Glacier's Highline Trail gets a facelift

The Highline Trail, one of the most popular trails in Glacier National Park, has received some upgrades over the past week. The trail is more than 30 miles long, but has the most traffic on the first quarter mile from Logan Pass.

"It gets so popular the sides of the trail become degraded," Clifford Kipp, regional director of MCC Northern Rockies, said.

The $40,000 project was split by the Glacier National Park Conservancy and the National Park Service's centennial match cost share fund.

A crew from the Montana Conservation Corps worked with the Park trail workers to rehabilitate the trail. Upgrades included building check dams to prevent erosion, fixing signs at the trailhead, and moving boulders to create a trail barrier and provide sitting areas. The work is above and beyond the Park's routine maintenance of the trail.

Part of the reason for moving the boulders is to form a corridor to keep people on the trail, Andrea Alvarez, MCC crew leader, said. The ultimate goal is to have a consistent width of the trail without it bottle necking or becoming too wide. The boulders take three to four people to move them.

At the trailhead is a section where the trail is more than 10 feet wide. Several large puddles of water force hikers off the trail if they don't want to get wet feet. Fixing this section is part of a later project, RJ Devitt, park trail crew leader, said. It is more involved than the MCC crew has time for during the 10 days.

The checks are installed to fix where the trail has become eroded into a "v" shape. A log is placed perpendicular to the trail to hold the dirt in place. Gravel and dirt is placed on top of the log to conceal it and raise the trail up to its original position.

"When erosion does happen, and when drainage does happen, it won't bring the gravel past where the bar is," Alvarez said. "The most important thing is just to preserve the trail,"

The crew installed six checks along a downhill section of the trail. The logs are salvaged from larch and Douglas fir trees that had fallen over in the Lake McDonald area.

The key to trail work is "getting the water off and keeping the dirt on," Devitt said.

The crew had to contend with lots of hikers along that part of the trail since it was less than a quarter mile from the trailhead.

"People walk from the trailhead down to that Rim Rock section ... and then they walk back, and you can see the impact of that in certain areas up here and that's why we're focusing on this first part," Devitt said.

If the MCC crew finishes the project work early, they will also help out the Park crew by replacing the hand-line long Rim Rocks, Devitt said. It is a portion of the trail that has a hundred foot drop down to the Going-to-the-Sun Road. They also plan to separate the cable into more than one section, adding anchors along the rock wall.