The sun was high and hot this first weekend of August, and Front Range visitors came flocking to the High Country.
I-70 traffic this weekend topped 141,000 vehicles for the first time all year. It was the busiest weekend on the mountain corridor since late September of last year, like the entire population of Thornton hitting the road.
In three days, July 31 to Aug. 2, traffic at the Eisenhower-Johnson tunnels was nearly 5% busier than the previous weekend but still 2% slower than the same weekend last year.
Travelers found some relief from a second-straight weekend of triple-digit temperatures in Denver, but not much. On Sunday, Aug. 2, the Krystalized weather center in Dillon broke 88 degrees Fahrenheit. It was the second-hottest day of summer, behind 89 degrees on July 21, and unofficially the warmest in history for that date, beating the previous record of 85 degrees from 2024 (at the Dillon 1 E record-keeping station).
Breaking the 140k mark at the tunnels has been a long time coming. Last year it happened twice during the ski season and nine times during the summer, June through September. In 2024 it happened 10 times, including two summer weekends with more than 150,000 cars in three days.