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Finding the Way

A Study in Leadership

1. The photograph

On Flickr I saw a beautiful panorama gazing southwest along Colorado's Wolf Creek. Right at the center on the valley floor, it shows a railroad crossing Colorado Highway 17 at Coxo. Above and to the left is a train.

From Coxo, the train has climbed roughly 250 feet to a little shelf called Windy Point. That's approximately the height of a 25-story building. As the crow flies, it's just over four tenths of a mile. But the railroad doesn't go straight up the mountain.

Instead, it takes roughly one and a half miles of track to make that climb, a sweeping curve that keeps to a constant gradient of 4.2%.

Coxo, Colorado, from Windy Point, looking down the Wolf Creek valley.
← If you don't see the entire panorama, scroll or swipe to explore more. →
From 250 feet above the valley, the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad (once known as the D&RGW) can be seen as a thin line sweeping to the right above Colo. Highway 17.
Photograph courtesy of Granger Meador. Visit Granger on Flickr. Used under CC BY-NC 2.0.

2. The problem

Now ask yourself: what wunderkind looked up at this mountain and figured out where to put the railroad? Who saw that a long climbing loop to the right around the creek's headwaters would solve a significant problem.

Locomotives on very steep slopes run out of steam. Their wheels slip. A train on this slope can be only half the length and a third of the weight as on flat ground.

None of that is good for business.

But in the last half of the 1800s, business came knocking. And it was business lucrative enough that ignoring it would have been irresponsible.

132 miles west of Windy Point are the San Juan Mountains, a treasure trove of silver waiting for miners with picks and shovels. That ore was allocated to the US Mint in Denver, 348 miles the other way.

Before the railroad came, getting silver out of those mountains was extremely difficult. Wagons couldn't negotiate much of that terrain, so men and pack animals did the lugging, down one hill and up the next.

Now let me tell you about my first-hand experience going up hills. It isn't easy. I get exhausted. After I had back surgery, I learned that I can't simply walk straight up a steep slope. Now I traverse at an angle. It makes the climb shallower and it takes a little more time but demands less effort.

3. The math

To get into the San Juan Mountains, surveyors had to build the railroad through challenging terrain, dealing with:

And they didn't have:

They had their surveying instruments, the math they carried in their heads, maps that were basically approximations, and people who went out physically to find the route.

The picture shows part of that climb. The Chama River is beyond Coxo, at 7,850 feet. Cumbres Pass is just a mile to the left of Windy Point, at more than 10,000 feet. And the entire climb from Chama to Cumbres is only 16 miles.

That means the track rises approximately four feet vertically for every 100 feet of horizontal travel. That 4.2% is an extraordinarily demanding grade.

A steam locomotive on that grade consumes huge amounts of coal and water. That's expensive.

To a railroad, cost mattered, enormously.

But so did time. In 1880, they had to get the tracks into the San Juans before the mines played out, before the price of silver dropped, and before other railroads got there first.

4. The challenge

Now you may wonder what this has to do with leadership.

Before the railroad could be built, somebody had to figure out where it could exist. Surveyors went into country that had never been fully mapped and turned an apparently impossible landscape into a series of measurable problems.

That's very close to what a leader does. You don't begin by saying: "Build the railroad!"

You begin by asking:

Sometimes the most productive thing a leader can do is spend time and resources understanding the problem before acting on it.

5. The question

So the leadership analysis becomes:

What assumptions are we treating as immutable that aren't actually immutable?

Everyone knows what a railroad is supposed to look like.

But looking at the picture again, the mountain was saying: If you follow my heights, your railroad isn't going to look like a railroad.

It made the surveyors ask, essentially: "Does it have to look like this?"

That's Dynamic Leadership.

Sometimes innovation isn't inventing something nobody has imagined. It's asking: "Why are we assuming we have to do it the conventional way?"

We sometimes define leadership as solving a problem. But some problems aren't solvable in a time-honored way. So leadership becomes:

Identify what cannot be changed, then design the system so it can function successfully despite obstacles.

And that is where this railroad gets particularly interesting.

6. The lesson

The mountain wasn't going to yield.

  1. Gravity wins. Every organization has its own version of gravity.
  2. Constraints aren't necessarily barriers; they can dictate better solutions.
  3. The shortest route isn't always the best route.
  4. Don't assume traditional methods are mandatory.
  5. And perhaps most importantly:
    If the destination remains fixed, the route must change.

The leadership problems we face aren't so far removed. Today's problems might include:

So here you are, standing at the bottom of the mountain. You can either stare up at the summit and say, "That's impossible."

Or you can start planning.

Because Dynamic Leadership is about having the discipline to understand where you're going, what you're up against, and which route gives your people the best chance of getting there.

7. The prize

Looking at the photograph, imagine the scene in 1880. The locating engineers and survey crews had to get out into that terrain on foot and on horseback.

They had to measure heights, calculate distances, establish grades and curves, and physically mark the route. A modern engineer can look at a digital terrain model. These engineers had to stand on the mountain and draw their own lines on a primitive map.

Once the route was established, construction followed, obeying the imaginary line marked on the surveyors maps.

And they built it...

480 miles of track...

Over some of the steepest mountains in North America...

They built a railroad that successfully delivered silver from the San Juans to Denver—silver worth $250 million. That's about $9 billion in today's dollars.

8. The key

And that gives us a wonderful leadership metaphor: The mountain didn't care about management philosophy.

The engineers had to make their calculations work against rock, gravity, water, locomotives, money, and time.

For those engineers in 1880, and for us as leaders today, the critical decision is:

How do we find the way around?

 

Presented as a speech for the Dynamic Leadership Pathway of Toastmasters International.

© 2026 Michael Heavener