Going-to-the-Sun Road: Eleven Years, Two Thousand Workers, No Markers for the Dead

The engineers said it could not be done. The terrain above Lake McDonald, where the cliff face of the Garden Wall drops nearly vertically toward the road corridor below, was declared impassable by at least two early survey teams. The grades were too steep, the ledges too narrow, the exposure too lethal for the construction methods of the era. The surveys were filed and the problem was set aside.

It was not set aside for long. Between nineteen twenty-one and nineteen thirty-two, more than two thousand men built Going-to-the-Sun Road through fifty miles of terrain the engineers had given up on. They were a workforce assembled from the wreckage of the postwar economy and the early years of the Depression: Blackfeet tribal members who needed wages after decades of reservation poverty, European immigrant laborers brought in for their experience with dynamite and hard rock, and local unemployed men who would take whatever work existed. They worked without systematic safety equipment. They drilled by hand into cliff faces. They set charges in ledges above drops that would kill a man before he hit the bottom. Some were suspended from ropes to clear rock faces too steep to scaffold.

The switchback you are passing through right now, the bend called The Loop, is one of the points where the construction foremen had to solve the problem of how to build a road around a cliff that should not have a road on it. The workers who solved it are not named on any plaque at this overlook.

The total number of workers who died building Going-to-the-Sun Road is not established in the public record. That gap is honest and it is documented. The Glacier National Park Conservancy and the National Park Service both acknowledge it: the construction records are incomplete, the labor rosters imperfect, and the casualty accounting was never systematically maintained. Men died here. How many, and who they were, is not fully known.

The road they built was designated a National Historic Landmark. It is celebrated in park brochures as one of the most dramatic roads in the Americas. The workers who blasted it from the rock have no monument at The Loop, no marker at the Weeping Wall, no plaque at Logan Pass. Their memorial is the wire cable bolted to the cliff on the Highline Trail, the one hikers grip when they look down and realize how far the fall would be.