An Evening of Grand County History

Join the Grand County Historical Association for an evening celebrating our community, the accomplishments of the past year, and the future of historic preservation. Enjoy dinner, learn about GCHA’s work this year, and our goals for 2027, and experience a special presentation by historian B. Travis Wright.

Grand County Historical Association Annual Meeting
October 17 | 6 PM
Dinner • Annual Meeting • Featured Presentation
$35 per person
Camper Hub at Snow Mountain Ranch

Drawing on rare photographs, archival film, engineering plans, contractor records, contemporary newspapers, cemetery records, and thousands of hours of original research, B. Travis Wright, MPS—historian, author, State Honor Award recipient, and co-founder of Preserve Rollins Pass—reconstructs the tunnel from the perspective of the people who built it. Drillers, muckers, timbermen, surveyors, physicians, families, and camp workers confronted challenges from unstable ground to unstable politics while temporary communities at East and West Portal sustained the work around the clock. The presentation also shares new findings from an ongoing effort to restore the identities and stories of workers whose deaths were omitted, misreported, or reduced to statistics. The result is not simply a monument to engineering triumph, but a deeply human account of public ambition, invention under pressure, sacrifice, and remembrance.