Constructed from 1921-1932, the Sun Road is considered one of the engineering marvels of the 20^th Century. The majority of the alpine section is carved out of solid rock, and there are 8 rock bridges along the way. You can see a photo of the Triple Arches in one my earlier posts.

It takes almost 4 weeks to plow the ~50-mile road every spring, even with equipment that can move up to 4,000 tons of snow per hour. Crews sometimes only clear 500 feet of road per day. At Logan Pass, the highest point of the road at 6,646′, there can be up to 80-feet-high snow drifts. 

The area across the Continental Divide is known as the “Big Drift”. Because of the heavy snow, the road is usually only open during July and August, plus a few day in June and September. Click here for some photos of the road plowing process.

In 1917, National Park Service director Stephen Mather started to make plans for an auto road to connect the east and west sides of the park. Chief engineer George Goodwin originally proposed a series of switchbacks that would gradually climb the mountains and eventually cross the Continental Divide at Logan Pass. However, landscape architect Thomas Chalmers Vint thought that would create irreparable scars on the landscape, and proposed a different idea: one road, carved into the side of the Garden Wall, that gradually climbed the mountain. He thought this would blend in with the landscape and protect the relatively-new National Park Service’s reputation as a conservation agency. The road would only have one major switchback on each side of the Divide. Mather agreed, and chose Vint’s plan, though it was more expensive.

Throughout construction, various teams were used, all with the directive of preserving as much of the natural landscape as possible. A team of Russian stonemasons used rock scraps from the blasting to build multiple stone bridges and archways, and even covered the culverts with decorative rock that blended in with the landscape. The stone guardrails were the first of their kind, and now are the primary style used in all US national parks. Construction of the Going to the Sun Road began in 1921, and the road opened fully in 1933, costing $2.5 million to build. The road is named after Going-to-the-Sun Mountain on the east side, which is named after an early Blackfeet legend.