Colorado State Highway 74
highway in Colorado

State Highway 74 (SH 74) is a state highway in the U.S. state of Colorado. Running 18 miles (29 km) from Interstate 70 (I-70) in El Rancho to SH 8 in Morrison, the highway roughly follows a hook-shaped path running northwest–southeast. The section of the route north of the town of Evergreen is known as Evergreen Parkway and is a segment with a four- to six-lane roadway, with the section east of Evergreen mostly two lanes. The other section is known as the Bear Creek Canyon Scenic Mountain Drive, or just Bear Creek Road, and primarily parallels Bear Creek, passing through the towns of Kittredge and Idledale. The route, which is on the outskirts of Denver, passes through several of the city's mountain parks, including Bergen, Dedisse and Red Rocks parks.
An early road following the current path was established in the late 19th century for miners and loggers. As floods ravaged the road along Bear Creek through the early 20th century, measures were taken to prevent further damage. Other sites along Bear Creek, such as a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in Red Rocks Park and the Bear Creek Canyon Scenic Mountain Drive, as the section between Idledale and Morrison is called, have given the route a listing on the National Register of Historic Places. An early designation of the route number went further west than its current-day designation; that section was truncated by the late 1930s. Another eastern segment was added from Morrison east toward Denver in the 1940s, but that section too was removed.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2113495. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Colorado State Highway 74” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.