Pass—reveals vanished towns, avalanche-swept rail corridors, exposed and decommissioned infrastructure, and a living corridor where wilderness boundaries, historic routes, pipelines, and modern pressures converge in one breathtaking setting. What emerges is clarity: the marks of engineering, the realities of altitude, and the responsibilities of land management are all visible at once. It is a story of visionaries and laborers, of resilience and calculated risk, and of terrain both fragile and enduring.
Yet this is more than a history lesson. It is a front-row examination of what stewardship requires when nationally recognized historic districts, archaeological resources, alpine ecosystems, and public lands intersect. Preservation victories grounded in defensible documentation and collaborative science stand alongside real and present challenges: vandalism, unauthorized motorized incursions, infrastructure demands, and the slow, compounding erosion of time. The program advances preservation as a disciplined, evidence-based framework for managing cultural assets, reducing conflict, and sustaining public trust.
Equal parts epic history and measured reflection, this program positions Rollins Pass as a consequential landscape—one whose future will be shaped by informed, engaged communities. It is a journey across altitude, ambition, and accountability—one that reframes the Continental Divide as more than a line on a map and leaves you with a clear understanding of why what remains on the pass still matters, and what is at stake if it is misunderstood or neglected.
ON WHY WE CHOOSE NOT TO SHARE CORE PRESENTATION MATERIALS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
We sometimes receive inquiries about whether we can provide a copy of our slide deck via email, external hard drive, hard copy, or by an online link. Due to the extensive investment of time, effort, cost, and resources involved in creating our presentations, we have established a policy of not sharing these core materials and source files. The following points outline the key reasons for this decision:
Significant Investment: Creating and crafting our presentations has entailed tens of thousands of hours of meticulous work. This includes comprehensive research, the integration of high-quality images and videos spanning both historic and modern eras, and the development of custom and graphically-intensive content. Additionally, we have conducted extensive fieldwork to capture unique footage and engage in research as well as volunteer initiatives; our efforts directly contribute essential data to our presentations. For well over the past decade, we have continuously refined our presentations to ensure the highest quality and the incorporation of the most up-to-date information, coupled with new discoveries and streamlined historical research.
Complex Animations: Many individual slides contain up to six dozen layered animations, crucial for delivering dynamic, captivating content, and to aid the audience’s understanding of complex and conjoined timeframes and ideas. As a result, these intricate animations are tailored for live viewing and do not translate effectively to sharing or printing, often appearing overlapped and illegible when printed.
Slide Volume, File Size, and Technical Requirements: The master deck encompasses approximately 2,500 slides, with a variable core file size ranging from 30-40 GB in Apple Keynote format (file size varies due to new content under development and existing content undergoing revision). This extensive volume of proprietary content and large file size exacerbates the complexity of sharing logistics, notwithstanding the near-certainty of performance and readability issues on standard systems. The presentation is also not compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint. In fact, our presentation demands state-of-the-art hardware, specifically a Mac system powered by Apple silicon M-series Max or Ultra processors. Minimum specifications include a 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 16-core neural engine, two ProRes encode/decode engines, 128 GB of memory with a memory bandwidth of 400GB/s to ensure optimal functionality for building, preparing, and presenting our slide deck. These systems guarantee peak performance, minimal latency, and flawless delivery.
While the complete slide deck remains proprietary, we may entertain reasonable, individual requests from specific groups or agencies necessitating particular images or screenshots. Such requests will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Of course, a sampling of our delivered presentations remain available to the world on YouTube. We extend our gratitude for your understanding and respect for the significant effort and resources invested in the development of our presentations. Upholding their integrity and exclusive use, as our intellectual property, is paramount to us and to our efforts to protect, preserve, and restore the area for future generations.
The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.
