A 200-foot chunk of the brand new $15 million road from Trappers Loop to Snowbasin Ski Resort, location for many of next winter's Olympic races, is sliding down the mountain.

Sections of the road have sunk about a foot and slid downhill as much as 5 inches, leaving large cracks and a series of abrupt dips on the road's surface. The 3.5- mile long cutoff route has been closed and when it will be reopened is uncertain.

Although there is an alternative route open, the road is needed to transport construction equipment to get ready for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. Officials are unsure as to the reason for the problem.

The road has been controversial for more than a decade. It was built with $15 million in federal funds as a necessary part of preparations for the 2002 Winter Games and the section of the road is at a known slide area that has had hundreds of thousands of dollars already spent on it.

Security officials said the one road that then went to Snowbasin would make the resort easily attacked by terrorists. Opponents to the road were many. Some said Earl Holding, who owns Snowbasin and originally proposed the road, should pay for it since his resort would benefit from it financially. Taxpayers, instead, picked up the tab.

Environmentalists were opposed to the road because it cuts across the Wheeler Creek drainage system.

The road also had critics who said it couldn't be built precisely because of what happened Sunday: The mountain on which it is built is sliding.

The road crosses two huge landslide areas, Bear Wallow and Green Pond. These are 2- mile long glacial deposits of flowing soil up to 100 feet deep and hundreds of feet wide.

About 12 years ago, a former Forest Service employee who has since died, Earl Olson, warned the area where the road is being built was unstable. He compared the Bear Wallow slide to the Thistle mud slide of 1983. Thistle dumped a 150-foot wide mud pile that dammed a river and buried an entire town.

Olson said Bear Wallow is 2.3 times bigger. Rex Harris, the UDOT engineer in 1999 who had the job of stopping the slide, agreed. "It's huge, the volume of it," he said. At its shallowest it is 30 feet deep and it goes down to 100 feet.

The slides move because subsurface water oozes through the dirt and forces its way up. That makes the dirt slippery and causes it to "float" slightly. Gravity pulls the dirt downhill. Measurements show Bear Wallow is slipping at a rate of 6 inches a year.

To stop the slides, Harris designed a massive "rock buttress shear key," a buried wall of stone designed to hold back the sliding mud and drain its water out.

DeYoung said the spring runoff, and water soaking the mountain, is causing this slide. "We had no indication that this is an area that would move on us, but this time of year with the saturated soil, this is the time of year that sort of thing will show up."

He said some money was budgeted to allow for some repairs, but admitted, "this is more than I had hoped for."

When the road will reopen depends on how long repairs take, he said. He said repairs to the road surface can't be started until the cause of the sliding is found and fixed.

[Story from the Utah Standard Examiner]