Interstate 35

Starts in Duluth, Minnesota, goes down through St. Paul, Minnesota where it meets Interstate 94, down to Des Moines, Iowa. Goes through Kansas City, Missouri, over to Wichita, Kansas, down through Oklahoma City, Oklahoma where it meets Interstate 40 and Interstate 44, down through Dallas, Texas, San Antonio, Texas, and ends at the Mexican border in Laredo, Texas.

I-35 ends in Duluth, MN at a stoplight overlooking Lake Superior. It does not go all the way to Canada. If you want to do that, take a right at the stoplight and go straight along Minnesota State Highway 61 to the big fence at the Pigeon River which demarcates the U.S.-Canada border in the area. So far in my life this is the only end of an Interstate I have seen, which impressed me highly when I was younger.

I-35 from Duluth to Des Moines covers a widely varying set of terrain. Nearby Duluth the land is a rolling glacial morain, with exposed bedrock in the freeway median. Between the Twin Cities and roughly Hinckley, MN, the land is full of pine forests, farmland, and exurban subdivisions. South of Minneapolis and St. Paul, it becomes very agricultural and after you pass Owatonna, MN, the land becomes very flat and virtually all farms as far as the eye can see. The land is flat as a billiard table from there all the way through Iowa.

I-35 splits when it reaches Denton, Texas into I-35E (which passes through Corinth, Lewisville, Carrollton, Farmers Branch, Dallas, Desoto, Lancaster and Waxahachie) and I-35W (which passes through Northlake, Fort Worth, Burleson and Alvarado). The two branches rejoin outside of Texas, which is 30 miles north of Texas.

The portion of 35E that passes through west Dallas is commonly refered to by its pre-Interstate system name, the Stemmons Freeway. In Dallas, Stemmons intersects with I-30 and several downtown arteries in a concrete cat's cradle called "The Mixmaster."

Nevermind, of course, that I35 is the main throughfare and most oft used intracity route through Austin, TX. In addition to being one of the most dangerous interstate highways in this here country it holds the same title for the Travis County area as well. Like the famed I35E and I35W split in Hillsboro, the highway divides in two for the span between downtown Austin and the UT campus. The idea is that the lower deck provides easy access to downtown and campus and the upper deck allows passersby and Nafta traffic to flow unabated past the often busy heart of the city. Like most of TXDoT's bright ideas, this split only serves to confuse the city dwellers and road-weary travellers alike, causing an unusually high level of traffic to accumulate before the split in either direction.

What many people don't realize is that the reason that the leftmost two lanes form the lower deck (and also the many exits) and the bypass that is the upper deck is composed of the two right lanes is due to poor city planning. Originally, I35 was a two-lane affair through the campus area. However, when the city grew, it was soon noted that a cemetery and Concordia University bound the banks of '35. Thus, adding a piggybacked two additional lanes was easiest to do when the right lanes were the add-ons, as opposed to reworking the lower deck or putting in new exits from the upper deck.

Thankfully, the lower deck is no longer the death trap it once was, due to many months of construction on the entrance ramps. But that's a topic for another node.