WSDOT Making Progress Clearing North Cascades Highway

WSDOT Reports They Cleared About 2 Miles Over the Past Week

Information and Photos Provided by Washington State Department of Transportation

LakeChelanNow.com follows the often-humorous and always dramatic weekly newsletter which features photos and updates of snow removal progress on the North Cascades Highway (Hwy 20).

Week 5 Update:

Week 5 is history and we can claim about 2 miles of progress on the west side and a quarter mile on the east side. While those numbers sound like we took the week off, it’s actually good news. It warmed up – way up- 55-65 degrees! So that had us dodging avalanches, blasting to bring down more and clearing highway we’d cleared 3 weeks ago.

On the west side, Jim and his Kodiak made it to milepost 154, the Swamp creek chain up area. Snow depth on centerline is 39 inches. 55 degrees and sunshine made the snow on roadway very soft and wet with no ice layer to speak of.

On the east side the quarter mile of progress was under Liberty Bell #1 & 2 where some of the drifts were 50 feet deep over the roadway keeping the two caterpillars occupied all week. The plan is to start on LB #3 Monday. You may recall, it had dumped 50 feet on the pavement back when we did the assessment trip in March. That was before the slides started coming down Wednesday.

Cutthroat #10, the west side of Spiral Gulch called “the annex” and 4 of the Liberty Bell chutes all let go of significant snow on their own, forcing our crews to pull back about 1 p.m. The avalanche crew spent much of the next day, Thursday, control blasting chutes to stabilize the pack so the crew can get back to work on the roadway below.

With a 65 degree temperature when the avalanche spotters pulled the clearing crew off the mountain Wednesday, it’s most likely when they do return Monday, they’ll be greeted with a mess – the opportunity to clear pavement that they cleared once already over the past three weeks.

While messy, it’s good news in that it means the chutes will be empty and unless they’re stable, we couldn’t open the highway even if the roadway was clear.

The forecast says dry – make it so!