Douglas Pass, elevation , is a mountain pass in the

Book Cliffs The Book Cliffs are a series of desert mountains and cliffs in western Colorado and eastern Utah in the Western United States. They are so named because the cliffs of Cretaceous sandstone capping many of the south-facing buttes appear simila ...

of western

Colorado Colorado is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States. It is one of the Mountain states, sharing the Four Corners region with Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. It is also bordered by Wyoming to the north, Nebraska to the northeast, Kansas ...

. It is located in

Garfield County Garfield County is the name of several counties in the United States: * Garfield County, Colorado *Garfield County, Montana *Garfield County, Nebraska *Garfield County, Oklahoma * Garfield County, Utah *Garfield County, Washington Garfie ...

and is traversed by State Highway 139. The pass divides the watersheds of West Douglas Creek to the north and East Salt Creek to the south. It is named for the Northern

Ute Ute or UTE may refer to: * Ute people, a Native American people of the Great Basin * Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, Utah * Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah * Southern Ute Indian Tribe of the Southern ...

, Chief Douglas. The pass is not an especially high summit relative to other Colorado passes, and the road, though reasonably steep on the south side (7%), has no tight spots and only a few switchbacks. The summit gives an unusual view of the northeast face of the La Sal Mountains (twelve peaks over 12,000 feet), away in Utah. The remainder of the drive is basically in valleys following creeks. The Utes had established a trail over the pass, which was subsequently used by European explorers and settlers. The

Domínguez–Escalante expedition The Domínguez–Escalante Expedition was a Spanish journey of exploration conducted in 1776 by two Franciscan priests, Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, to find an overland route from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to their Roman C ...

crossed the pass in 1776. Following the Ute trail, a road over the pass was constructed in the 1920s. The mountain consists of

shale Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock formed from mud that is a mix of flakes of Clay mineral, clay minerals (hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates, e.g., Kaolinite, kaolin, aluminium, Al2Silicon, Si2Oxygen, O5(hydroxide, OH)4) and tiny f ...

strata belonging to the

Green River Formation The Green River Formation is an Eocene geologic formation that records the sedimentation in a group of intermountain lakes in three basins along the present-day Green River (Colorado River), Green River in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. The sedimen ...

, exposures of which can be seen on the south side of the pass.Boak, J., Sarg, R., Tanavsuu, K. and Yeakel, J. 2009. Oil shale of the Piceance Basin, Colorado. Colorado School of Mines, Guidebook of the 29th Oil Shale Symposium field trip, October 22–23, 2009, Stop 4.

References

Mountain passes of Colorado Landforms of Garfield County, Colorado Transportation in Garfield County, Colorado {{Colorado-geo-stub