Righting a Sun Road wrong

Wall that went unfinished for more than 20 years now fits

By CHRIS PETERSON

Hungry Horse News

Without tourist traffic in the way, work is humming along on the Going-to-the-Sun Road. Crews last week were putting down fresh pavement below Haystack Creek. Massive culverts were being installed above Big Bend. Large slumps were being dug out and replaced with stabilized layers of rock and roadbed material.

And in all of this, a historic wrong was righted. Subcontracting crews from Anderson Masonry are finishing up a spectacular stone wall at Triple Arches that has sat idle and unfinished for more than 22 years.

The incomplete wall has been an eyesore for two decades. Now it finally looks like it fits the landscape.

The story starts in 1987 when the Sun Road developed a crack in the original wall.

Bob Dunkley was the landscape architect for the Park at the time. Contacted last week, he recalled that the historic stone retaining wall just east of the arches was beginning to fail — it had a large crack in it — so an environmental assessment was done and the preferred alternative was to pour another concrete wall in front of the historic wall.

That's right. Cover the entire historic wall up, top to bottom.

Dunkley admits that wouldn't happen today. But at the time, it was a fix that worked and it was affordable.

"We didn't know as much about the historic resources (of the road)," he said.

So contractors poured the wall and made it taller than the rest of the guardwall that existed on the road.

Why?

Dunkley explained that at the time, the federal Highway Administration was looking to enforce a new standard for guardwalls on the road. In short, it wanted the guardwalls along the road to meet their crash standards. A spat ensued. The Park Service was worried about history. The Highway Administration about safety. Their relationship dates back to when the road was first constructed. The Park Service says what it wants from a road, but federal Highways oversees the contracting, at least some of the design and construction.

To settle the wall dispute, in 1996, the Park Service had rock sent down to a crash test facility in San Antonio, Texas and they built a lower wall — the wall that matched the historic walls — and then crashed vehicles into it.

At 35 mph the wall passed. (Though from those crash tests, the Park would put restrictions on oversized vehicles, like RVs — those didn't pass).

The Park Service had won. Any reconstruction from there on out, would match the historic wall. But there was the problem with this concrete wall that now sat big and ugly at Triple Arches. Dunkley noted that Park masons tried to put a facade on it. But the stone didn't match and the masons, who weren't professionals, but seasonal employees, couldn't make it look right. They also ran out of money and had a hard time finding source rock. At the time, there were no local quarry supplies and they had to scrounge rock out of Park avalanche chutes to make masonry repairs on the road.

Work was stopped and the wall sat idle for 22 years, until this summer, when the Park, armed with stimulus funding dollars, made the wall right.

First, crews tore off the old facade and cut the concrete wall down so it matched the rest of the road. The old concrete wall was so high, said Jack Gordon, Glacier's current landscape architect, that someone in a subcompact car would barely see over it — they'd never see the Triple Arches.

After the wall was cut down, a completely new face was built by Anderson, matching the stone to the surrounding cliffs. Finally, the wall fits.

Making things fit the landscape and still be functional are now the norm on the Sun Road, Gordon notes. That spat between the Park Service and the federal Highway Administration 20-plus years ago may have been acrimonious at times, but it also opened lines of communication, he said.

Now the Park Service and federal Highways work closely together on the Sun Road. On a tour of the construction last week, crews were in constant contact with Gordon, working out kinks in the project, asking opinions, making sure things were right, not just from a construction standpoint, but from an aesthetic standpoint.

It's more than just rebuilding a road, it's paying homage to history, Gordon noted. Guardrails fit the landscape. Colors match the landscape. And the alpine section of the road is beginning to take the shape and form it had when it was finished in 1932.