Accomplishments & Outreach

Stephen H. Hart Award

In 2015, CDOT Cultural Resources staff—which included Dan Jepson, Greg Wolff, Lisa Schoch, and Kara Hahn of the DTD Environmental Programs Branch, and Regions 1 and 4 Historians Ashley Bushey and Jason Marmor, respectively—received a Stephen H. Hart Award by History Colorado. The accolade, for “Initiating and Developing a Collaborative Mitigation Program Throughout Colorado”, recognizes CDOT for cultivating and maintaining a historic preservation compliance program that is among the very best in the state. CDOT staff coordinates effectively with the Colorado Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation (members of which submitted the nomination), as well as local agencies and entities, and has collectively become a leader in creative mitigation as part of the collaborative process for individual transportation projects. 

Spanning Generations: The Historic Bridges of Colorado

Completed in 2004 and written by historian Dianna Litvak, Spanning Generations: The Historic Bridges of Colorado was developed using a grant from the State Historical Fund and matching funds from CDOT. In addition to an overview of bridge building in Colorado, the volume features a pictorial history of Colorado's significant bridges and provides information about current bridge preservation issues and strategies.

Colorado Experience

In 2015, Rocky Mountain PBS, in collaboration with CDOT’s Cultural Resource Program, produced an episode of the show Colorado Experience titled Gateway to the High Country that exclusively focused on the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnels. As the highest vehicular tunnel in the world with an elevation of 11,155 feet, the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnels are a massive engineering achievement.

CDOT’s Centennial History

In commemoration of the 100-year anniversary of the agency, in 2010 CDOT published a centennial history book to highlight the agency’s history and accomplishments. Cultural Resource staff members, as well as other CDOT employees, wrote several chapters, and overall, the book showcases the importance of CDOT and Colorado’s transportation network on the history of the state.

Presentations

CDOT Historians and Archaeologists regularly speak at state and national conferences and to local history organizations. This enables CDOT to disseminate the information developed in our various research projects, as well as inform both professional colleagues and the general public about the CDOT Cultural Resources Program and the historic and archaeological resources encountered on CDOT projects. Past presentation topics include:

Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnels
Vail Pass History
Glenwood Canyon History
History of CDOT Avalanche Mitigation
Colorado’s Historic Highways