Anyone who has spent a winter in western Colorado has been there: wheels spinning on the ice, no visibility past the hood and miles of 7 percent grades to the bottom of the hill.

Jaws are clinched. Fingers strangle the steering wheel. But survival brings a story to be told over and over to those timid souls who will never know the exhilaration of a white-knuckle drive over one of Colorado's famous mountain highways.

Now, Four Corners denizens can brag about surviving not just a bad mountain drive, but the worst drive Colorado has to offer.

Seized by the journalist's desire to categorize, quantify and rank everything, the Herald assembled a list of Colorado's paved, year-round mountain passes and rated them on all the problems that make winter driving such a scare: snow, switchbacks, steepness, traffic, elevation, distance from help and frequency of accidents.

The winner: Wolf Creek Pass.

Red Mountain Pass was a close runner-up, and the Coal Bank/Molas duo ranks in the top 10, so Durango drivers are hemmed in from the north and the east.

It's journalistic pseudo-science in all its glory, but who could doubt the ferocity of Wolf Creek Pass? After all, it was immortalized in a country music song (C.W. McCall's 1974 narrative about hauling a load of chickens over the pass).

To read this article in its entirety, go to http://durangoherald.com/article/20120108/NEWS01/701089895/The-state-s-No--1-dangerous-pass-is----