road condition Hwy 70 west

It's a beautiful drive and you will find lots of places for rest stops, some official and some not. I live in Glenwood Springs and I really wouldn't consider it very RV friendly, especially now that they're working on the new bridge and traffic gets really backed up. You could take the W. Glenwood exit and turn west and find a nice mall and rec center with good parking, though I don't know about overnighting there, but a good place for gas and a Target. Rifle and Grand Junction are much easier to navigate and have more RV parks, etc.

ncrowley wrote:
I have driven Hwy 70 fro Denver to Grand Junction a number of times. It is very doable but not our favorite road. There are not a lot of easy places to stop until you get near Grand Junction. I once spent an uncomfortable hour trying to find a rest stop. I finally pulled into a small town and it was very narrow and painful.

Really? There are easy places to stop to take a break at the top of Eisenhower, as well as Vail pass. Many other "scenic overlooks" that are big enough to accommodate multiple RVs.

3 Rest Areas through Glenwood Canyon, plus at least another 3 that I can think of either east or west of there.

It is a beautiful stretch of road that is at least 2 lanes everywhere, sometimes 3. Some grades are steep, but not unmanageable.

I have driven Hwy 70 fro Denver to Grand Junction a number of times. It is very doable but not our favorite road. There are not a lot of easy places to stop until you get near Grand Junction. I once spent an uncomfortable hour trying to find a rest stop. I finally pulled into a small town and it was very narrow and painful.

We have driven I 70 (eastbound) a couple of times. once in a 36 foot gasser pulling a 4,000 pound car. It was slow cresting the high point, but we made it with no issues. We did not stop for other than a driver change in a pullout. Our slowest speed was 28 mph on the steepest grade, in the gasser, 4,500 rpm in first. The diesel with a 5,000 lb tow'd just walked up the grades.

It is an Interstate with plenty of traffic, much of it slow on the grades. We ran from Grand Junction to well pas the mountains before stopping for the night. Didn't look for over nights, but there should be plenty, it is tourist country.

Places you can stop:

Idaho Springs
Empire
Georgetown
Silverthorne-Frisco
Copper Mountain
Vail
Avon-Edwards
Eagle-Gypsum
Glenwood Springs
Newcastle
Silt-Rifle

The route is heavy with mountain resort communities out to Rifle. The will be restaurants in most of these communities, with the usual collection of travel services clustered right at the exit.

The paired-communities are places where you can get off to travel the old highway (US-40 toward the eastern end, US-6 to the west) for access to more facilities than you will typically find at an exit.

Silt, where the highway very close to the Colorado River, is a summer resort where you will find RV parks and restaurants, if that's what you mean by "places to stop." But that's almost all the way to Grand Junction.

Glenwood Springs, where the Roaring Fork joins the Colorado, is another major resort, closer to half way. But Denver to Grand Junction is only about four hours at Interstate Highway speeds, so halfway is not very far.

The road is a busy Interstate Highway with a lot of truck traffic. Where grades are enough to greatly slow truck traffic, there are extra lanes. Road condition is what it is on our overage Interstate system, winters are long and harsh on this section so summers are spend rebuilding sections of the road. Colorado DOT (you have a link) will have up to date construction information. I see the Eisenhower Tunnel is down to one lane, that will likely slow traffic some.

Coming from Denver, there is not really an alternative route. Coming from Colorado Springs/Pueblo area, US-50 is a good alternative, but is more than a four hour drive, maybe 5-6 hours steady driving. But I don't really know, because I've never made in from Pueblo to Grand Junction in less than two days, sometimes it stretches out to four or five days, because there is so much to see and do along this route.

Here's the Colorado Dept. of Transportation's web site:

https://www.codot.gov/travel

Places to check out along the way....do you mean right along the highway or are you will to get off the highway and explore?

Possibilities:

Hwy 24 - Leadville down to Buena Vista
Glenwood Springs
Rifle - nice state park
Grand Junction - Colorado Nat'l Monument; a drive up to Grand Mesa; Black Canyon of the Gunnison