Imagine receiving an official letter from the county informing you that your address is going to change because it contains an offensive word.

That will soon happen to 74 households located on “Old Squaw Pass Road,” “Little Squaw Pass Road” and “Squaw Mountain Trail” — three corridors that wind between Evergreen and Idaho Springs on Highway 103 in Clear Creek County.

All three roads were named for the 11,000 foot mountain they sit on and which carried the offensive word. Last year, the Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board voted to change the name to Mestaa’ėhehe Mountain — pronounced MESS-taw-hay.

The old name was scrapped, along with 28 other creeks, canyons, pillars and points in Colorado because the “S” word is considered a derogatory slur to American Indians everywhere.

“It’s degrading to our women to be called this because it refers to the woman’s anatomy,” said Fred Mosqueda, a Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho who has been one of the leading voices for geographical name changes in Colorado. “For a long time, people realized it was derogatory to us but they didn’t care. There was always that mindset of the conqueror. We have had to take this kind of treatment for a long time.”

The geographic names are managed by the federal government, but the road name changes are the responsibility of the counties where they are located.

Recently, the Clear Creek County Board of Commissioners voted to replace three “S-word” roads and have started the process come up with new ones.

But not until after holiday package and card season.

“Changing people’s addresses is a lengthy process. You don’t ever want to do it over the holidays. Getting packages and deliveries makes it harder. We won’t be doing anything until after the first of the year,” said Matt Taylor, Internal Services director of the county’s Road Research Team.

Unraveling the web of address changes will take months. After they receive county’s formal notification letter, residents will be given a survey with name-change suggestions.

The process begins

Once the new road names are decided, Taylor and his group will have to notify first responders, such as EMS and 911 dispatch centers, as well as the postal service, the county assessor and treasurer, the county clerk and recorder, and social media sites that give virtual directions, including Google, Bing, Waze and Apple.

It’s a complicated operation that Taylor’s road researchers got an early taste of when they re-sequenced a string of address numbers on a handful of houses on Evergreen’s West Meadow Road last year.

“The biggest thing we learned from that is that we had outdated contacts with the U.S. Postal Service, so while we were sending them new information on corrected addresses, they weren’t receiving the emails, so it took longer than we had anticipated,” Taylor said.

All but one of the three offensive road names on Mestaa’ėhehe Mountain have been around for years — one of them even going back to Colorado’s mining days.

Three s-word roads

The naming of the three roads with the “S” word have varying origins, which range from 16 years to more than a century ago.

The “Old S-word Pass” name has been around the longest and the Clear Creek County archives have no record of who dubbed it. The road is part of the original pass, which cut through the mountain in the early 1860’s before Colorado became a state.

It’s also home to most of the families affected, 47, which is double the number of folks who live on the other two roads combined.

When Nancy Judge built her home there in the mid-1990’s, her family didn’t realize that the road she lived on was named after a disparaging word. She admitted she has no close ties to the Native American culture.

“But do I want something named derogatory to a culture? Never,” she said.

Judge, the president of the Evergreen Chamber of Commerce, is “ambivalent” about changing her address where she’s received notifications, bills and junk mail for nearly 30 years.

“Will there be a transformation period for us? Yes? But it’s not life-altering for many of us. Will there need to be a grace period? Of course,” Judge said.

The neighbors are not fired up about the upcoming changes … yet, she said.

Little S-word Pass Road

There are only eight homes on “Little S-word Pass Road,” which was named in the 1940’s when two subdivisions, Pine Valley (1941) and Pine Valley Heights (1944), were established.

Again, archives have no record of who chose the name — but it was mostly likely named after the mountain peak.

Internet searches and history

Not all of the S-word road names are centuries or even decades old.

Just 16 years ago, controversy over the “S” word arose among homeowners, who lived on an unnamed but numbered route off of Highway 103 at the top of Little Bear Creek Road in Idaho Springs.

At issue was what to name that road, which was known as County Road 422.

At the time, Jefferson County had been sued over the “S” word.

Every resident who lived on that unnamed section dug in their heels to name it “Little Squaw Mountain Trail” despite the fact that the Mapping, Planning and Site Development Departments “had been informed that the term was considered derogatory by the Native American community,” the minutes of that meeting showed.

Residents felt that “Squaw Mountain Trail” was an “honorable and historic name” and did not want “political correctness” to win out over history.

In the end, on Feb. 21, 2007, the Clear Creek County Commissioners put their stamp of approval to the sought after name because, the minutes revealed, there were other roads with names like “Chief” and, after doing an on-the-spot internet search, Commissioner Kevin O’Malley found no indication that the S-word was a derogatory term.

After the vote, O’Malley predicted the issue of terminology could arise again in the future, but the residents said they were willing to take that chance.

As anticipated, the controversy erupted again.

Taylor said that once the road names are changed, around 20 new signs will be made by the county road and bridge crew, and if any of them have the 12-word name Mestaa’ėhehe in them, they may have to be custom-cut.

But that’s a concern for down the road.

“We’re glad we’re getting to these three roads,” said Clear Creek County Commissioner Randall Wheelock during their weekly meeting Tuesday. “It was a lousy name before we learned something.”