Repair crews face race with weather
Glacier seeks emergency funds for flood work
By JIM MANN
The Daily Inter Lake
Glacier National Park is seeking emergency funding to repair flood damage on Going-to-the-Sun Road, where crews are working over the Veterans Day weekend, Superintendent Mick Holm said Friday.
"Our intention is to get everything done that we can … before the weather drives us off the mountain," Holm said. "We've got the crews working this weekend to try to clear as much as they can."
The window for work on Sun Road could be short, with the National Weather Service issuing a warning that forecasts 6 to 12 inches of snow above 5,000 feet by midday today.
John Kilpatrick, the park's facilities manager, was in the field Friday, sizing up at least three washouts in the East Side Tunnel area, a rockslide that buried the road in the Haystack Creek drainage on the west side of Logan Pass, and other flood-related problems along the historic 50-mile-long highway.
Between Nov. 2 and Nov. 7, 11 inches of rain was measured at an automated weather station on Glacier's Flattop Mountain, with 8.5 inches coming down on Nov. 7 alone.
The downpour pushed streams above their banks, overwhelmed some culverts on Sun Road and caused Swiftcurrent Lake to rise well above its normal level, flooding the bottom floor of Many Glacier Hotel.
The worst washout on Sun Road took out both lanes, leaving a gap of 103 feet. While that breach probably will block snow plowing from the east in spring 2007, Holm said he is optimistic that the road can be plowed from the west.
Kilpatrick said the 103-foot washout "is going to prove the most challenging. But we've repaired these things before. We'll come up with a good plan."
He anticipates park crews will make good progress on repairs at lower elevations this year.
"I think we'll probably be fairly successful below the Loop and below Siyeh Bend," Kilpatrick said, "and we'll have quite an effort going on for the spring."
Park officials have yet to settle on a cost estimate for repairs, but Glacier has applied for emergency funding through the National Park Service's headquarters in Washington, D.C., and Montana's congressional delegation is aware of the situation, Holm said.
Glacier will be in line for funding with other national parks in the Pacific Northwest that were hammered by heavy rain over the last week.
Damage from the downpour was not limited to Glacier Park.
There was a massive debris slide in the Clayton Creek drainage west of Hungry Horse Reservoir that was surveyed on Thursday by Flathead National Forest hydrologist Dean Sirucek.
About 3 1/2 acres of a hillside above a tributary to Clayton Creek slumped and caused a debris flow that scoured a path through the tributary more than a quarter mile to Clayton Creek, Sirucek said.
There is a 20-foot pile of logs and rock at the bottom of the slide, which occurred on land burned by the 2003 Blackfoot Fire. The burn likely contributed to the severity of the slide, Sirucek said.
Farther south, the West Side Reservoir Road is closed because of water flowing over the road at Ben Creek. While flows have dropped off, that closure remains in effect because of damage to the road.
Elsewhere on the forest, the Trail Creek Road that crosses the Whitefish Divide just south of the Canadian border was closed because of road damage near the top of the divide, Sirucek said.
Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com