A few years after 

completing the east 

end of the parkway 

from Chinook Pass, 

towards Natches, 

Washington, Gary 

Hunter returned to 

Mather Memorial 

Parkway to work on 

the stretch between 

Cayuse Pass and 

Chinook Pass. 

“Cayuse Pass is 

really just an intersection of SR 410 

and 123,” Gary 

said. “The project 

headed up grade 

and didn’t quite 

reach the summit of 

Chinook Pass. . . . It 

ended about a mile 

west of Chinook 

Pass, so there was a 

gap of about a mile 

between the two 

projects.” This 

project was completed in 1998. 

“It was an interesting project,” Gary 

said. The Civilian 

Conservation Corps 

(CCC) had built the 

road in the 1930’s, 

“blasting it out of 

the cliff, and building stone retaining 

walls on the downhill side.” 

The crew worked 

out of a camp at the 

upper switchback 

and the project 

presented some 

interesting challenges. 

Cayuse Pass (National Park 

Highway) 1998 

Compiled from 

Interviews, June 2013 

Having a contractor 

unused to FHWA’s work 

ethic created interesting 

challenges for Project 

Engineer Gary Hunter. 

The fact that it was the 

first WFLHD project to 

use metric units provided 

additional insights. 

Western 

Federal Lands 

Highway 

Division 

A Glimpse into 

an Earlier Era 

Article 51 

August 2014 

At top the crew prepares to place concrete into a completed section of formwork. A concrete hose, top center, hangs from the 

boom of the pumper truck at left. A lower switchback of Highway 

410 can be seen below the work. Above: Vicinity map of Cayuse 

Pass, courtesy Google Maps. 
Construction operations 

required Highway 410 to be 

closed to daytime traffic for 

four days each week. “We had 

to be very careful because 

there were very tight switchbacks on this stretch and 

really steep cliffs on either 

side. We wanted to make the 

road wider and safer without 

disturbing any of the cliffs or 

the trees. But how could you 

make it wider and safer when 

there was a steep cliff dropping off the side of the road? 

“The designers at WFLHD 

designed massive—and high—

concrete retaining walls on the 

cliff side that were fully hidden from view from the roadway and still left all the original work undisturbed. I really 

have to compliment the designers on how well they 

designed it,” Gary said, 

“because the road really 

worked out well. 

walls involved a lot of rebar 

work as well as carpentry 

work for the forms. “Of course 

the carpenters and laborers 

didn’t know the metric system,” Gary said, and “from the 

first we thought it would be a 

problem for them, because 

they would attempt to convert 

the metric measurements into 

English units.” 

A shrewd superintendent was 

able to sidestep the inevitable 

mistakes, however. “From the 

beginning, he wouldn’t let the 

carpenters or ironworkers use 

English units at all. He said 

they’d just have to get used to 

it, and he bought them a 

bunch of metric tapes and told 

them they had to use those.” 

The work was all done without 

doing any conversions. “There 

were a lot of complaints at the 

beginning,” Gary said, “but it 

worked very well.” 

Page 2 Cayuse Pass (National Park Highway) 1998 

“This project was the first 

one we built that used the 

metric system.” The concrete 

I really have to 

compliment the 

designers... the road 

really worked out well. 

Concrete retaining walls preserve the look of original CCC work 

An operator uses a crane to set forms for a high retaining wall. 

To stabilize the fractured rock of the cliff, the contract requires four rock anchors to be 

installed. Here, the contractor drills a horizontal hole for one of the anchors. The drill is 

mounted on the boom of an excavator, which stands on the roadway above. Below is a 

lower level of Highway 410. 
The prime contractor came to 

the project with experiences 

and expectations dramatically 

different from what contractors can expect from FHWA. 

They “had done a lot of work 

in Alaska for the Army Corps 

of Engineers, and they had 

always had an adversarial 

relationship with the Corps,” 

Gary explained. “At the end of 

each project, the contractor 

would file a bunch of claims 

against the Corps, and would 

end up winning them. So they 

were getting literally millions 

of dollars on every project. 

“FHWA doesn’t work that 

way,” he pointed out. “We try 

really hard to have a constructive and positive relationship 

with the contractor. 

We expect 

the contract 

provisions to 

be carried 

out. We 

expect that 

if something 

is not covered, that 

we will write 

a contract 

modification 

to include it. 

We do our 

best to 

acknowledge the contractor’s requests. 

“That really set them 

for a loop,” Gary observed, because “This 

contractor didn’t know 

how to work that way. 

He expected a lot of 

claims, but it turned 

out there weren’t any 

opportunities for 

claims.” 

In the end he did get 

one claim. “The contract required them to 

remove the top 8-10 

feet of material” from 

the top of the borrow 

pit because it wasn’t 

Article 51 Page 3 

suitable. “They were supposed 

to dig down, set that top material aside, and use the material 8-

10 feet down for the job. They 

didn’t do that. They crushed 

the rock we required, but mixed 

some of the overburden into it, 

and that introduced a lot of dirt 

and clay into the mixture, so it 

became a lot more plastic.” 

The contractor had been having 

a hard time getting the crushed 

aggregate base rock to set up 

properly. Their claim was that 

this was due to there being 

substandard rock in the materials source, and that there was 

too much plastic in that material. “When done properly,” Gary 

explained, “the base rock is 

placed and compacted, and sets 

up to provide a solid foundation 

for the road. In this case, 

however, the crushed rock 

contained clay or silt. . . After 

the rock has been placed and 

compacted, it deflects—as if it 

Contractor submits claim: material source is “substandard” 

We try really hard to have 

a constructive and 

positive relationship with 

the contractor. 

The drill on the boom of an excavator. When the hole is complete a 

25-foot-long anchor will be installed; grout will be injected around the 

anchor to hold it in place. 

At night in a cage suspended next to the cliff, two men 

use a hydraulic jack to apply tension to the rock anchor. 
Gary Hunter’s remembrances of the project on 

Chinook Pass can be found in two previous articles, 

“Chinook Pass (National Park Highway) 1994-95” 

Part I and Part II. 

Stories in this series have been developed by Marili 

Reilly from interviews and correspondence. Retirees 

who would like to share their memories may email 

marili.reilly@dot.gov. 

A Glimpse into an Earlier Era 

610 East Fifth Street 

Vancouver, Washington 98661 

http://www.wfl.fhwa.dot.gov/about/history/

articles.htm 

Western Federal 

Lands Highway 

Division 

Continued from page 3 

have acted,” and 

they assured him 

that he had acted 

appropriately. 

“Not in my mind,” 

he said. “In my 

mind, a Project 

Engineer is on the 

project to solve 

problems. This 

was a problem 

that I didn’t get 

solved.” 

Photos in this story 

were provided by 

Gary Hunter.

contains rubber or plastic—

whenever a truck drives over 

it. This will not adequately 

support the pavement that is 

to be placed on top of it.... 

“Even though they had 

brought the problem on themselves, they still filed a claim 

against FHWA,” and, Gary 

lamented, they finally won the 

claim. 

“I wasn’t happy about this,” he 

said. “I didn’t think the 

contractor should be paid.” 

The contractor had created the 

problem himself, “but we still 

paid him.” 

Gary added “I asked our 

attorneys what I could have 

done differently; how I should 

At the material source, a Cat pushes rock to the contractor’s 

crusher. The contractor is required to remove about eight feet 

of unsuitable overburden from the source before beginning 

operations, but fails to do so, mixing the brown overburden with 

the gray rock. The resulting crushed rock is very plastic when 

placed on the grade.