By the summer of 1925, the survey crews from the Bureau of Public Roads had done all they could do on paper. They had walked the face of a rock formation called the Garden Wall, in the young Glacier National Park, and they had returned with something that looked like an answer. But standing at the base of that wall, looking up at what they had committed themselves to build, even the engineers understood that the real problem was not something any survey could solve. The Garden Wall is not a hillside and not a cliff in the ordinary sense.
It is a knife-edge ridge of stone, formed over ten thousand years as two glaciers carved the mountain from opposite sides at the same time, until all that remained between them was a wall so narrow at its crest that a person could stand on top and see both sides of the Continental Divide at once. On the eastern face, the wall drops nearly two thousand feet to St. Mary Lake. On the western face, it falls away to McDonald Creek.
In many places, both faces are vertical. The plan was to build a road across this wall, not over it but through it, cut directly into its face. A rock shelf would be carved at mid-height, wide enough for two cars to pass, clinging to the cliff for twelve miles at elevations between four and six thousand six hundred feet. In some stretches, the mountain would rise another thousand feet above the road, an apron of unstable rock, while below, the drop was so steep that a man falling from the outer edge would not touch the slope before reaching the bottom.
The engineers had surveyed the line. Their instruments gave them direction and grade. They could tell the construction gangs at what elevation and width to cut. What the surveys could not tell them was where the rock would cooperate and where it would not.
The Garden Wall was not uniform. It was ancient sedimentary rock, Precambrian limestone and mudstone, laid down over a billion years, then shoved upward by the Lewis Overthrust, one of the largest geological events in North American history, which pushed an entire slab of old seafloor more than eighty kilometers eastward over younger rock beneath it. The result was a mountain range made of rock far older than the terrain it sat upon, fractured in patterns no surface survey could fully predict, subject to conditions no construction crew working in a desert canyon or a river valley had ever faced. Snow.
The Garden Wall receives more than 250 centimeters of snow a year. The construction season at that altitude and latitude was five months at best, from late June, when the snowpack melted enough to reach the worksite, to mid-October, when it closed in again. Some years it was four months. Some years less.
The crews did not work through the winter. They could not. The avalanche danger above five thousand feet in the northern Rockies in winter was not a risk to be managed but a condition that ended human existence on a mountain face. They worked for five months, came down before the snow locked the approaches, and returned the next summer to find what winter had done to what they had built.
Dealing with winter’s damage was the problem they solved every spring before they could build anything new. To understand why anyone would attempt a road across the Garden Wall, you have to understand what a national park meant in 1924 to the people who ran the railroads. Glacier National Park had been established in 1910. The Great Northern Railway had been running tourist trains to the park’s west entrance since 1892, when James Hill’s line reached the Flathead Valley.
Hill understood something about mountains that the automobile age would confirm. If you could show people the inside of a mountain range, they would pay to see it. The problem was that the inside of Glacier was not accessible. The park’s most spectacular country, the backbone of the Continental Divide, the glaciers, the passes, the peaks from which the park took its name, lay behind the Garden Wall, reachable only on horseback over trails that took many days and required guides, horses, and camping gear, limiting the experience to visitors with great amounts of time and money.
The automobile was changing what Americans expected from their national parks. By the early 1920s, cars in the United States had gone from a few thousand to nearly ten million. People who could not spend a week on horseback could spend a weekend in a car. Parks with roads drew visitors.
Parks without roads sat silent. The National Park Service, founded in 1916, understood this arithmetic. Its first director, Stephen Mather, was a businessman who had made a fortune in borax mining before taking the federal post. He believed the parks would be saved by their visitors, and those visitors would come by road.
The Going-to-the-Sun Road was as much his project as anyone’s. A road designed to cross the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, connecting the west entrance at West Glacier with the east entrance at St. Mary, so that a driver could cross Glacier National Park in a single day. That required carving a rock shelf into the face of the Garden Wall for twelve miles at average elevation.
The Bureau of Public Roads surveyed the line in the early 1920s. The survey was done on foot, by men who walked the cliff face with compasses and altimeters, recording bearings while standing on trackless rock. When construction began in earnest in 1925, the crews had only a line on paper, nothing else on the mountain. The men who worked the Garden Wall in the summer of 1925 were drawn from the skilled labor pool of the northern Rockies, which in that decade meant a particular set of communities.
There were workers from the farming towns of the Flathead Valley, men who had spent their first winters on their homesteads after the land rushes of 1910 and found that high-country farming on a short season could not support them. There were men from the mining camps of Butte and Anaconda, skilled in rockwork and powder, unbothered by tight spaces or the sound of blasts. There were Blackfeet workers, whose reservation bordered the park’s east side, men whose ancestors had used the passes through this range for centuries before the park was declared and before the road was even imagined. And there were Italian stone masons.
The Bureau of Public Roads brought in skilled masons for the project’s masonry, the retaining walls, drainage channels, and guard structures that supported the road base on the cliff face and kept the outer edge from collapsing under load. Many of these men came from communities in Montana, Colorado, and Wyoming, where immigrant Italian workers had been doing stonework since the railroad-building era. They were the second generation of that migration. Their fathers had set dynamite on mountain railways.
They shaped and set stone on mountain roads. The difference was in the precision required. A retaining wall bearing passenger cars had to meet standards a railroad fill did not. It had to look right and hold.
Wages on the Garden Wall varied by skill and task. Common laborers made $3. 50 a day in the mid-1920s. Skilled drilling crews made between $4.
50 and $5. Powder men made a little more, for the specialized knowledge required. The Italian masons, brought in under contract rather than as day labor, negotiated piece rates for specific structures. In today’s value, $3.
50 in 1925 is roughly $62. For a ten-hour day on a rock face at fifty-five hundred feet in the northern Rockies, carrying tools over approaches where no road yet existed, under a system that closed the mountain in October regardless of progress, the wage was $62. There was no overtime, no hazard pay, no formal accident insurance. The Bureau of Public Roads kept records of project injuries and deaths with the same blunt directness it used to account for material costs.
The records read: worker injured, date, cause. Worker killed, date, cause. Names appear once. To understand the particular physical problem of the Garden Wall section, you need to know the reality of the work.
The wall averages between 60 and 80 degrees on its western face along the section where the road crosses, between the Loop and Logan Pass. A 60-degree slope is steep enough that a person without trail experience cannot walk it without using their hands. An 80-degree slope is essentially a cliff. The road base had to be cut into this wall at a constant elevation, which meant that on the steepest sections, the men were not cutting into a slope.
They were cutting a horizontal shelf into a near-vertical wall. To do that, they first had to reach the wall. There was no path above the road line because the road itself was what was being built. Before any blasting on the main road base, crews had to cut access trails up the slope to the working elevation.
These access trails were themselves construction achievements, narrow switchbacks hacked by hand through talus and scree. The slope was so steep that equipment and supplies were hauled in by mule or by hand, because wheeled vehicles could not manage it. Everything that reached the working face of the Garden Wall got there on the back of a man or a mule: steel drill heads, wooden handles, powder boxes, water, food, timber for scaffolding, rope. The men all climbed the access trails to the site in the morning.
They returned down in the evening, because there were no camps on the Garden Wall. The main camp was at a site called the Loop, a large sharp switchback on the west side road, where the elevation was lower and the ground level enough for tents and cookhouses. From the Loop to the highest work sites on the Garden Wall was a round trip of four to six miles, with an elevation gain of fifteen hundred to two thousand feet. The men walked this twice a day, before and after their shift.
That walk was not part of the shift. It was simply the precondition for reaching it. At the working face, the process was survey the line, drill holes, blast, remove rubble, then move the line forward. Drilling was done by two-man teams.
One man held the drill steel against the rock face and turned it between blows. The other struck the drill head with a four-pound hammer at a steady rhythm, two to three blows per second. With each blow, the hole advanced a fraction of an inch. In granite, progress was slow.
The rock of the Garden Wall is mostly argillite, a metamorphic stone harder than sandstone but less resistant than pure granite. An experienced team could advance a drill hole eight to ten inches an hour. A standard blast round on the Garden Wall required a pattern of holes drilled to specific depths and angles, usually six to ten holes per round, depending on the width of rock to be removed. The angle of each hole determined the direction in which the blast would throw material.
A properly drilled round on a vertical face would push the broken rock outward and downward, away from the mountain into open space. A poorly drilled round would shatter rock unpredictably, potentially undercutting natural ledges above the blast area or leaving irregular blocks of fractured stone to fall on the crew during the mucking phase. The powder man loaded the holes in sequence and fired the charge. After the dust settled, the mucking crew went in, breaking up remaining fragments with heavy hammers, gathering rubble into wheelbarrows or canvas sacks, and hauling it to the outer edge of the road base under construction, where it was dumped over the cliff.
Each blast advanced the road base two to four feet. To cut twelve miles of rock shelf in the Garden Wall, they repeated this process thousands of times over seven construction seasons. The specific problem that caused the most dangerous work on the entire Going-to-the-Sun Road was not the Garden Wall itself. It was a section called the Weeping Wall.
The Weeping Wall is a cliff on the upper west approach to Logan Pass where groundwater seeps through the rock and emerges continuously from the cliff face year-round. Even in winter, when the exposed surface is frozen and the seepage behind it continues, forcing its way through the mudstone, water moves through cracks where accumulated snow and summer rain soak through the mountain and emerge at road level. In summer, water runs down the wall. In spring, the road is ice.
The road passes beneath a rock overhang in this section, blasted out to create a twelve-foot clearance above the pavement. The blasting that created that overhang required drilling into a wet face. Water in a drill hole affects how the charge is handled. Drilling wet rock produces a mixture of fine stone dust and water that accumulates in the hole with the drill, and must be constantly removed to allow the drill to advance.
The drilling crews at the Weeping Wall wrapped cloth around their hammer hands to absorb the spray from the seeping face. They worked in wet clothing in an area where the temperature rarely exceeded fifty degrees Fahrenheit even in July, because the overhang blocked direct sunlight and the wall threw cold groundwater onto anyone standing beneath it. Below the Weeping Wall, the slope fell away at roughly 40 degrees for several hundred feet before dropping into a vertical cliff. A man who slipped from the working face at the Weeping Wall did not stop until the slope ended.
The Bureau of Public Roads records show that work on the Weeping Wall section took two full construction seasons. One season to establish the road base beneath the overhang, another to complete the blasting of the overhang and build the retaining structure that anchored the upper edge of the road against the seeping face. Two full years of wet drilling and bitter cold. No names appear on any sign at the site today.
In summer, visitors to Going-to-the-Sun Road stop at the pullout below the Weeping Wall, walk to the overlook, feel the spray from the cliff on their faces, take photographs. The work that allows them to stand there is invisible from where they stand. The rope work on the Garden Wall followed the same logic as all other cliff construction projects of that era. The most experienced men went over the edge.
On the steepest parts of the Garden Wall, where the angle exceeded a man’s ability to stand without assistance, drilling crews worked from rope scaffolds lowered from above or from wooden platforms anchored to the road base under construction. The wooden platform was assembled from materials brought in by mule over the access trails, fitted together by hand without power tools, and anchored to the rock face with iron pins driven into holes drilled by hand. A platform section on the Garden Wall might be eight feet wide and six feet deep, hanging over a void hundreds of feet deep, supported entirely by iron pins driven into the face of a wet cliff by a man suspended on a rope. The man who drilled the anchor holes was not a carpenter and not an engineer.
He was a rock worker who had spent enough time in the mountains to understand where a driven iron pin would hold in argillite and where it would not. That knowledge was not written down anywhere. It was in his hands and his eyes from years in this rock. He drove the anchors.
The carpenter built the platform. The drilling crew worked on it. The logic of the arrangement was that if an anchor failed, the man who drove it would not be on the platform when it fell. He would be hanging on a rope beside it, drilling the next hole.
Consider the scene with the precision it requires. You are sitting on a wooden plank suspended by two ropes over a drop of two thousand feet. Your back is against cold argillite even in July. Midday light reflects off the valley below in a way that is beautiful and changes nothing.
The men working your rope stand forty feet above you on the road under construction. You communicate with them by rope pulls. One pull, lower. Two pulls, stop.
Three pulls, haul me up now. You hold a steel drill in your left hand, its head against the rock. Your partner, on his own rope, six feet to your right, swings the hammer. The wall is wet from the morning fog that fills the valley below Logan Pass on most July mornings.
The drill slips if your angle is not perfect. You correct it. The hammer swings. You feel the shock travel through your forearm to your shoulder.
You turn the drill a little. The hammer swings again. After two hours of this, you have a hole eight inches deep and a bruise up your left forearm from the vibration that will last two weeks. Then you come off the wall and eat cold beans from a metal plate, and you go back on the rope the next morning.
Blackfeet workers appear in the Garden Wall section in the correspondence of the Bureau of Public Roads construction office as local labor. On the payroll records, they appear as common laborers without further specification. Field supervisors’ correspondence occasionally notes that some workers showed good knowledge of the mountain terrain, which helped in locating trails in the upper areas. The wording is administrative and does not explain what is meant.
What it means is that men whose families had crossed the Continental Divide passes for generations before the park existed were paid $3. 50 a day to guide Bureau of Public Roads engineers to locations their surveys could not precisely determine from the valley floor. That knowledge was not expensive. It was included in the daily wage.
There is a landmark on Going-to-the-Sun Road that shows clearly what the masonry crews accomplished and why it matters today. The Triple Arches are a section of stone retaining wall on the west approach to Logan Pass, visible from the road where the roadbed crosses a watercourse descending from the upper Garden Wall. Three stone arches, built without mortar, fitted from argillite and limestone quarried from the surrounding terrain, carry the road over a stream that in spring carries enough water to undermine any poured concrete structure not built with sufficient consideration for the movement of material beneath it. The arches are dry-laid.
Each stone was selected from the valley by an experienced mason who understood the weight it would bear and the geometry of the arch of which it was a part. Each arch’s keystone is fitted so precisely that the pressure of the stones on either side holds it in place. Remove the keystone and the arch collapses. Leave it and the arch grows stronger under load, because pressure compresses the joints and forces the stones to grip harder.
The mason who built the Triple Arches worked from knowledge, not drawings. The drawings existed, the Bureau of Public Roads provided specifications for all masonry structures on the project, but the drawings showed dimensions and materials only. They did not show which stone to choose from the surrounding terrain. They did not show how to read argillite for fracture lines that might cause a stone to split under load a decade later while appearing sound when set.
They did not show how to dress the bearing surfaces of each stone so that contact between stones was level enough to transfer load without creating a stress point that would crack in the freeze-thaw cycle. That knowledge the mason had acquired himself, from wherever he learned it, an Italian mountain village or a Colorado railroad or both. He carried it with him. He applied it to a stone wall in Glacier National Park in 1928, and the wall stands today.
The freeze-thaw cycle at five thousand feet in northern Montana is relentless. Water seeps into rock cracks in autumn, freezes in November, expands, pushes the rock apart slightly. It melts in April, contracts. It repeats every winter.
It has continued for nearly a hundred years since the Triple Arches were built. The arches still stand. The road still crosses them. Every spring, when the snowplow makes its first pass on Going-to-the-Sun Road to open it for the season, it crosses the Triple Arches built by a man whose name appears on no memorial within a hundred miles of where he built them.
Going-to-the-Sun Road was completed in 1932 and officially opened on July 15, 1933. The ceremony was attended by officials from the National Park Service, the Bureau of Public Roads, and the Great Northern Railway. Stephen Mather, the visionary who had driven the project from its beginning, died in 1930, two years before the road was finished. He did not see it open.
The men who built the road were not present at the opening ceremony. They had moved on to their next projects. The official records put the total construction cost at about $2. 5 million, roughly $45 million in today’s prices.
The records include materials used, contracts, and completion dates. The names of the day labor appear in payroll records, preserved and available to researchers. But what those records do not show is the nature of each worker’s job. They only record name, daily wage, and number of days worked.
They do not distinguish between the man who pushed a wheelbarrow on level ground and the man who drilled anchor holes on a rope above a two-thousand-foot void. The road was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1983, in recognition of its engineering achievement and aesthetic integration with the surrounding landscape. The official document describes the road as an outstanding example of harmony between built infrastructure and natural terrain, and that description is accurate. The road blends into the landscape as if it were part of it, its curves following the natural lines of the mountain, its stone walls matching the color and texture of the surrounding rock.
That is not coincidence. It is the product of men who chose each stone from the mountain they built in and placed it with such precision that the joints between stones disappear into the geological formation. The harmony between road and mountain is the product of their work. The construction of Going-to-the-Sun Road cost workers their lives.
The Bureau of Public Roads records document eleven deaths over the course of the project. The causes listed include rockfalls, falls from the ground, and equipment accidents. Eleven is the official recorded number. It does not represent the men who left the project with injuries that later killed them, or the men who inhaled rock dust for six construction seasons and died of lung disease in the 1940s in a town in the Flathead Valley, with no recorded connection to the road they had worked on twenty years before.
By 1925, silicosis from rock drilling was understood in a way it had not been in 1879. The medical knowledge existed, but its industrial application did not. It was known that wet drilling, passing water over the drill head to suppress fine rock dust, reduced silica exposure. It was not standard practice on Garden Wall construction, because water had to be carried to the work site, and the drilling crews were already carrying everything they needed up the two-thousand-foot access trail.
Adding a water supply to that logistical chain required a decision by someone with authority. The men whose lungs would bear the consequences of not making that decision were not the ones with authority. That sentence is what lingers when reading the Bureau of Public Roads field reports about the Garden Wall construction seasons. The decision about wet drilling was a matter of logistics and cost, and it was decided on that basis.
The argillite dust they drilled into entered their lungs because no one with the authority to make that calculation was aware of the result. Today, Going-to-the-Sun Road is open from mid-June to mid-October, the same season that constrained its construction. The road receives about two million visitors a year. It is managed by the National Park Service as a historic road, which means modifications must preserve the character of the original construction.
When sections of retaining wall collapse, they are rebuilt with the same material and the same original technique: dry-laid argillite fitted by eye without mortar. There are still masons doing this work today, who learned it from studying the original walls and from working with those who in turn worked with those who mastered the craft. The chain of knowledge continues. The site has passed through many hands since the men who built the Triple Arches set their last stone and walked back down the access trail in 1928.
Those trails have disappeared. They were temporary routes cut during the construction season, then abandoned when the completed road provided access from below. The only trace they leave is in construction photographs, where they appear as thin scratches on the slope above the road base, merging with the talus a few hundred feet above the camera frame. The road is the record.
There is a section between the Weeping Wall and Logan Pass where the road base was cut into the face of the Garden Wall at its steepest angles. The outer edge of the pavement ends at a native stone curb anchored with blocks of argillite set by construction workers in the late 1920s. On the other side of that curb, the wall drops to the valley. If you stop at the parking lot just below Logan Pass and walk to the edge and look down, you will see the road line below you on the sharp switchback, and below that the slope of the Garden Wall, and below that the valley floor nearly two thousand feet down.
The scale of the scene does not register immediately. It takes a moment to absorb what you are seeing. What you are seeing is a shelf in the face of a cliff, a shelf twelve feet wide and twelve miles long, carved by hand into a mountain that took 1. 7 billion years to become what it was before the men with the drills arrived.
They borrowed their workspace from the rock. They took what it offered and shaped it with iron and powder, with their understanding of how stone breaks and where it holds. Then they walked the access trail for the last time in October, and winter came and covered what they had built. When the snowplow came up in June, the road was still there.
That scene has repeated every June since 1933. Drill marks from the Garden Wall construction are still visible on parts of the cut surface. Regular circular depressions in the mudstone where star drills entered ninety years ago. There are no signs, no interpretive panels.
Most visitors pass them at fifteen miles an hour enjoying the view and do not notice them, but they are there. If you slow down and look at the cut rock face as you pass through the steepest part of the Garden Wall, you will see them. Small circles in the stone, placed with precision, the diameter of a steel drill driven by a man tied to a rope above a valley he was told was a national park and would be cared for forever. He drilled the hole.
He set the explosive. He moved away, and the mountain fell, and the road was cut, and his name is recorded nowhere that can be found. But the hole is in the rock, and the road still stands.
