3 Routes Surveyed
3 Routes Surveyed: Rock Creek most expensive by 15%
By 1927, Shelley had stirred up enough interest in a new Cooke City road that the government surveyed several routes: the current route up the Rock Creek drainage was going to cost $1.14 million to build ($14.4 million in 2011 dollars); a second route down the Stillwater valley to Big Timber came in at $985,000; and a third down the Clark Fork valley to Cody, Wyoming was $915,000.
There’s little record of how Siegfriedt and Shelley took the decidedly unwelcome news, but over the next five years, their efforts must have been colossal. Because in early 1931, a “Park Approach Act” passed both houses of Congress allowing the government to fund National Park Approach roads. When the news reached Red Lodge that President Hoover had signed the bill, “the announcement touched off the greatest celebration this mining town has ever known,” wrote The Billings Gazette.
The Act was written to appear generic, but it had so many specific qualifications that few roads would ever qualify for this funding. In fact, when the chosen route up the Rock Creek valley was surveyed a final time, it was discovered that even it didn’t qualify for the government funds: the Act allowed for roads of no more than 60 miles. When the Red Lodge-Cooke City route was finalized, it totalled 68.58 miles long. Further bureaucratic wrangling placed those extra 8.58 miles under the jurisdiction of the Forest Service, narrowly averting yet another major setback.
