Glacier National Park plows at the Big Drift - Logan Pass parking lot cleared

Glacier Park plow crews were clearing out the Logan Pass parking lot and making the first cuts into the Big Drift Friday on the Going-to-the-Sun Road.

The Big Drift is a massive drift of snow that covers the highway just east of Logan Pass. This year it’s about 70 to 90 feet deep. It usually takes about a week to get through it and is the last big obstacle in clearing the highway each spring.

The Logan Pass parking lot had about two to three feet of snow in it and was being cleared by a rotary plow that can move about 4,000 tons an hour.

Park plow crew foreman Stan Stahr said this year’s clearing has been “about average.”

The crews were delayed about a week in May due to a storm, he noted. Crews had just gotten through the Triple Arches area when slides hit about three minutes later, said park avalanche specialist Jake Hutchison.

The slides buried the Triple Arches and they had to start all over again.

But even that is pretty typical, Stahr noted.

Hutchison said the Triple Arches slides aside, the park hasn’t seen big wet-slab avalanches like it has in past years. The big slides can wreak havoc on the road, tearing out walls and tearing away the road itself.

Crews are also busy putting up removal guard rails. The Park has gone to the rails in more and more alpine sections of the road. They have an advantage because they can unbolt them in the fall, store them in a location safe from avalanches and then put them back up in the spring. It helps save the road from harm, but it’s also a labor intensive process.

The road has nine sections of removable timber rails, with 430 timbers that are taken on and off each year.

Park staff made no predictions on when the road would open to vehicle traffic. The weather at the beginning of next week could throw a curve ball. Rains of up to 2 inches could come to Glacier, with snow in the higher terrain, the National Weather Service is warning.

Right now, most of the avalanche chutes have slid, Hutchison noted. He said over the course of the past three weeks, about 15 to 20 feet of snow has melted. This year saw a higher than average snowpack — about 130 to 140 percent of average.

Motorists can drive as far as Avalanche Creek on the west side and Jackson Glacier Overlook on the east side.

All of Glacier’s secondary roads are now open as well.