Digging out from the disaster was enough to make anyone go crazy. Although the community made some strong initial steps and registered much progress, it still faced great burdens: debris to clean up, roads to reconstruct, ditches to repair, bridges to rebuild. More mundane infrastructure matters such as sidewalks and sewers also demanded attention.

The road damage was most serious upstream in the canyons above Boulder to the mining camps. The task of repairing the highway up Boulder Canyon, from Boulder to Salina, fell to Charles Cobb, a well-known freighter who lived in the foothills. Cobb quickly recruited sixty-five men for the work. He approached the construction very efficiently by having men work on specialized tasks, and his strategically timed dynamite blasts made the process move quickly. Cobb lit the fuses himself during each day’s noon break, so that his men were eating lunch at safe locations when the rocks flew. Cobb proudly stated that no one on his crew was ever hurt. He and his crew, with the help of some volunteer road builders, needed only a month to get a road open for hauling supplies to and from Salina

Progress came slowly, particularly in more isolated areas such as Four Mile Creek above Salina. For almost a month, volunteering miners performed all the road repairs in that district, with no help from the county. Frustrated leaders of the mountain communities threatened to pull their business from Boulder and Longmont if these towns did not push harder to finish the road repairs. The miners were more than happy to take their business to Denver if the valley towns would not share the financial burden.

But Boulder County could not spend money it did not have. From the very start, the committee of ways and means resolved (and the county commissioners agreed) to hire only Boulder County men to do the work of rebuilding. However, the immense cost involved left the county unable to provide appropriate wages for all the laborers. The commissioners finally offered twenty cents per hour for basic labor, and thirty-five cents per hour for a man with a horse team. The editors of the Camera, however, warned officials not to use poverty as an excuse for inactivity: “If the commissioners assume the ground that they have no money and can do nothing until money comes to them through regular channels, they will be declared incompetent, incapable men from every sensible point of view. . . Men are idle. Roads need rebuilding. Employ the men and give us the roads.”