road Plans to convert Rollins Pass into an historic automobile road were first published in November 1949. Several years later, on Saturday, September 1, 1956, Colorado lieutenant governor, Steve McNichols, opened Rollins Pass as a non-vital and seasonal recreational road. Each summer, from 1956–1979, Rollins Pass served as a complete road over the mountain pass for automobiles until a substantial rock fall in Needle's Eye Tunnel in 1979 closed the path over the pass. In 1989, after several engineering studies and structural strengthening of Needle's Eye Tunnel were accomplished, the complete road was re-opened only to close permanently in 1990, due to a rockfall injuring a sightseer. For the past years—since July 1990—no motorized route connects across the Continental Divide, effectively making each side a dead-end uphill route that must be traveled again, downhill, to leave the pass. Rollins Pass as a natural gas pipeline route In 1969, a natural gas pipeline was placed on Rollins Pass. In the mid-1990s, Rollins Pass was closed for the installation of a diameter Xcel Energy high-pressure natural gas pipeline. The pipeline, not always under marker, still is in existence and uses the low pass to reach the Front Range by loosely following County Road 8 in Fraser, utilizing much of Ranch Creek towards the Middle Fork of Ranch Creek below Mount Epworth, climbing the pass near Ptarmigan Point, and following much of the old railbed past Corona at the summit of Rollins Pass. The pipeline continues across the railbed towards and under the twin trestles, down the old wagon route on the spine of Guinn Mountain, and then towards Eldora. The pipeline undergoes internal inspections "at least" every seven years with the deployment of a smart pig inside the pipeline. Artifacts and features Preservation of both prehistoric and historic records A majority of Rollins Pass is located within the boundaries of two national forests—Roosevelt National Forest and Arapaho National Forest—and as such, is federal land. The Archaeological Resources Protection Act along with the Antiquities Act, among other federal and cultural laws, recognizes the nonrenewable and vulnerable nature of cultural resources and these laws protect and make it illegal to collect artifacts, including but not limited to: arrowheads, horseshoes, buttons, cans, glass or ceramic bottles, dishware and utensils, coal, railroad spikes, snowshed wood, railroad ties, and telegraph poles from Rollins Pass. All artifacts—from the prehistoric to the historic—on the pass are objects of antiquity