Mike Pearson's Adventures on a Pale Blue Dot

Cut 9, on the Squamish highway project was legendary before we even touched it. Steep, high, covered in trees and pretty much looming over the existing roadway, it was an intimidating sight. Approximately 185,000 to 200,000 cubic meters of rock needed to be removed, while keeping the highway and railroad far below, intact. Cubic meters of rock...to put it into perspective. envision a two story, flat roofed house. 10 meters long ( 33 ft +/- ) and 10 meters wide, 10 meters tall...a cube 10x10x10 meters...that would be 1000 cubic meters. A highway legal dump truck with tandem axles can haul about 8 cubic meters of rock...maybe more maybe less...but let's go with 8. The point being...we had to safely and efficiently remove the equivalent of 200 two story houses, or 25,000 dump truck loads of rock from a ledge that was perched 100 meters above the existing highway. We tried to get loggers in before we started....the heli-loggers wanted the highway closed while they worked...th...

Lucky for me...very, very lucky for me, as the Sea to Sky job progressed, it got steadily more complex and challenging. If I would have been faced with all the impossible tasks, right off the hop, I would have just melted into a little puddle of sweat. I had faith in myself and the people working with me, that given the tools and the ability to be creative, all the technical issues could be tamed.  Cut 10, was the next impossible task. Situated above an active railway, and ocean, below a busy main highway...it was a huge step up in complexity. Doing major damage to the tracks was a no-no. There were scheduled trains, both freight and passenger everyday. The railroad company had no sense of ha-ha about having their property buried in blast rock just so we could build a new road to the Olympics in Whistler. Just getting road building machines to the start of the job was tough enough. High and nearly vertical bluffs from both approaches, coupled with threatening overhangs, cause...