North Cascades Highway March 31 update: one summit to go
The Washington State Department of Transportation’s Twisp-based snow-removal crew on Wednesday, March 31 reached Washington Pass, at 5,477 feet, the highest point on State Route 20 in the Cascade Range. They and the west crew now have their sights set on Rainy Pass to complete reopening of the northern-tier highway.
The North Cascades Highway is the northernmost east-west thoroughfare in Washington State, connecting the Skagit Valley north of Seattle west of the mountains with the Methow Valley in Okanogan County in Washington’s north central interior.
Though it’s deemed a national scenic byway and one of the most beautiful mountain wilderness highways in the United States, SR 20 in the Cascades is not considered a critical cross-state corridor for winter travel and is allowed to ’snow’ closed each fall. Only after melt out begins in March and snow removal equipment becomes available from the state’s other cross-Cascade routes is an effort mounted to clear Highway 20’s snow burden and reopen it to public travel.
By the close of work Wednesday the east crew had cleared and widened a swath through three of the four main avalanche chutes daylighting pavement under the slide-prone, sheer east face of Liberty Bell Mountain. Two seven-foot wide cuts also were made by one Kodiak snow blower up to Washington’s summit.
Until today’s announcement, WSDOT’s west side crew out of Newhalem had been taken off the snow removal detail to do infrastructure repairs in their bare pavement section. But an opportunity to do a shakedown on a newly rebuilt piece of machinery, a front end loader-mounted snow blower, will enable them to push up the westside highway Thursday, April 1 from Granite Creek uphill toward Rainy Pass.
Their plan is to have a truck snow plow push as far as it can up from the milepost 148 bridge crossing and when it bogs down, the refurbished loader-blower will take the lead for a real-time test.
Thursday plans call for east side operators to finish widening the remaining snowpack/avalanche pile cut to ‘driveable’ width under Liberty Bell up to Washington Pass and then head downhill into the Bridge Creek drainage clearing the highway toward the Whistler Mountain avalanche section. With the mild winter no avalanches reached the highway in this corridor so there is just pack snow for the blowers to deal with.
New snow fall accumulations are in the forecast, but for now avalanche monitoring will be halted, subject to recall if the avalanche danger increases. As of Wednesday, March 31, WSDOT crews with the benefit of a mild winter had cleared eight miles of State Route 20 on the east slope and 14 miles of westside pavement. There are 14.5 miles of highway remaining to be cleared.
Snow removal started March 22 with a projected, three-week time-table (barring equipment problems or avalanche concerns) to resumption of public travel.
Kodiak Northwest of Burley, Idaho is the manufacturer of the key pieces of equipment, the custom-built snow blowers, which make this effort possible. Check out their Web site at http://www.kodiaknw.com/view.php?id=17.
Source: Jeff Adamson, WSDOT, Wenatchee
CLOSING THE EAST/WEST GAP :
MP 170.5 Silver Star Gate (3,400 feet)…..MP 168.5 Lone Fir CG…..MP 166.5 Cutthroat Ridge…..MP 165 Spiral Gulch …..MP 164.5 Liberty Bell…..MP 162.5 Washington Pass (5,477 feet)…..MP 160.5 Whistler Mountain…..MP 157.5 Rainy Pass at Pacific Crest Trail (4,855 feet)…..MP 153 Swamp Creek…..MP 148 Granite Creek…..MP 145 East Creek Trail (near county line)…..MP 141 Canyon Creek Trail…..MP 134 West Gate near Ross Lake Trail at Happy Flats (2,170 feet).
Tags: Fishing, Hiking, North Cascades, Okanogan, State Route 20
