Route From Level 3 To Qwest On The West Coast

I am looking at getting some Qwest bandwidth at 200 Paul, San Francisco. Not being too familar with Qwest's network and as part of evaluating that decision I did some testing to see how the routes/latency looked from various points on the Internet and from our other data centers. For pretty much all the testing I did from the major tier 1/2 networks, Qwest has great peering in places you would expect resulting is decent routes and low latency.

The strange thing is that the one exception is routes from Level 3. As an example, traffic from various Northern California points on Level 3's network to a test IP on Qwest's network in Sunnyvale all go via Denver to connect to Qwest and then back to the Bay Area. For LA originating traffic, it goves via Dallas. Same thing for Seattle that is going via Denver.

Hard to imagine these two tier 1 providers don't peer at any location on the west coast at all? Is this typical between these two or is there some temporary outage right now? Or is there some peering spat going on between them?

Seems pretty silly for traffic to go 3,000 miles between points that are only 10 miles apart!

Here is an example of the route to a test IP sunnyvale.speedtest.qwest.net (205.171.214.185):

1 vlan89.csw3.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.68.18.190) 0 msec
vlan79.csw2.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.68.18.126) 0 msec
vlan99.csw4.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.68.18.254) 0 msec
2 ae-62-62.ebr2.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.69.134.209) 216 msec
ae-82-82.ebr2.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.69.134.217) 4 msec
ae-72-72.ebr2.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.69.134.213) 204 msec
3 ae-3.ebr1.Denver1.Level3.net (4.69.132.58) 204 msec 200 msec 204 msec
4 ae-11-51.car1.Denver1.Level3.net (4.68.107.6) 224 msec
ae-11-55.car1.Denver1.Level3.net (4.68.107.134) 212 msec *
5 dvr-brdr-01.inet.qwest.net (63.146.26.133) [AS209 {ASN-QWEST}] 24 msec 28 msec 28 msec
6 dvr-core-01.inet.qwest.net (205.171.10.54) [AS209 {ASN-QWEST}] 24 msec 24 msec 28 msec
7 * * *
8 svl-svcs-01.inet.qwest.net (205.171.214.98) [AS209 {ASN-QWEST}] 28 msec 28 msec 28 msec
9 svl-speedtest-01.inet.qwest.net (205.171.214.185) [AS209 {ASN-QWEST}] 28 msec 28 msec 28 msec

Anyone have experiences with using Qwest bandwidth in Northern California they care to share?