After no contractors wanted the job, Park County plans to revisit how best to fix an Elk Basin road that’s being damaged by a slow landslide.

The county recently found no one interested in stabilizing around 800 feet of Road 1NG, about 15 miles north of Powell.

“We’re going to go back to the drawing board and see if we can come up with a different approach and try to do something quickly,” Park County Engineer Brian Edwards told commissioners last week.

The sliding road — not far from the natural gas processing plant operated by Vanguard Natural Resources and used heavily by oil and gas vehicles — has gotten progressively worse over the past year or so.

When county officials sought bids last month to stabilize the slope around the road, “it seemed like we were getting good interest,” Edwards said.

Twenty-one contractors across Wyoming, Montana and Idaho got copies of the plans and about a dozen showed up to a pre-bid meeting at the site, but no bids arrived by the Oct. 5 deadline, he said.

Edwards said it appears one part of the project — driving a type of nail deep into the earth to secure the sliding ground — was going to make up an unexpectedly high percentage of the project’s cost. With that nailing work having to be handled by a subcontractor, it apparently wasn’t going to leave enough work to interest the general contractors.

The county now plans to either bid out the nailing separately or find a way to simplify the design.

“We’re hoping we find a cheaper, better way to do it,” Edwards said.

Commissioners wondered if it would be worth upgrading or creating an alternate route down into Elk Basin, but “by the time we’d improved the alternative, we’d end up spending way more,” Edwards said. Assistant county engineer Jeremy Quist added that finding a different route is “likely not feasible.”

Moisture in the ground is fueling the landslide.

The sliding portion of Road 1NG is near an old water tank, but Vanguard officials have said the tank isn’t leaking, and a county consultant found no evidence that it is, Edwards said.

Commissioners also suggested moving the road toward the water tank and away from the sliding earth, but Edwards didn’t think there was enough room on the hill to do that.

Commissioner Tim French wondered if Vanguard would be interested in helping share the cost of fixing the problem. The county has an interest in keeping the road safe for the public and for preserving the revenue it receives from the oil and gas operations, French said, “but also as a company, they’re making a lot of money on the oil.”

“I bet they’re not making much money now, though,” Commissioner Loren Grosskopf offered, referring to down times in the industry.