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Building a retaining wall near Granite Creek National Park Service photograph, circa 1927 |
DESIGNING THE ROAD
The Going-to-the-Sun Road crosses Glacier National Park through Logan Pass. Various surveys in the 1910s proposed several different passes for the road, including Swiftcurrent Pass and Gunsight Pass. Other roads were proposed as well. One surveyor planned a road com.pletely around Lake McDonald. Another surveyor suggested a road from West Glacier, along the western shore of Lake McDonald, and up to Waterton Lake. Lrom that main corridor, roads could spur to the left and to the right to reach almost every part of Glacier National Park.
In 1918, the first National Park Service engineer, George Goodwin, planned a route that became the guideline for transmountain road con.struction in the early 1920s. Goodwin's proposal was very similar to the current road except that it made a steep climb up Logan Creek using 15 switchbacks before reaching the Continental Divide at Logan Pass.
During the early 1920s Congress provided annual appropri ations of $100,000 for construction of the "Transmountain Highway," as the Going-to-the-Sun Road was first called. With this money, the park signed contracts to begin construction at both ends of the road. In 1924 Glacier's appropriation increased to $1,000,000 for a three-year road construction program.
Map of the Going-to-the-Sun Road Drawn by Tajda Ivanisevic, Historic American Engineering |
Frank A. Kittredge of the Bureau of Public Roads directed the survey of 1924. The project, which mapped out 21 miles over the Continental Divide, started in September, and Kittredge raced to finish the survey before winter closed in. Kittredge and his team of 32 men often climbed 3000 feet each morning to get to survey sites. The crew walked along narrow ledges and hung over cliffs by ropes to take many of the measurements. The work was too challenging for some, and Kittredge's crew suffered from a 300 percent labor turnover in the three months of the survey.
Glacier National Park officials and Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, were extremely impressed with the work of Kittredge and the Bureau of Public Roads. In 1925, as a result of the Bureau's work on the Going-to-the-Sun Road, Mather signed an agreement with the Bureau to supervise road construction in all National Parks.
Although the Bureau of Public Roads provided the road building expertise, National Park Service landscape architects together with the Bureau's engineers created the specifications for the road, working to blend the road into the surrounding environment. They insisted that the bridges, retain.ing walls, and guardrails be made of native materi.als. Most of the structures along the road used rock excavated from the adjacent mountainsides during construction. Another concern was with construc.tion methods. Contractors were required to use numerous small blasts of explosives, since large blasts would cause more destruction to the landscape. It was even recommended that power shov.els are excluded from construction, but since the expense of a road built exclusively with hand labor was too great, they were allowed to be used.
| Introduction | Acadia | Blue Ridge Parkway | Chickamauga and Chattanooga | Colonial Parkway | Generals Highway | George Washington Memorial Parkway | Going-to-the-Sun Road | Great Smoky Mountains | Mount Rainier | Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway | Shenandoah's Skyline Drive | Southwest Circle Tour | Vicksburg | Yellowstone | Yosemite |
