Connecting up the streets

Moorcroft is moving forward with the next phase of the bike/walking path through town as the council examines the anticipated route along North Big Horn Avenue, from Crook Street to Goshen east to Belle Fourche Avenue and south to reconnect with Crook. The aim is to encourage people to use and enjoy the wider and safer pathway to traverse town throughout the year.

There are challenges, though, with several areas of significant elevation and steps built into the walkway on both the east and west sides of the avenue years before ADA was a recognized consideration.

HDR Engineering's Liz Hunter has identified potential options to solve these problems; the first concentrates on the intersection at Big Horn and Crook Street.

"On the east side," explained Hunter, "the sidewalk is at the right-of-way and on the west side, the north part of the sidewalk is right at the back of the curb to begin with and then, as you go further up that block, it jumps over. Having it cross askew isn't ideal for the ADA side of things...We can run the sidewalk along the right-of-way or we can bring the sidewalk in and run it along the curb and that would organize that intersection."

The engineer's study of this aspect of the route moved on to the Big Horn/Weston intersection with an exclamation, "It's a mess." – the same sentiment expressed by Mayor Ben Glenn.

There is currently a culvert crossing beneath the roadway and there is a double elevation in the existing sidewalk. "Probably, we'd end up going up Weston a little way and doing some reconstruction."

The mayor expressed his acceptance of such an addition to the job, saying, "[That] doesn't hurt us at all."

The group discussed other possible options to alleviate the problems discovered within this phase before retiring to consider the suggestions provided by the engineering team. No option was accepted at the time.