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This summer, many of you have probably stayed a bit closer to home to avoid airline hassles and high gasoline prices. But if you're still planning a vacation, and a national park is on your agenda, you might head up to Glacier National Park in Montana.
This year, the park is celebrating the opening of the main road that runs through the park. The Going-to-the-Sun Road is a 50-mile, two-lane highway that was finished in 1933. Over the years, it's been called one of the most beautiful roads in the national park system.
The road provides an awe-inspiring drive through the upper elevations of the national park. There's incredible scenery, and wildlife sightings are around every corner.
The road itself, by today's standards, is narrow and nerve-racking in places. After all, it's now 75 years old.
"It's amazing when you travel on the road, because it's just literally cut right out of the side of the mountain," said Bill Schustrom, a Glacier National Park interpreter.
Because of the difficulty in building the road, it has earned several accolades. It was designated as a national historic landmark a few years ago, and it's also a national civil engineering landmark.
Construction began on the road in the early 1920s. It was extreme, dangerous work cumbered by deep snow and huge boulders. Workers used horses to drag various pieces of equipment up the mountainside.
Schustrom met several of the men who helped build the road. "They also shared with me the fact that the initial construction was basically done by hand. It was pick-and-shovel work, drilling holes by hand into that rock," he said.
This summer, the park celebrated the 75th anniversary of the road with a big ceremony attended by several hundred people.
"It's important for us to keep the Going-to-the-Sun Road for a lot of reasons, and it's really not a road, but it's a journey. It's a journey of not going through the park, but a journey that honors the best attributes and the qualities of what it means to be a human being and enjoy the outdoors," said Montana Sen. Max Baucus.
The Going-to-the-Sun Road opened a beautiful area to millions of people through the years. Now, it is undergoing a massive rehabilitation to make it wider and repair areas that have deteriorated.
"We're involved now in a very long-term process of refurbishing the road, bringing it back up to current standards that we have today," Schustrom said.
The refurbishing project will last for the next six or seven years and will cost at least $250 million. Compare that to the original cost of the road 75 years ago: under $3 million.
E-mail: kmccord@ksl.com
