Sun Road repair going full bore

By JIM MANN

Crews pushing to open road by early July

The Daily Inter Lake

Heavy duty riprap - and lots of it - is the material of choice for repairing a heavily damaged stretch of Going-to-the-Sun Road east of Logan Pass.

And those repairs are on schedule for a complete opening of Glacier National Park's historic highway by early July, a Federal Highway Administration engineer said Thursday.

The big task at hand is a series of six washouts along a one-third-mile stretch of Sun Road just below the East Tunnel. The damage resulted from a deluge of rain that peppered the park last November.

The damage was unprecedented in the road's 75-year history.

The worst of the washouts was a 110-foot gap in the road at the centerline, where both lanes were lost. To provide access beyond that point and to make room for huge grated vaults and 48-inch culverts, the rock wall above the road was blasted with explosives this year.

That allowed for construction of a bypass that is providing access to two more work sites, including a stretch where about 350 feet of retaining wall must be built in the next month.

"You've got to break some eggs to make an omelet, so to speak," said John Schnaderbeck, Federal Highway Administration engineer.

Now Schnaderbeck and crews with Sandry Construction of Bigfork are working on all six sites simultaneously.

Starting Monday, crews will be working two 10-hour shifts daily, the latter shift working at night.

The work so far has been fast and furious, with haul trucks bringing in immense volumes of fill - mostly large boulders to serve as heavy riprap, along with more than 5,500 cubic feet of smaller fill material.

The heavy riprap is being cemented into place, at one location forming a massive, 300-cubic-foot boulder under the road.

The fixes are intended to be permanent, complementing a long-term Sun Road reconstruction project that gets under way later this summer. The repairs also are intended to replace finer materials that once supported the road but proved to be highly vulnerable to the extreme runoff that comes with 11 inches of rain in four days.

Now, those finer materials are visible in the form of huge alluvial fans that were carried more than 1,000 feet down the steep, green slopes below the road.

"The amount of water coming over the road here was just incredible," Schnaderbeck said of last November's rain event.

Emergency repairs on the road, including damaged areas west of Logan Pass, were projected to cost a total of $6 million. But the lion's share, about $4 million, is being directed at the damage along the short stretch of road below the East Tunnel, Schnaderbeck said.

Work got under way in earnest on that stretch in early May, and it has been helped along by a rapid snow melt-out and relatively good weather.

"We've only lost about six to seven days since the beginning of May due to weather and avalanche danger," Schnaderbeck said.

"Some days, it was pretty exciting up here," he said, recalling one day when park avalanche technicians advised workers to get off the road because of increasingly dangerous conditions. The crew followed that advice as if it came from the Gospel.

"We came back and there was 20 feet of snow over the road right here where we were working," Schnaderbeck said.

The current work schedule calls for installing a temporary bridge over the biggest gap in the road within the next two weeks. Putting it in earlier would slow down work above the bridge.

"We're estimating it will take about six days to put it all together," he said of the bridge.

Paving will be carried out in the last week of June, and "we're still looking at opening on or about July 1."

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com