A map of Summit County from around 1955
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Under Dillon Reservoir, remnants of infrastructure that once ran the old town of Dillon remain, and once in a while the reservoir is low enough to spot some of these pieces of Summit County history, particularly former pieces of road.
Summit Cove resident Steve Johnson said that when he’s driving over Swan Mountain Road, he can sometimes see pieces of the old U.S. Highway 6 and Colorado Highway 9 routes starting to make an appearance, and in mid-December, he decided to get a closer look. He captured a photo of one of the old highways.
“When the lake gets really low, you see it,” Johnson said. “The striping is still visible, which amazes me.”
Historian Sandra Mather wrote her dissertation at the University of Oregon on the geographical history of Summit County and learned endlessly about the history of the reservoir and what was here before it. She said she was amazed to see striping on the roads when they’d show up from below the reservoir in the 1980s.
Mather said these pieces of road are still under the reservoir because nobody went out of their way to bulldoze or move dirt from these locations as the focus was on the old town of Dillon.
