DEVA 335272 - TITUS CANYON ROAD CONSTRUCTION

The project is located at Death Valley National Park, California and Nevada. The surrounding area is rural with limited staging located at various turnouts along the project roadway. The roadway is closed to the public due to storm damage. Delivery of materials is anticipated to be complicated by rough roadway conditions. The construction site is 85 miles from nearest suppliers, and 10 miles from the nearest lodging facilities.

Park roads leading to the start of the project will remain open during construction, thus contract activities and logistics must be structured and scheduled to minimize visitor impact. The site requires protective measures to ensure the surrounding area remains undisturbed. The roadway is a historic cultural resource. The anticipated period of performance of 200 calendar days including any potential weather shutdown. There are seasonal/other shutdowns mandated through the construction season due to high temperatures in summer. Winter construction may be required.

Project Scope: Titus Canyon is the most popular back-country road in Death Valley National Park. This project will make repairs to the eastern 13.5 miles of Titus Canyon Road between the east boundary gate and the head of the canyon just west of the Leadfield town site. The 97-year-old, 24.7-mile route, of which the easternmost 22 miles were classified as a route suitable only for high clearance/4x4 vehicles, was heavily damaged in both the August 2022 and 2023 storm events.

Due to the severe damage, the road currently is impassable for all vehicles larger than a bicycle at multiple locations. Those two storm events produced rainfall that far exceeded previous historic storm events. The most common form of damage was erosional gully cutting from storm runoff running down long lengths of the roadway due to the extremely high flows and inadequate numbers of runoff diversion structures, or diversions that were no longer maintained and thus allowed runoff to concentrate on the roadway.

There also were multiple road crossings of wash channels where the high flood flows jumped the wash channels and ran down and cut gullies in long lengths of the roadway. Additionally, the heavy rains destabilized many of the steep slopes above the roadway and generated significant rockfall onto the roadway. On multiple steep sidehill roadway segments, especially in the vicinity of Red Pass, the poorly compacted outboard edge of the roadway was also destabilized by the heavy rains and runoff.

In several of these areas the remaining roadway width has been reduced to an unsafe dimension (even for 4x4 vehicles) of 10-feet or less. On the westernmost 8-miles of the road between Leadfield and the canyon mouth where the road was located on the floor of Titus Canyon, the road was totally obliterated by the flood flows and deep deposition of alluvial sand, gravel, and boulders.