GRANT COUNTY — County and state road crews have been busy clearing rockslides throughout Grant County after the heavy snow melt-off in recent weeks, with at least two vehicles suffering damage on the switchback stretch of Highway 395 South between Canyon City and Seneca.

A rockslide near Vance Creek on Highway 395 South, between mileposts 11C and 12C, proved problematic for motorists, said Oregon Department of Transportation operations maintenance manager Shane Giffin. The rocks were a little larger than a beach ball, he said.

“We’ve had minor erosion on the one at 395 from milepost 11 to 12,” Giffin said. “We had two cars hit rocks that had to be towed out of there. It tore the whole front of one car and the airbags deployed. The wrecker had to come get it. The second one, it tore up the front and broke something in there.”

Giffin said ODOT used a loader to push the material off the road.

Elsewhere, ODOT crews placed rock to hold back water along the westbound shoulder of Highway 26 just west of Prairie City when high water started flooding the roadway on Jan. 22.

This past week, ODOT crews were also busy fixing a washout on Highway 26 near milepost 170, at the Indian Creek Road junction, Giffin said.

Other work for ODOT included drainage clearing and the daily fixing of potholes along 395 on Canyon Mountain and from John Day to Mt. Vernon, with a few on Dixie and Tipton summits, Giffin said.

“We used a lot of sand, so we’ll be cleaning a lot of the drainages to get the sand out so the water will run,” he said.

Grant County Roadmaster Alan Hickerson, who supervises the county’s road maintenance and snowplow deployment, said there had been a couple of rockslides along Keeney Forks Road and a few on the Middle Fork John Day River along County Road 20.

“We got quite a bit of snowfall all at once,” Hickerson said. “The crew did a really good job and the public did really well patiently waiting for us to get to the roads.”

He said his crew has been busy cleaning up the rockslides.

“For us right now, it’s been what we’ve seen in the wintertime with this much water going on,” Hickerson said. “There’s a lot of water, and it usually happens in the wintertime. We see some small rockslides.”