There aren’t many stretches of road in Minnesota like Highway 1. Though it’s not officially designated a scenic byway, it should be. Narrow, with pine and birch trees crowding right up against the tarmac, Highway 1 winds through the Superior National Forest, connecting Lake Superior to Ely. The sun bursts in patches through the trees, dappling the road with light as you drive along. The stretch feels forgotten, even peaceful. It’s absurd, maybe, to suggest that a person can commune with nature from behind the wheel of a car. But driving Highway 1 brings you about as close as you’re going to get while still getting where you’re going.
Motorists are at the mercy of the landscape, slowing according to bends in the road, and always watching for the moose and deer that sometimes loiter directly on the dotted line. There, the forest rules, just as it did before Highway 1 was first paved in 1937.
Unfortunately, that is about to irrevocably change. Starting this summer, Minnesota Department of Transportation engineers will be doing what they do best: engineering. They’re undertaking an elaborate reconstruction of Highway 1, specifically of its most wild and winding section, a fifteen-mile stretch just south of Ely. The road will be significantly straightened and widened. Also, two charming old river bridges will be replaced with cast cement bridges airbrushed to look like stone.
When MnDOT proposed changing Highway 1, admirers of the road came out in droves. At public meetings, they conjured the spirit of Charles Kuralt, the former traveling correspondent for CBS, who once said, “On the map, Ely appears to be the end of the road. For people who love wilderness, beauty, and solitude, on the contrary, it’s the center of the world.”
Conscientious objectors expressed dismay at the state’s habit of jackhammering away all the rough edges. One wrote in a letter, “As our lives and our environment get more and more homogenized in the future, the special places will become fewer and fewer and our lives less enriched.” Another lodged an all out, on-the-knees plea: “Oh, please! Please, please, please! Don’t change the road. It is sooooooo pretty the way it is.”
Certainly, Highway 1 will not become a 35W, or even a 371. Engineers call the project a good example of “context sensitive design.” That’s a fancy way of saying that, across the country, highway departments are trying to be more ginger with the natural environment when plodding through with bulldozers and paving machines. According to MnDOT Project Manager Todd Campbell, “This job isn’t going to significantly alter the appearance or feel of the road. People had a problem with their perception of safety. The trees are so close to the road that there is very little buffer between a driver and a tree or a rock. But this is not going to look like an airstrip landing.”
Nor will Highway 1 remain the same old, unobtrusive Highway 1. The renovation, which will take place over the next five to seven years, includes a fairly dramatic widening of the road and its shoulders. What now amounts to two eleven-foot lanes with two-foot shoulders will become two twelve-foot lanes with six-foot shoulders, plus another four feet of clearance on either side. Thus a twenty-six-foot-wide highway becomes a forty-four-foot-wide highway. And in places where hills will be smoothed out, the footprint will be even larger, up to sixty-two feet.
Straight lines aren’t as interesting as curvy ones; wider lanes appear barren. In short, Highway 1 will become a more typical Minnesota highway: safe, tidy, and, compared to its former incarnation, boring. This despite the fact that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the road. There hasn’t been for seventy years. Yes, there are slightly more accidents than along similar two-lane byways—less than one crash more per million miles driven. But, because of the sixty-four curves along the targeted fifteen-mile stretch, people drive slower. That makes the accidents less severe. Speeding up traffic, by smoothing thirty-mile-per-hour curves into forty-mile-per-hour curves, will not only make Highway 1 less appealing, it could be bad news for those on both sides of the windshield.
The true beneficiaries of the reworking of Highway 1 will be enormous commercial vehicles, like logging trucks. It was the U.S. Forest Service, after all, that first proposed the project back in 1999. And federal Forest Highway Program dollars will pay eighty percent of the total $13.7 million bill. “We use the highway administratively for work,” said Roger Pekuri, an engineer for the Superior National Forest. “A lot of commodities, principally timber, are hauled down to Two Harbors. Logging trucks have a hard time navigating the highway now. And, besides, it’s hard to plow. It’s so narrow that the blades go into the other lane. There are a lot of places where ledge rock is right up to the shoulder.”
It seems that Highway 1 is being widened and straightened—and, arguably, degraded—primarily to make it easier to haul trees out of the forest, so the woods themselves can be more rapidly degraded. Now that’s progress.
—Jennifer Vogel
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