Rock falls off Sun Road and crushes construction trailer

Hungry Horse News

No one was injured, but a rock fell off the face of the Going-to-the-Sun Road last Friday and crushed a trailer owned by a contractor working on the road.

The 10,000 pound rock came off the face directly above the trailer at Triple Arches. The damage wasn't as bad as it looked, said Zack Anderson of Anderson Masonry.

He said most of the tools in the trailer were salvaged. The trailer, however, was in rough shape, to say the least. The rock had caved it in.

Anderson and crew from Sandry construction were able to use a crane and other equipment to move the rock.

This isn't the first big rock to come off the mountainside onto the road this spring. The Park earlier this month closed the alpine section of the road for about a week because of rocks falling onto the highway.

Some of them were big enough that they had to be blasted off the road. Last year basketball-sized rocks fell off the highway and hit a Porsche traveling on the roadway, injuring the driver when they went through the cab of the vehicle.

Anderson Masonry of Bigfork is doing most of the decorative and stabilized stone work on the highway projects as a subcontractor to Morgen and Oswood of Great Falls.

The two main points where construction is taking place this summer are the Triple Arches and the West Side tunnel.

The construction is designed to shore up the structural integrity of the highway in those sections - anchoring it the mountainside using huge steel beams along with grout injected into seams in the bedrock.