They hold back millions of gallons of water, take us to breathtakingly scenic vistas and helped establish the Flathead Valley as the economic center of Northwest Montana.
They are some of the region’s most amazing engineering feats and even though some were built more than a century ago, these infrastructure wonders still serve us today, providing water, electricity and transportation to the masses. Today, these projects – the Going-to-the-Sun Road, Hungry Horse Dam and the Great Northern Railway – stand as sentinels to a time when people tackled massive undertakings and accomplished amazing things.
The Going-to-the Sun Road
Millions of people travel the 53 miles of the Going-to-the-Sun Road every year and many of them are probably too awe struck by the surrounding scenery to truly appreciate the wonder below their tires. But just because the road is not as old as those glacier-carved peaks in the distance does not make it any less spectacular.
As soon as Glacier National Park was created, people wanted a trans-mountain road to access its scenic wonders. In 1918, the National Park Service’s first engineer drafted a route through the park and in 1921 Congress appropriated $100,000 to begin construction. The route followed much the same path the road does today with one major exception – instead of a long, steady climb from The Loop to Logan Pass, engineer George Goodwin proposed 15 switchbacks to clear the western slope of Logan Pass. Goodwin was overruled and today, there is only one switchback at The Loop, where the road begins a 6 percent climb to Logan Pass. The precise percentage was selected because that was the maximum recommended grade for an automobile of that time before it had to shift into second gear.
Construction lasted throughout the 1920s and was completed in the fall of 1932. The final price tag was more than $2 million, which today would be more than $32 million. The road included two tunnels, one near The Loop and another just east of Logan Pass. In order to blend the road into the landscape, designers and engineers used rock that was excavated nearby to build retaining walls.
But the construction did not come without a high cost. Three people were killed while building the road.
The end result of that blood, sweat and tears was the birth of one of America’s most iconic highways. In the years since its construction, the road has been designated a National Historic Landmark and Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. A few years ago, Esquire Magazine included driving the road on the list of things every person should do before they die.
The Hungry Horse Dam
The Hungry Horse Dam was a beacon of the greatest technology the nation could create when it was completed in 1953. But its construction had much humbler beginnings. Nearly a decade earlier, in 1945, workers began to clear the forest that would eventually become the Hungry Horse Reservoir by dragging two massive 4.5-ton steel balls behind tractors and knocking down whatever stood in the way.
The idea for a dam on the South Fork of the Flathead River dates back to the 1920s, but it wasn’t seriously considered until the 1940s when the country needed electricity for the war effort. In 1945, contractors began to clear 20,000 acres of land along the river to hold the reservoir and three years later the General-Shea-Morrison Company of Seattle began building the dam and powerhouse. The dam was completed in October 1952 and President Harry Truman flipped the switch to start the powerhouse.
The statistics and numbers that surround the structure are staggering: 3 million cubic yards of concrete in a dam that is 564 feet high and 2,000 feet long and holding back 1.2 trillion gallons of water. When it was completed, the dam was the third largest in the world and today its “morning-glory spillway,” where water drops in from the reservoir, is still the tallest on earth.
The dam permanently changed the region’s landscape but it also helped power the post-war boom in the United States. Today, it produces enough electricity to power 270,000 homes.
The Great Northern Railway
Everyday, mile-long trains weighing thousands of tons cross the Continental Divide near Marias Pass on BNSF Railway’s critical route from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest. But the battle of freight trains versus gravity pales in comparison to the challenge it required to find Marias Pass in the first place. Its discovery, years after other cross-country railroads had been designed and constructed, is why the Great Northern Railway’s route across Montana was among the best built during the 19th Century.
Settlers and railroad builders had known for years that there was a lower and easier route across the Rockies, but as noted in C.W. Guthrie’s book “All Aboard for Glacier,” it went undiscovered until the late 1800s. One reason, according to historians, was that the Blackfeet Indians closely guarded the pass and never allowed outsiders near it. But another is political. In 1853, when Congress allotted $150,000 to the War Department to survey four railroad routes west, Isaac I. Stevens led the charge to find a route across the northern part of the country. When his men found what appeared to be Marias Pass’ eastern approach they reported back to Stevens, but by then Secretary of War Jefferson Davis (who later was president of the Confederate States of America) ordered them to stop exploring the northern route at once because he preferred another one that would benefit the South.
Thirty-five years later, James J. Hill’s Great Northern was rapidly expanding across Montana and he sent legendary railroad engineer John F. Stevens to finally find the pass in December 1889. By studying primitive maps, incomplete engineering reports and stories he had heard from local natives, as well as a little bit of luck, Stevens found the pass that winter. However, before he could go back to Hill, he spent a frigid night at the summit, an evening so cold that he did not even dare to sleep. Instead, he built a fire and paced around it until dawn.
Rails were laid across the pass the following year. Because the summit of Marias Pass topped out at 5,213-feet, it meant the Great Northern had the easiest grades of any railroad in the west. In 1891, the rails reached Kalispell and the city became a hub and the economic center of Northwest Montana. For his contribution, a statue of Stevens was erected at the summit of Marias Pass. But finding Marias Pass was not his only accomplishment. Stevens went on to design other railroads and was even the chief engineer on the Panama Canal project. In March 1925, he was given the John Fritz medal, the highest honor in American engineering.