 Each road has its own character. The personality of this road, this is a John Wayne road. Adventure some. I'd kind of describe it as very low-key, very kind of a personality of being very subtle. This one was basically a big drag strip through the sagebrush. It's kind of the stairway to some wonderful place that you don't even expect to be within your reach. We call this the parkway that lies lightly on the land. Much like people, every road, every highway has its own personality, its own character. Understanding that character, connecting with it, respecting it, that is at the heart of the work of federal highway partnerships. Since the founding of the National Park Service in 1916, there has been a need for roads to and through national parks and other federal lands to give access to the public that is really the owner of these lands. The first director of the National Park Service knew that if you don't have access, environmentally appropriate access to the parks, that people will not be able to appreciate them as well. Roads provide that access. When you put a road in, you have to make sure that you're doing so in a sensitive way. Federal highways works with us to lay them lightly on the land so that we're not doing any impairment of the resource. These are the people's lands. And by devoting a significant number of our resources to the preservation of those lands and the roadway systems that serve those lands, we help make those lands available to the Americans. National parks and other federal lands often protect historical and cultural landmarks. So the process of constructing highways demands a special sensitivity to these cultural issues. Guard walls were very much a character-defining element of that road. But they were hand-laid, mortared, unreinforced stone walls on here that had no structural capability to them. You couldn't effectively rebuild that rock wall and meet the crash standards required at this point. And so the challenge was, if we rebuild a steel and concrete core and then rock face it, it was going to be, I think, an extra $5 to $7 million. The National Park Service and Federal Highways solution was to have the contractor take molds of selected walls representing the character they wanted to preserve. That texture was recreated in concrete and then enhanced through a three-step process of spray painting and application of mica chips, adding coloration and sparkle as realistic as Mother Nature's own granite. I still get calls from people saying, oh, thank you, thank you so much for rebuilding that rock wall. Well, in effect, we didn't. That's a pretty good testimony for it. One of the real benefits of Federal Highways is a commitment to preserving this place and the integrity of the visitor's experience. A similar problem with the different solution faced highway planners at Mount Rainier. Driving this highway is like being on top of the world. Aging guardrails here needed to be brought to modern safety standards by reconstructing hardier concrete walls. And we replaced it with a concrete core wall. And we faced it with the native stone, so it would at least match up with the intent of the original walls. The technique enhanced safety while respecting the culture of this unique highway's history. These examples involve preservation of artifacts from 20th century history. In other cases, even prehistoric artifacts affect construction planning. This road on Arizona's Hopi Reservation is a road paved with history and tradition. The road project partnership involves the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Hopi tribe, and the Federal Highway. There was that big boulder that was sitting here. And there were some rocks underneath it. Below it, they were sitting on it. Each time it rained, it moved. And some of those boulders were wedged in here. They were like 8, 10 tons. These were about like 48 tons. They were about 50 feet above the roadway. The main concern was that the boulder falling down and injuring or killing someone. That's the main road, only road going up to the mesa. Like the federal lands they lie on, these roads have a history, sometimes predating the history of the United States. Sensitivities to that history and the culture it represents make many highway projects more than just a construction job. We thought about what archeological sites there may be up there in Petroglyphs. We got some people up there, our elders, and they found approximately 45 burial sites and a number of Petroglyphs. We were getting pressure from the clan leaders and the people to remove that rock as quick as we can. And we told them, well, we can't do it alone. It's going to take the agency's help working with us. And so they contacted federal highways to be involved in this project. We work with the tribe archeologists to help as well as our region archeologists. Blasting technology had to be developed to protect ancient graves of children. To preserve the Petroglyphs, federal highway identified ways of bolting this rock to the mesa's side rather than blasting. It was a team effort. The people were very happy about it. And thankful that the project went successfully. Protecting the resource and improving the visitor experience are the primary focuses of these project partnerships. The roads run through environments that are themselves national treasures. Sensitivity to these national environments is as significant as sensitivity to the culture. The general Hitchcock Highway climbs like a staircase to the stars in the Coronado National Forest of Arizona. Several species of cactus would have been displaced and destroyed by the construction. The Forest Service and Federal Highway had the cacti dug up, housed them in a nursery, and then it replanted them back alongside the newly widened highway. Federal Highway and its partners recognized that any road is an invasion of the environment created by centuries of nature's own work. Grand Teton National Park is one of the most beautiful parks, I think, in the Western US. And we're here to talk about road construction in a place you don't want to build anything. So we forged a partnership with federal highways to provide the roadway design and safety engineering portions of road design. What we're trying to do is give people a way to interact with the park while they're still in their car. It's so much nicer to go up the bluffs and get views of the mountains and back down and through the trees as opposed to driving down a straight road at 60 miles an hour in the sagebrush. To meet the challenge, cures were designed to blend the road with the topography and to aim the visitor's attention at the land and the mountains. Yet this posed the problem of hiding the scar left by the abandoned roadway. We saved the topsoil from where the new alignment was. And then when traffic was on the new road, we took that topsoil and used that to heal in the scar of the old road. We actually collected seed along the road, took it to a nursery, and so we actually used seed from this site to reveget. In a few more years, you won't know that there was ever a road out here. This primitive highway traverses the Elk Refuge in Wyoming. Its personality is a subtle one. Here, the Fish and Wildlife Service partnered with Federal Highway to improve mobility within the refuge while not impacting its residents. The Elk Refuge is basically a winter range that was established for elk in 1912. We wanted to rebuild the road but not make it a big, fancy, gaudy highway. We wanted to keep the real, kind of the rural primitive character of the road. Keeping it rudimentary and natural was the challenge. Fences, even asphalt paving, would have been counterproductive, changing the lay of the land and impeding the movement of the elk. While many federal lands projects have required cutting edge technology, in this case, a low-tech dirt road was needed. The federal highway folks brought the technical highway construction expertise and the ability to work effectively with the contractor to get the job done in a way that met everybody's needs. When the federal lands highway program takes on a project, they take it from the very beginning, from the planning stages, from developing the environmental studies, working with the other federal resource agencies, to really understand what it is we want to accomplish at the end of the day with the project and what the long-range plans for the park are. We actually involve them from the outset. We actually bring the construction people in as part of the preliminary planning and design team, and federal highways and park staff are involved throughout the life of the project. We do the environmental analysis, working closely with the park, and we do the design work and meld it all together into a set of plans and specifications for the construction and hire a contractor and the federal highways and the park service have staff on the ground working with the contractor through the construction process to get the project built. This is not the kind of construction you see on state roads or on highways anywhere across the nation. It's very complicated ecologically. It's very complicated culturally. It's very complicated in terms of management. I mean, how many places in the world do you have bison moving through or grizzly bears or erupting plumes of smoke and hot water, bubbling mud? And how do you design a bridge to go over a steaming, heated thermal area that's probably one of the hottest in the whole park? What kinds of technology can you use? They manage the entire country. It's a huge responsibility. And on these roads, we're talking about 100-year decisions in a lot of respect. The federal highways, by being our partner and involved with those long-term decisions, are really helping from cradle to grave. So I think they will always be involved with Yellowstone. Federal highway and its partners know well that building a highway means more than just the contract and the construction. When we initiate at Federal Lands any project, we begin what's called a social economic and environmental team. And that's a partnership of all of the agencies that are stakeholders in the project that have an interest in it from either a monetary or resource advantage point. This is the primary access road to Yellowstone National Park. And they have been key players in this. I know that their interests have been listened to and accommodated. The people at Federal Highway and their partners make this happen. They've held public meetings. They've captured the concerns of the communities in this area. I think they're bringing the glue for putting all the different agencies with the local communities and trying to come up with a plan that we can all be proud of and will work for the Beartooth Highway. The tunnels were built. Vehicles were not as high as they are today. We now have a lot of SUVs on the road. We also have a lot of RVs coming through the park. And a lot of vehicles were hitting the sides of the tunnels. And we had even had a couple of accidents in the tunnels because people were hugging the center line. And then you'd have opposing traffic coming on the other side and it caused problems. We had been looking at the tunnels for a long time with Eastern Federal Lands Highway. We knew that to do the work on the tunnels, it was going to require us to close the road for a certain period of time. The initial reaction from the public was negative. We had some major concerns over the construction because our livelihood depends on tourism. And we didn't want tourism interrupted because the main flow of revenue for my child. Federal highways worked within the local communities. We've had several meetings, not only with public, the members of the public, but also with officials from the local communities. The park designed a plan to do the construction on the tunnels with minimum impact on the flow of traffic and interruption to our tourism industry. The construction was designed so that there would be 10-minute delays through the tunnels. My people were grateful and I'm glad it was done. We have access to what the newest technology is in terms of road building, whether it's making the road safer or more efficient for people to use or getting information to motorists that need to use that roadway system. The Cumberland Gap National Historic Park stands on the shoulders of the junction of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. It faced the preservation challenge of adding tunnels to divert traffic from the more historic areas of the park. America's historic gateway to the West would be the best description of the Cumberland Gap. The project itself has been a monumental partnership between the Federal Highway Administration and the National Park Service, encompassing multiple contracts to ultimately build the tunnels, relocate to US highways, construct several bridge overpasses, and highway interchanges as well if it's one of a kind. One of the features of the Cumberland Gap Tunnels is the ventilation system. It's the first of its kind in the United States. We have 75 horsepower jet fans in pairs mounted every 600 feet within the tunnel. We also have cross passages that gives access to fresh ventilation at any point of the tunnel. What formed into a partnership with the National Park Service and the Federal Highway Administration became a real design and engineering marvel that to this day is looked at by others all around the world. Just last week, we had Russian transportation officials here studying how this tunnel was built. Chair Haley Skyway is a scenic highway that rivals any in the United States. During construction, the contractor encountered an acid-producing rock called Anakista, whose runoff was polluting trout streams. Steep side slopes challenged their ability to fill. Federal Highway and the Forest Service had to develop new methods to overcome both these technical challenges. They came up with a design to encapsulate the Anakista to eliminate that acid runoff into the stream. They used a variety of things such as nylon roving, to line the ditch lines, and to prevent erosion. FHWA was probably on the cutting edge of a lot of different techniques on this project. Natchez Trace, one of the original highways of our nation, forged by the footsteps of Native Americans, trappers, and traders. The parkway here parallels and criss-crosses the original trace. It offers a unique case as one of the few national parks where the roadway is actually the park. Like each of the federal highways we have been visiting, the Natchez Trace Parkway stands as a symbol of all the virtues embraced by federal highways partners. Sensitivity to the environment and culture. Involvement from beginning to the end of the project. Coalition building with local communities and other agencies. Sophisticated technical knowledge of safety, mobility, and convenience. One of the main objectives of building a modern parkway is to design a roadway that lies lightly on the land. When we're building a road, we need to know what the fabric of that location is about, so that we can provide a transportation system that fits in with the very fabric of the location that we're trying to serve. We work with the federal highways administration so well, because they do work with laying lightly on the land the roads, because of the fact that the resources are absolutely important. And the visual experience that you have from being on those roads are critical. If it weren't for us and the work that we do, Americans wouldn't be able to enjoy the vast amounts of public lands that we have in this nation.