Glacier Park's Sperry Chalet expected to reopen by 2020
A helicopter from Minuteman Aviation drops off and picks up supplies at Sperry Chalet last fall. (Chris Peterson photo)
The plan is to have Sperry Chalet open to the public by the summer of 2020, National Park Service officials told contractors and the public interested in the project on Wednesday at a meeting in Kalispell.
The contract for phase II of reconstruction of the main dormitory of the chalet complex is expected to be advertised on the federal business opportunity website in the coming weeks.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime project in my opinion,” Daniel Lawson of the Park Service’s Denver Service Center said.
The first phase of the project, which included a new foundation, the buildings superstructure and the basic floors and roof was completed last year by crews from Dick Anderson Construction of Great Falls.
The chalet was gutted by the Sprague wildfire in 2017. All that remained after the fire was the chimneys and the stone walls. Built in 1913 by the Great Northern Railroad, the chalet is a national historic landmark.
The Park Service decided to rebuild the chalet after significant public support.
Architect Liz Hallas of Anderson Hallas Architects said the floor layout will be very similar to the original chalet, with 18 guest rooms, two open lobbies and three rooms for the crew as well as other rooms for storage and supplies.
The stairwells and other features will be brought up to modern codes.
One the big aspects of the next phase of work will be cleaning and rehabilitating the stone masonry. Right now, internal walls are holding up the roof. But once the masonry is cleaned and the mortar is restored, the walls will be removed, revealing the stone walls as they were in the old chalet. The roof will then rest on the walls. The Park will allow quarrying of rock from a nearby talus slope that was originally used to build the chalet.
The total cost of the project is more than $12 million, including insurance money.
Work is expected to start July 1 and run through September and possibly into October. Last year crews got a temporary roof on in the nick of time, as Sperry saw its first snow in later September.