Sun Road has a lot of snow up high
Hungry Horse News
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK - How dangerous is plowing the Sun Road? Just ask Shawn Bessinger. Bessinger was operating a bulldozer last Wednesday on the highway when he just a little too far out on what's known as "borrowed" snow-snow that built up from the plowing process at Rimrock.
Next thing he knew his dozer was sliding down the slope.
Fortunately, it stopped about 75 feet down the hillside and didn't tumble. His crew workers threw him a rope and helped him up, but it took the better part of Thursday to get the dozer back on the highway, using a system of winches to drag it back onto the road surface.
Bessinger was back at it on Friday, clearing snow from the Rimrock area again.
All in a day's work.
"As an operator it's not a great feeling," when your equipment goes over the edge, said Lou Summerfield, park roads and fleet facilities manager.
Summerfield said that while plows may be ahead of schedule, it's still too early to predict an opening of the road. Above the 6,000-foot level, there's still plenty of snow in the mountains, which means there's still plenty of snow up above the road just waiting to come down.
While the park today uses things like remote weather stations to track the weather, the best indicator of when the avalanche activity will subside is way across the valley on the dished slopes of Heaven's Peak.
When Heaven's Peak's snowload stops cracking and sloughing off, then the avalanche activity above the road is said to subside as well. As of this week, Heaven's Peak was still snow loaded and looking grumpy.
Even so, significant progress is still being made. Plows on the east side are at the Big Drift and West Side plows are at Logan Pass. The Big Drift is a huge drift of snow just east of Logan Pass. Punching through that is usually the last step in opening the highway.
Crews will probably have to either blast or knock a cornice off the drift before they can proceed with punching through it. The drift is 45 feet deep this year. Some years it's 100 feet deep.
Crews plow four days a week, but the park currently has shifts on seven days a week getting the road ready to open.
Summerfield cautioned that while progress is going well, crews have been this high this early before and the road hasn't opened until three weeks later.
May can be extremely unpredictable and this week's forecast bears that out. Snow is in the forecast at higher elevations through the weekend and fresh snow on top of a settled base spells avalanche danger.
Down low, however, the road is a different story. Because higher elevations have stayed relatively cool, the Sun Road is dry and free of debris for hikers and bikers to at least Big Bend on the west side and folks can drive to Jackson Glacier Overlook on the east side.
In a normal year, the weather warms up, melts the snow, and the road at times can have a torrent of water running down it. Not so this year. Late last week, the Weeping Wall section, known for its cascade of water, was barely a fall at all.