The North Fork Road will see $1 million in new guardrails in the future.

Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke, a Republican, presented Flathead County officials on Monday with a faux check for $1 million to replace the guardrails along the road from the end of the pavement near Glacier Rim to the Camas Entrance of Glacier National Park.

The county will actually have to apply for a grant to receive the funds, but the money is there to back it.

The guardrails, aside from ones the county fixed recently right where the road goes from pavement to dirt, are about 50 years old, when the road was owned and maintained by the Forest Service.

Today the county maintains the road, but it’s actually state secondary Route 486 to Camas Road and a county road beyond that.

The bill to replace the guardrails was too high for the county to pay on its own, so the county sought funds from the federal government, as the road in that section serves primarily Forest Service-owned land.

Once the funds are received, the county will likely contract out the actual work, noted county Public Works Director Dave Prunty. There isn’t a timeline at this point.

Zinke was happy to help.

“Let me know what we can do. We’re going through the appropriations process again,” Zinke, who recently announced his retirement, said.

Zinke noted that there are a lot of bridges that need attention in Flathead County as well. Prunty noted there’s still a wooden bridge near Olney that still gets some use. It’s the last wooden bridge in the county.

Zinke also spoke to paving the North Fork Road to Camas. 

He said he thought the project should simply be done as a categorical exclusion, but others see it differently, as the road runs through the home range of grizzly bears and lynx, both of with are endangered species.

The county a few years back tried to get funding for an environmental analysis through the federal Highways Administration, but the funds didn’t go through.

“(Paving) makes sense,” Zinke said. “The loop (from the North Fork to Glacier National Park) needs to be paved ... It drives me crazy. If they had a (categorical exclusion) it would have been done.”

The road will see dust abatement this summer from Glacier Rim to Camas, Prunty said. The county received federal Resource Advisory Committee funding for that. It will not see dust abatement from Camas to Coal Creek, however.