Inside Road will see work this summer
Three mule deer in a row, walking down the Inside North Fork Road in Glacier National Park last week.
Glacier National Park’s Inside North Fork Road will see work this summer, but it won’t be open to motor vehicles for its entire length.
The park will re-route the road at “Lover’s Leap” where the bank of the North Fork of the Flathead has eroded away the roadbed this summer, North Fork District Ranger Jim Dahlstrom said at the North Fork Interlocal meeting last week.
It also plans to put in new culverts at Logging Creek. The creek jumped its banks a few years ago and now has several channels outside of the bridge. At high water, it floods portions of the motor campground at Logging Creek.
But the road still needs work at Anaconda Creek, where it also has jumped its banks and now braids in multiple channels.
Dahlstrom said that won’t see a fix this year, though by late summer, the road couple be open as far as the creek. Last summer the road was made passable in the event of an emergency, so residents living in the North Fork could get out if the regular North Fork Road was cut off.
Longtime North Forker Lynn Ogle expressed skepticism that the park would ever fully open the Inside Road to motor vehicles. It’s been closed from Camas Creek to Logging Creek for years, though it is still open to hikers and bikers.
The road is one of the oldest in the park and runs from Apgar to Kintla Lake.
As an aside, Dahlstrom said the wooden beams on the bridge over the North Fork to the ranger station — the “Polebridge” — would be replaced this year as well.