Death in Zion National Park by Randi Minetor
Author:Randi Minetor [Minetor, Randi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2017-05-18T16:00:00+00:00
Chapter 6
Sudden Darkness: The Zion–Mt. Carmel Tunnel
The Arizona Republic waxed eloquent on July 6, 1930, two days after the formal dedication of an engineering marvel in the heart of Zion National Park: “No highway completed in the west in a number of years has opened up the scenic beauty to motorists that a trip through the Mt. Carmel tunnel and the connecting roads affords . . . The new road, beginning near the park ranger station at the entrance, is only 26 miles long, but it is declared to be the most scenic in all America.” In particular, the writer admired the road’s new tunnels: “It incorporates two tunnels, one 5,600 feet long and the other more than 400 feet in length. These tunnels are cut through the crimson rock that forms the mountains, and some six galleries have been opened for ventilation and to afford motorists opportunities to view the wonderful panoramas that unfold before them as their cars emerge from the darkness.”
Three years in the making at a cost of nearly $3 million (a value of more than $41 million in 2017 dollars), the new scenic highway and the Zion–Mt. Carmel Tunnel created a direct route from Zion to Bryce Canyon National Park to the northeast, and to Grand Canyon National Park to the south in Arizona, cutting the travel time to Bryce Canyon in half and shortening the time to Grand Canyon by a third. The National Park Service, the State of Utah, and the Bureau of Public Roads all had a hand in the project, but the vision for it came from National Park Service director Stephen Mather, who envisioned a “Grand Loop” highway that would become a “center of American tourism.” The road through Zion was a small section of Mather’s larger concept, but it formed a critical link that made a motor tour of Utah’s parks accessible and affordable for millions of tourists. It also opened an area of the park that only intrepid tourists on foot or horseback had any chance of seeing before: Pine Creek Canyon and the eastern plateau, a world of vertical Navajo sandstone formations and planes of variegated slickrock.
The tunnel itself presented one of the road’s greatest challenges. At the time of its construction, the 1.1-mile tunnel was the longest underground passageway in the national park system, and the engineering involved in its planning and construction pioneered new techniques that made this tunnel a manmade marvel in an extraordinary natural wilderness. The Nevada Contracting Company took on the challenge of actually building the tunnel under the supervision of expert crew bosses from across the country. They began by blasting gallery openings into the soft sandstone, creating a literal window in the side of the rock face through which they could reach the wall’s interior. Carefully carving out the tunnel and removing rock, dirt, and sand through these windows, the crews burrowed out a narrow shaft from one end of the tunnel to the other, and then began the long, meticulous process of widening and shaping the tunnel from the inside.
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