The Weeping Wall is a long curtain of water running down a cliff cut for the road, heavy in June and thin by August. Next to it, Big Bend's wide curve looks up at avalanche paths and the cliffs of the Garden Wall, a good place to scan for goats with binoculars.
Water on your left. That's the Weeping Wall coming up beside you, and Big Bend's pull-off is on your right just past it. If you pulled in at Big Bend, turn right to carry on. This waterfall is a leftover from the road. As engineers carved through here they made a cliff, and water from springs and melting snow above now pours over it. In June and July it's a torrent. By August it fades to a trickle. Look up the slope at Big Bend and you'll see treeless strips running down the mountainside. Those are avalanche paths. The park counts thirty-seven that can affect this road, and the crews know them by name, The Grizzly, Swede Point, Alps of America. Crews often dig out thirty to forty feet of snow at this bend. This one short section can eat a week or more, while spotters watch the slopes and radio warnings down to them. Every spring they have to find the road all over again. Under all that snow, the first dozer cut has to hug the inside wall, so each year the road is relocated by people who can't see it. Each pass comes down closer, until rubber-tired machines take the last three or four feet to protect the pavement and the stone. It takes two to four months. The very first spring opening, in nineteen twenty-nine, was one small gas shovel and a crew of six. And those log guard rails on the avalanche stretches come off every year so the slides can't rip them away. They go back on after the plowing, which is one reason the road can stay shut after the plows have reached the pavement. Scan the cliffs from Big Bend for mountain goats, resting on ledges that make no sense, and for the occasional bighorn, which blends in so well you'll need binoculars. The goats you see up here move to steep cliffs on Mount Cannon for the winter, above Avalanche Creek. A little under a mile past the bend, the road crosses the Triple Arches, and you won't see them from on top. Three masonry arches carry the road across gaps in the cliff. On one of them, the line the arch springs from runs parallel to the six percent grade, while the other two sit level. Some mason cared about that, up here on a ledge, and the arch is still carrying traffic.
Photo: David Restivo / NPS · Public domain