Roads

Road maintenance and repair costs are covered by income from a grazing lease with the Mannix Brothers whose family has ranched in the Helmville Valley for four generations. The majority of the lease income is used for road maintenance. Over the last two years Powell County has worked on the Hoover Creek Road from the Jens exit on I-90 heading north toward Miller Lake, as county money and manpower allow. GMPOA maintains the road from the lake to our property boundary. The Board responds to requests from property owners for road repair and allocates the available funds for the most needed maintenance. Any property owner can request repairs. Contact George Tague (geotague@gmail.com or 303-717-2446) or Bruce Koerner (brucekoerner@bresnan.net or 406-490-7344) with requests.

The roadwork areas we focus on annually include:

Cattle guards, which are installed at ranch fence lines so GMPOA property owners don’t have to get out to open gates. The ranchers maintain the fences on GMPOA’s perimeter while we maintain some cattle guards on Hoover Creek, Mud Creek, and Chimney Lakes Roads. Maintaining these heavy high traffic guards require periodic cleaning of runoff mud and debris, mechanical repair [welding & reinforcement], occasional pit rebuilding and even costly full replacement.

Water bars are the shallow ditches that divert runoff water to the side of the road as opposed to allowing it to run down the road bed and erode it. Water running down the roads is the single most destructive natural problem. Another goal of the water bars is to keep sediment from filling the pits under the cattle guards.

Grading. Most owners think of grading as the most effective use of funds to smooth the roadbed and fill potholes but, due to the rocky nature of most of our roads, it is only moderately successful over time. It can only be done effectively during moist conditions. Grading is a short term fix for what is usually a long term roadbed problem.

Road Base. When property owners founded the GMPOA in 1975, most roads were gumbo clay impassable in wet weather. For four decades, we’ve improved our roads by application of thousands of truckloads of gravel, rock, and road base. This is challenging because of the difficulty of locating proper materials, distance from the source of the material, and hauling and spreading the base. This is an ongoing problem which is critical for the future of our roads.