“And I don't remember screaming, but I remember hearing my voice screaming. It's kind of weird,” Randy Wheelock remembered.

Now a Clear Creek county commissioner, Wheelock worked as a laborer on the Eisenhower Tunnel five decades ago when he first moved to Colorado. 

The Eisenhower tunnel turned 50 on March 8 and was celebrated by the Colorado Department of Transportation and local officials. According to CODOT, at the time of its construction, the tunnel project was the largest single federal-aid highway project in US history.

“I was working on this crew of laborers over there with pick and shovel and working really hard, doing really hard, dirty work,” Wheelock said. 

That was the early '70s. Wheelock left his home state of Oklahoma in pursuit of adventure and freedom in Colorado as a 23-year-old. When he got to the Centennial state with what was left of the $125 he set out with, he realized his car wouldn’t make it up the mountains, so he stopped in Idaho Springs. 

Soon, he was working on what would be one of the most historic highway projects in the country. But to a young Wheelock, it was just the start of his Colorado life. 

“I came up wanting to get that raw Colorado-high-mountains experience. And within a week and a half, I was running a jackhammer at 10 degrees below zero at 11,000 feet, jackhammering through frozen ground and rock,” he said. 

Working at the tunnel wasn’t an easy job. It was grueling, physically demanding work that was dangerous. 

“There was ice forming on my boots. And then I was working so hard that I was pouring off so much heat that my T-shirt was wet from sweat and I was steaming, there was steam coming off of me,” he remembered.

Wheelock worked many roles in his time at the tunnels. On an early assignment, one of his supervisors didn’t like that many of the guys had long hair, and accused them of being lazy. Wheelock decided to work twice as hard to prove him wrong. 

“I just noticed that this guy came and started threatening us and telling us we weren't working hard now. But I thought, that's funny, I'm working so hard I feel like I’m gonna die,” Wheelock remembered. 

Later that day, as Wheelock worked at double pace to prove he was a hard worker, the crew ran into trouble while loading up boulders to be hauled out of the tunnel. 

A fellow worker moved a machine into place to receive a boulder, when suddenly it malfunctioned. 

“And as he did, he lost control of the machine and the machine hit the boulder and the boulder hit me and the boulder slammed my leg up against one of the steel girders and everything stopped,” Wheelock said. “And I don't remember screaming but I remember hearing my voice screaming. It's kind of weird.”

Wheelock’s leg was fine at the moment, but his crewmates said they shouldn’t move the machine in case it malfunctioned again, as it could crush him. 

“And I said get it off me,” Wheelock said. 

The workers all warned that the machine wasn’t operating correctly, and could very likely kill him. All Wheelock could think about was his supervisor seeing the time they were wasting. 

“All I could think about was, I'm gonna get fired, we're gonna get fired. Get it off me,” he said.

The machine did reverse and Wheelock and his coworkers were able to get back to work unscathed. But that didn’t stop the supervisor from firing everyone on the crew with long hair at the end of their shift. 

As all the other laborers hung their heads and walked out of the tunnel, Wheelock gave the supervisor a piece of his mind. 

“I really felt like if there was a moment, you know, there's a moment in my life where I just decided that I didn't care who anybody else was,” he said.

He left the tunnel and was able to get his job back with help from the union, but that experience shaped him.

“That was the night I grew up,” he said. 

Wheelock worked in the tunnels for about four to five months, then went on to work for a friend doing house framing. He decided to return to the final stages of the tunnels’ construction when they needed union carpenters. 

“And two days after I showed up on the job, they went on strike,” he remembered. 

The strike lasted two weeks, and Wheelock was back working. He worked quicker than most, to the dismay of his new supervisor. 

“And then he took me aside one day, and he said: look, this job's not gonna last forever. And we don't need to finish it that fast,” Wheelock said. 

This comment was surprising and demoralizing to Wheelock, who didn’t stay at the tunnels much longer than three months this time. He then went on to do construction contracting work. 

“And to think that I ended up still being here 50 years later, and now I'm a county commissioner,” Wheelock reflected. 

The tunnels are over a mile and a half long each. The westbound Eisenhower bore, which was completed first, took five years to complete, and the eastbound Johnson bore took four years.