End is near on alpine road work

After several years of traffic jams, opening delays, dust and jackhammers, the end is near for work in the alpine areas of the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park.

Park landscape architect Jack Gordon said work on the higher elevation portions of the highway should be completed by the summer of 2013.

“We can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Gordon said last week.

The road has seen more than $110 million of work to date, and the complete job is estimated to cost $135 million.

Currently crews are working in two sections of the highway — between Avalanche Creek and the Logan Pit and between Haystack Creek and Big Bend. That work will continue this summer and into next summer.

Last summer, crews and subcontractors with HK Construction finished up the section between Big Bend and Siyeh Bend and the section between the Logan Pit and the West Side Tunnel.

The alpine sections are the most challenging because the road is extremely narrow, there’s a lot of hand-worked masonry and the construction season is short because of the weather.

Crews are scheduled to begin work between Siyeh Bend and Rose Creek from the spring of 2013 through 2014. The plan is to finish up the east side of the Sun Road from Rose Creek to St. Mary in 2014.

Then in 2015 to 2016, work is expected to begin on the final leg of the project, from West Glacier to Avalanche Creek. That work is predicated on National Park Service funding, but the Federal Highway Administration is proceeding with planning as if it will become a reality.

Congress has yet to pass a long-term highway funding bill, but Sen. Max Baucus in recent weeks stumped hard for a bill that would allocate about $1 billion for projects on federal lands, which would include the Sun Road.

The hope is to have the road reconstruction completed by 2016 — the National Park Service’s 100th anniversary, Park assistant superintendent Kym Hall said.

West Glacier businesswoman Sally Thompson suggested Glacier Park build a bike path along the highway from West Glacier to Avalanche Campground, but Park officials noted that wasn’t likely to happen.

The highway is a National Historic Landmark and adding a bike lane would change the historic character of the road. Even painting fog lines on the road hasn’t been done because they didn’t exist when the Sun Road was originally built, Hall noted.