The Long Opening of Going-to-the-Sun Road

Snow sits on the blacktop at the closed gate on the west side of Going-to-the-Sun Road. In summer this is the busiest stretch of road in Glacier National Park, cars stacked on the switchbacks, the descent hot with the smell of brakes. In spring the gate is down, and there is nothing past it but pavement running under a white drift that has not been touched since November. The same gate stands on the east side, at St. Mary, and between the two gates lies the whole length of the crossing.

The road was completed in 1932, and from the first it had a strange relationship with winter. It climbs from cedar and hemlock on the west side, crosses the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, and falls toward the plains on the east — fifty miles of road cut into mountainsides that have never agreed to hold a road. It was a marvel to finish. It is a marvel to reopen. The forest does not claim it back. The snow does.

The Road That Winter Takes

Snow begins on the pass early, while the valley below still holds the color of October larch. By the new year the upper road is buried under drifts that grow with every storm that crosses the Divide. The wind packs the snow into one surface. The sun glazes it. The yellow line, the guardrails, the pullouts, the signs — all of it sits under a depth of snow measured the way you measure a building. And the mountain, all winter, decides when it will let go.

The work of reopening starts at the bottom, where the valley warms first. The lower road clears itself, black showing through in long wet patches. The crews come up from the maintenance shop and work the stretches that have already given up their snow. It is easy work, the kind any Montana plow crew does in a normal winter. Everyone knows where the easy work ends.

It ends at the switchbacks. It ends where the road is a shelf cut into the rock, cliff above and fall below. It ends at the deep cuts, where the snow has settled all winter into something like concrete, and the plows have to chew through foot by foot and throw the spoil over the side into the valley.

The crews run heavy loaders with snow blowers mounted in front — machines that eat into a wall of white and fling it out over the edge. They work in pairs, one cutting, one spreading. Behind them the pavement appears in sections, a few feet at a time, and the snow stands so high on both sides that a machine drives through a white corridor with the sky straight overhead.

In the weeks before the pass is reached, the mountain is quieter than it will be all year. No engines. No horns from the switchbacks. The only sound is water — the melt running in ditches under the snow, creeks filling to the top of their banks. The road, in that time, belongs to the animals that cross it without knowing it is a road.

The pace is set by danger. Avalanche paths cross the road in a dozen places, and a snow load that has hung all winter can come down in seconds. The crews watch the chutes. When a slope has loaded itself past safe, they bring it down deliberately — explosives set so the road is empty and the snow falls where it can do no harm. This is not the dramatic part of the work. It is the part that decides whether the rest can happen.

The Weeks of the Plow

Nobody drives the road while this is happening. The gate stays down. Hikers walk the lower stretches, where the closed road is a quiet footpath with pavement hiding under the dirt left by melt. But the full crossing — west side to east side — stays shut until the pass is reached.

Logan Pass is not a peak but a saddle, the place where the road crosses the Continental Divide at the top of the climb. In winter it holds the deepest snow on the route, and it is the last place cleared. The crews work toward it from both sides. In some years the west side reaches it first; in others, the east. The final cut is always the same. The machines come up from whichever direction found a way, and the last wall of snow between the two sides comes down in a single pass.

The snow moved in one spring at Logan Pass would fill a small town. Most of it is thrown over the side and falls into the valleys below in chunks the size of cars. Some of it melts where it sits, blackening the fresh pavement with gravel the plows have picked up from under the snow. In the days after the crossing is made, the graders come through again and scrape the road clean.

The weather decides the calendar. A warm stretch softens the snow; a cold snap sets it up again. The crews do not work to a date. They work to conditions, and the only honest answer to when the road will open is: when the mountain allows it.

Then the road is open — not to the public, not yet, but open. The crossing holds from one side of the park to the other.

The Summer on the Pass

When the road finally opens for the season, the snow banks along it stand taller than a truck. The white walls run for miles on both sides of the pavement. Travelers who drive the road in July park at the pass and walk into snowbanks that will not melt until August. One step takes a person from a summer afternoon on hot blacktop to a winter morning that has been waiting all year.

The wildflowers do not wait for the snow to leave. They grow at its edge. Glacier lilies come up through the melt; beargrass covers the slopes above the road in white plumes. The meadows at the pass are green and running with meltwater long before the highest drifts give up. The whole high country lives on the snow's schedule, and the road lives on it too.

By midsummer the walls are gone. The cuts show gray rock, walls the drills worked in 1932. The Weeping Wall sends water across the pavement. The switchbacks are crowded. And by September the first snow dusts the pass, and the cycle begins again. The crews have opened the same road for the better part of a century. They know every cut, every chute, every place the snow hangs longest. Every spring they do it again, because the road is there, and the summer is coming, and the two have to meet.

Glacier National Park