Gravel or Pavement, Which Road Montana Counties Are Heading Down

Gravel or pavement. Here's why some Montana counties are leaning towards gravel roads versus paved roads in more and more situations.

I had the honor of speaking at the MACRS Convention in Great Falls. MACRS is the Montana Association of County Road Supervisors. What a great crew. You had road supervisors, foreman, road crews, county commissioners, and folks from the construction and heavy equipment industry all packing into the Heritage Inn in Great Falls.

Tuesday night, I also had the privilege of attending the Caterpillar dinner up at the airport overlooking the city. What a view from up there!

I had a great chat with Steve Jenkins, Wheatland County Road Supervisor Travis Schuchard, and Wheatland County Commissioner Jeff Sell. We got to talking about why, in some circumstances, it is advantageous to do a gravel road rather than a paved road- especially in some of these more rural counties.

Steve Jenkins did a great job of explaining how the wear and tear on a paved road is way more costly and the road can get pretty beat up pretty fast. He talked about how some road crews are mixing in milled asphalt with gravel as an alternative to the costlier process of paving a road. Here's the result, according to the AI platform Grok:

The combination creates a semi-hardened surface that’s more durable than plain gravel, resists erosion better, and reduces dust. It’s not as solid as fresh asphalt but offers a cost-effective middle ground.

I asked Matt Ulberg, Director of the Montana Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP), about this during the MACRS convention. He says a lot of counties are looking at pursuing this option, especially the timber communities that have lost timber mills and the revenue that comes with the logging industry. This may be a way for them to keep those roads open.

Ulberg: "If you're a county that has a small budget, it costs five times as much to maintain one mile of asphalt that it does one mile of gravel. So, there are counties that are unpaving their roads now, and they're grinding them up, like you said, using that material to recycle and giving them a surface that they can maintain with a road grader instead of a paving machine or a chip seal machine. It stretches their dollar farther, and with the volumes that are on those roads of traffic- if you don't have 500 to 1,000 cars a day you really should probably be in a gravel situation. And so many of our roads were paved to support industry in western Montana that doesn't exist anymore."

We then talked about the importance of reviving and rebuilding our industrial base- like mining and our timber industry.

Here's our full coverage from the MACRS Convention in Great Falls along with extended interviews.