Snowsheds of Glacier National Park

Nothing short of a strong earthquake could bring this thing down, I mused, running my hand over the rough eighteen-inch-thick support timbers. Peering down the track line, the steel rails narrowed and disappeared as they rounded a curve and exited the snowshed. Through the open sides, shafts of winter-gray light checkered the railbed in alternating hues of black and gray, black and gray.

Folks who don’t live in regions with high-angle avalanche zones and railroads don’t know much about snowsheds. Part lean-to and part tunnel, they don’t catch the eye. As an architectural piece, they are strictly utilitarian and certainly not things of beauty, unless you’re a construction engineer who digs bulky, behemoth buildings.

Historians don’t generally agree on this, but snowsheds have been around since the industrial age hit Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Roads, and then railways, replaced pack trails at alpine passes, and crude snow roofs built of stone and wood provided an answer for clear passage. Even earlier, though, stone-arched snowsheds between Switzerland and Italy were constructed under the direction of Napoleon between 1801 and 1806. Today, railway and highway snowsheds are widespread in Switzerland, Austria, the Scandinavian countries and the Andes in South America. In North America, they remain the design of choice for rail protection in the Sierras, the Cascades and the northern Rockies. In Montana they are only found in one place.

Deep snow zones along the southern boundary of Glacier National Park leading to the Continental Divide at Marias Pass are especially prone to avalanches and have been since the days of the former Great Northern. Today, Burlington Northern crews battle snow between East and West Glacier throughout the winter. Construction engineers sought ways to create snow-free tracks and minimize train damage by constructing sturdy roofs over railbeds vulnerable to avalanches. Simple observations of topography identified sites where persistent snow slides swept over the tracks…and sometimes trains. At first, crude sheds were constructed with available logs and roofs of rough-sawn lumber, often destroyed with each winter season. With time, construction crews chose to create permanent sheds that called for gigantic, milled timbers or steel girders spaced closely together spanned with sloping roofs that shrugged the snow load.

These sheds, eleven in all, are strung along the Burlington Northern’s line adjacent to Glacier Park. They require continual repairs. In the business of shed design there are compression anchors (downhill) and tension anchors (uphill) that pin the structure to steep hillsides. All need careful attention and maintenance with specialized and trained Burlington Northern crews assigned to the task.

The mammoth anchor wall of shed number 10, for instance, is 115 years old, constructed the same year Glacier Park was established in 1910—before the Titanic went down and before World War I. Its centurion concrete face has seen a whole evolution of locomotive designs and rolling stock concepts: steam to diesel, boxcars to container cars, wealthy tourists to rank and file Amtrak travelers.

To look at it in the summer, it’s hard to imagine there is any snow hazard here. Uphill, a thick stand of brush and mature trees grace the slope, hardly the look of a gouged-out avalanche chute. Truth is, there probably isn’t a need for shed number 10 anymore. Like a river that will often rechannel its flow, avalanches have created other gullies and chutes to slough snow from the heights. Then, too, snow depths have diminished in the last several decades leaving the need for track protection to the distant past.

Still, there it is, hulking and functional and ready for another hundred years.