If you’ve come up to visit us recently, you’ve seen the dramatic project underway on Goose Lake Road. Crews are making serious progress on the long-awaited reconstruction project. Thanks to meticulous planning, the construction is causing only minimal delays for our summer visitors. Drivers face delays up to 30 minutes on Thursdays, but can expect delays of no more than 5-6 minutes on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Once the project is complete, the road will be significantly wider and the sharpest curves will be re-engineered or eliminated altogether. Here’s a look at how the project is progressing:

Construction Update

To straighten and widen the road, crews are working on ‘cuts’ and ‘fills’ on several different slopes above and below the existing roadway.

The entire project involves moving approximately 200,000 cubic yards of material. Each cubic yard consists of a little over a ton of material.

The second-most significant ‘fill’ is pretty much complete.

This curve is about half way up the road. If you’ve visited us during a big winter storm or when we have especially slick conditions, you’ve likely seen a vehicle or two experience a ‘snowbank encounter’ here.

As you can see in the photo above, the new road bed follows a much more subtle curve and it will also be significantly wider. The specs of the project call for a minimum 11-foot width per lane. The current road is just 8-feet per lane in many spots which is less-than-ideal for two-way traffic involving recreational vehicles and trucks towing trailers.

A similar but MUCH LARGER re-route is underway in the ‘Thorn Creek’ curve, known to many of us as ‘the hairpin’. This entire curve is being eliminated.

A brand new section of road will bypass this corner, taking off from just below the Gordon C. Titus parking lot entrance and connecting with the straighter part of the road below.

This is the largest part of the project. Crews are getting ready to lay a 400-foot culvert in the gully before tackling one of the biggest ‘fill’ efforts many of these crew members have ever worked on.

I got the opportunity to get an escort to the bottom of this gully. Standing there, you really get a sense of the enormity of this project.

Photos don’t do it justice. If you look closely, you can see the project engineer in the photo below. He’s walking at the base of what will be a 75-foot-tall fill. That’s as tall as a standard six-story building.

A 400-foot culvert is about to go in where you see those orange markers. After that, it will take more than 100,000 yards of fill material to bridge this gap. That’s about 7,000 full loads in one of these giant dump trucks!

That’s expected to take several weeks. Crews will be pulling material from several ‘cuts’ on other parts of the road to fill this area and also to straighten out some of the more minor curves.

Plans also call for a major rebuild of the intersection between Goose Lake Road and Highway 55, but crews are focusing their efforts on the higher-elevation parts of the project first.

This project is part of the Forest Highways Program and we feel very fortunate that it will allow our guests will enjoy easier, safer access for years to come. We’ll be posting more updates and photos as this exciting project progresses!

Short Delays Possible

As we mentioned, visitors who head to Brundage Mountain on Thursdays may encounter delays of up to 30 minutes. (Those delays will be in effect Mondays through Thursdays, but Brundage is only open Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays during summer months so we have one day per week where visitors could see 30 minute delays). Right now, there are no closures or delays on Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays. Delays of up to 5-6 minutes are possible on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays beginning August 19. At that point, traffic will be limited to one lane along a short stretch of the road with traffic signals alternating the flow at 5 minute intervals.

• April