Sun Road work going full bore

By CHRIS PETERSON / Hungry Horse News

The asphalt is gone. There are big holes where culverts are being replaced. Rock walls are missing as others are being rebuilt. And a big crane holding a six-foot drill is boring into its walls.

Those are just some of the reasons why folks can't access the alpine section of the west side of the Going-to-the-Sun Road by foot, car or bicycle this fall. It's truly a work zone.

The job, from the West Side Tunnel to Haystack Creek, has been underway since this summer when H-K Contractors of Post Falls, Idaho, was awarded a multi-million dollar contract to repair the alpine section of the storied highway.

While the job began this summer, since the road was shut down to vehicle traffic this fall, work has really progressed in earnest.

Above the Loop subcontractor Jensen Drilling has been putting rock bolts into the sheer cliff face. The operation uses a crane perched on the highway, holding a basket containing a large drill.

The drill bores holes into the cliff face and then the holes are grouted and large bolts are fastened into the rock.

The idea is to stabilize the face to reduce the risk of rock fall on motorists below. The operation isn't foolproof, however. Sometimes when crews are drilling, the face itself will begin to pull off the wall. They then have to scale big chunks of cliff away or it will fall on its own.

A materiel called Shotcrete is also being used to hold rocks in place. It's the same color as the gray stone, though later crews will actually use dyes to make it blend in even better.

It's dangerous work. The crane is perched on the highway and below it there are drop-offs that fall hundreds of feet straight down.

Crews are also working on the Sun Highway's historic rock walls as well. Subcontractor Anderson Masonry, based in Kalispell, is dismantling and rebuilding the Sun Highway's stone walls, piece by piece.

Crews photograph the walls, dismantle them, number each rock that can be salvaged and then through the photographic record and the numbers, put them back together again, using modern mortar techniques, masons Mike Bercier and Dustin Winter explained.

Bercier is a fourth-generation mason.

Rocks that can't be reused, he noted, are replaced by replicas, many of which have been salvaged from the Park. A few years back there was a big slide that went across the road at Haystack Creek. Those rocks were salvaged, Bercier noted, and he spent about three months shaping them — using a variety of hand and power tools — into usable blocks for the walls.

On an average day, masons can build about 27 feet of new wall.

The footers to the original walls are also completely rebuilt, using a variety of concrete reinforcement methods.

Crews will work until the weather shuts them down. Usually in November, the Sun Road sees significant amounts of snow.

Until then they're taking advantage of every sunny, and even rainy, day they get. So far, snow level has been staying above 6,000 feet or so, making life fairly pleasant.

All told, complete reconstruction of the highway is estimated to cost about $140 to $170 million for the entire job over an 8- to 10-year period.