the Colorado and Southern Railway, providing the first rail link between Denver and the South Park mining communities such as Fairplay (the tracks were removed in 1938, but the modern highway follows the old road and the railroad route over the pass - most of which is still visible). During this same year of 1879, the poet Walt Whitman crossed the pass and described its summit with these words, later published in Specimen Days: I jot these lines literally at Kenosha summit, where we return, afternoon, and take a long rest, 10,000 feet above sea-level. At this immense height the South Park stretches fifty miles before me. Mountainous chains and peaks in every variety of perspective, every hue of vista, fringe the view...so the whole Western world is, in a sense, but an expansion of these mountains. On July 25th, 1936, Denver and Rio Grande Western locomotive #346, which was on loan to the Colorado and Southern at the time, rolled on the east side of the pass as it hit a corner at an estimated speed of ~40 mph. The engineer at the throttle, Eugene K. McGowan, was killed in the wreck. Popular culture In the South Park episode "The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers" a sign for Kenosha Pass can be seen as the boys walk from South Park to Conifer to the video store. In the episode "Prehistoric Ice Man," a man who has been frozen since 1996 goes back to his wife, and he says he was lost on Kenosha Pass. In South Park: Post Covid, a sign shows saying "Kenosha Pass: Now OPEN due to Global Warming" as Stan returns to South Park. A line from Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow: you never danced the kenosha kid is repeated throughout, with varying punctuation and capitalization, changing the meaning of the sentence each time. References Rail mountain passes of the United States Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad Mountain passes of Colorado Landforms of Park County, Colorado Transportation in Park County, Colorado