Between November 1937 and August 1938 the Pocatello Tribune kept track of work on two mountain roads out of Arbon Valley. One was the Mink Creek road, the valley's short way north over the range to Pocatello. The other ran east through Garden Creek Gap, toward Robin. Both were straightened and regraded in the same months, under different arrangements.
The Mink Creek road
The road's earlier years, as the valley's mail route to town, are told in an earlier post. The canyon section lay in Bannock County. In November 1937 the county commission placed orders for culvert and pipe, the opening step toward moving the road onto a line that could be used the year round. Our account of that article appears below.
About two weeks later, on December 7, the Tribune put the plan on its front page. County Commissioner W. H. Jensen described it as a joint effort of Bannock County, the forest service and the state. The starting point was the road's first ford of Mink Creek, and the work was to move south from there. In that split the county's share was the groundwork, meaning the culverts, the ditch alterations and a first layer of surfacing, while the state took on the finished grade and, after completion, the upkeep. The paper noted that the road carried a great deal of traffic, and not all of it was bound for the valley. Skiers headed for the new winter sports area on the forks of Mink Creek used it, and so did Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts going to their camps and visitors to several smaller playgrounds up the forks.
By February 1938 the realignment was under way between the mouth of the canyon and the forest boundary. In the "Buzz of the Burg" column of February 9, the Tribune writer who signed as Ing asked for more. Ing wanted oil laid on the road, reaching at least as far as the Power County line, and the column grumbled about dust in the hot months and about repairs that were always promised for next summer. No route between the valley and town was shorter, Ing pointed out.
On July 3 the Sunday Tribune-Journal reported progress on what it now called a three-mile realignment. A. G. Nord of Logan, supervisor of the Cache National Forest, had promised that the forest service would keep helping. The job was now split three ways. The workforce came from a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. The forest service put four tractors on the first rough cut of the new line. Everything else on the Bannock County stretch went to the state highway department: buying right-of-way, setting culverts, building fence, and grading and surfacing. By Nord's count the rough cut was finished for 2.3 miles, and he expected the remainder to be done before July was out. This was not quite the division announced in December; the papers do not say why.
Wheat from the upper valley
On July 25 Commissioner Jensen raised the hope of a better connection to Mink Creek for the farmers at the head of the valley. That was probably the Crystal and Rattlesnake Creek country, though the paper did not name it. Jensen had talked the matter over with Claude Bistline, who headed the Pocatello chamber of commerce, and with W. L. Hansen, the district's forest ranger; Hansen said he would put the project before Nord. Mud was the problem: the stretch the paper called an extension of East Fork canyon could not be driven in wet weather, and it mostly needed grading and gravel. Jensen offered county road equipment for the job. Timing mattered, since growers there planned to begin hauling about 40,000 bushels by truck in a month or so. Without the Mink Creek connection, the growers had two choices: the unfinished Garden Creek Gap road, or a 20-mile haul over dirt across the reservation, south to the Pocatello–American Falls highway at Schiller. The valley's struggle over that reservation road is told in another post.
Garden Creek Gap
The same page carried news of the other road. County surveyor W. P. Havenor reported the Garden Creek Gap job close to the finish. The road ranked among the valley's most important links over to Portneuf Valley, and the scenery in the gap brought sightseers out by the hundreds every year. Havenor said the hardest part, cutting through rock and building up fills, was mostly done, leaving the crew to widen the road and bring down high spots here and there. The foreman was a man named Hall; his first name cannot be read on the page.
By August 12 the crew was placing a dirt fill. Havenor, now titled county engineer, thought traffic could start moving over it within seven to ten days; finishing touches would go on well after that. In his view it ranked high among the WPA projects in Bannock County. Arbon Valley and the Robin district are separated by a mountain range, and the road follows a fault line that breaks through it. Havenor put the rock removed from the slope at thousands of tons, all of it taken out to make the road gentler and straighter. Writing to the Tribune in 1946, N. S. Coffin of Lava Hot Springs said nobody traveled through the gap before 1912, and that people used to say "a crow couldn't fly through the Garden Creek gap."
The pages read for this post do not say when either road was finished, whether the state took over the Mink Creek road as promised, or whether the East Fork road was graveled in time for the 1938 wheat. No valley resident is named in any of the reports.
On this site: the Crystal area history describes the high basin at the head of the valley, the Arbon stage in Mink Creek tells of a 1925 wreck on the old canyon road, and skis and a weasel at Crystal finds a Rattlesnake rancher snowed in at Garden Creek Gap in 1949.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, November 24, 1937, page 4. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
A $1,977 order of road materials for the Mink Creek road made the Tribune on the day before Thanksgiving, 1937.
Bannock County's commissioners meant to shift the road between Pocatello and Arbon Valley, which the paper called the Bannock highway, onto a new line, and culvert and pipe were the first things they needed. The money went to two suppliers. For $1,008, the R. Hardesty Manufacturing company would deliver 1,516 feet of culvert. The concrete pipe, 1,700 feet of it at 57 cents a foot, came from a Pocatello firm, the Clark Concrete Construction company. That works out to $969 for the pipe, and the two orders together make up the total.
Winter was the reason for the change. The commissioners wanted a road that could be kept clear in the snow season, giving town and valley a connection that never shut down. The item named two more beneficiaries besides the valley: the forest service's Mink Creek station in the Cache National Forest, and the new winter sports grounds.
The short item, headed "County Purchases Road Materials," named no county official and gave no date for the work to begin.