Fifteen Switchbacks

This road was fought over twice, once with dynamite and once with telegrams, and only the telegrams got personal. Look at the ground they had to work with. Rock stood on end, and a creek far down in the bottom of it. George Goodwin was the Park Service's chief engineer, and for eight years the road over Logan Pass was his. His line was direct and it was cheap. It ran up Logan Creek and looped back to the pass, climbing the way a mountain road climbed in those days, back and forth, back and forth. Then Stephen Mather, who ran the Park Service, gave the plans to his landscape engineer, Thomas Vint. As Vint remembered it, that route had fifteen switchbacks, looking like miners had been in there. He talked Mather into walking the ground with the two of them, and he proposed a longer way around, with one switchback. One. Goodwin stood on his pride. There is nobody in the United States, he told them, that knows as much about road-building in mountains as I do. Mather's mind may have been made up on the spot. He brought in the Bureau of Public Roads, and late in the summer of nineteen twenty-four Frank Kittredge came through the pass to run a new line. His men climbed twelve hundred to three thousand feet every morning just to reach the work. Goodwin kept redrawing his own route the whole while, trying to get his road back. That next May, Vint stood up on the new line himself, with footholds carved in the frozen snow to keep him there. In the summer of nineteen twenty-five the contractors moved in on the new line. On the sixth of July, Goodwin wired Mather. Taking that survey away, he wrote, was an unwarranted reflection upon my professional work. He said he might take it to the Interior Secretary, or the public. And somewhere in there he asked whether he should carry on, or be relieved of further duty. Goodwin swore later that was never a resignation. Mather took it as one, and Bert Burrell had his job. The government's own history of this road calls George Goodwin the first casualty. The road went on without him, and it went on rough. On the cliffs just east of The Loop, a blasting crew drilled holes the contract forbade, big enough to hold a man. They spent a week packing in eighty boxes of dynamite and more than twelve tons of black powder, with wool socks pulled over their boots against a spark. One government man said it looked to be half of a mountain, slowly rising, crumbling, moving out and dropping away. They built it the way Vint wanted, with The Loop for its major switchback. Every time I come through here, I look for the other road. Fifteen hairpins stacked up Logan Creek in the thin air, as Vint remembered them. One man drives it, and he knows more about it than anyone in the United States.