Six Inches From Losing a Truck on Glacier's Deadliest Road

In September 1932, an FWD four wheel drive heavy hauler came within six inches of going over the edge of Glacier National Park's Garden Wall, the most dangerous stretch of the entire Going to the Sun Road construction project. This is the story of how a freshly blasted, ungraded ledge eleven feet wide, an early season snowfall, and a four wheel drive system most rival truckmakers had ignored combined to create one of the closest calls of the eight year, two and a half million dollar effort to carve a fifty mile mountain road across the Continental Divide. You will see how the FWD Model B's independent front axle traction stopped a slide that a rear drive hauler could not have survived, how a hand operated cable winch anchored to a single rock bolt pulled the truck back along the cliff face foot by foot, and how a road crew with no precedent for this exact emergency improvised a solution in real time, working just ahead of the truck's rear wheels. Going to the Sun Road was dedicated on July 15, 1933, after eleven years of construction and the loss of three workers' lives. The FWD that nearly went over its most dangerous cliff kept working through the rest of that season and for years afterward, a reminder that duty cycle matching mattered more than raw horsepower in some of the hardest jobs in American trucking and road construction history. If this story moved you, subscribe for more deep dives into the machines and the people behind America's most demanding hauls. #truckbuff #americantrucks #truckbuffusa #truckhistory #vintagetrucks #americantrucking