North Mountain Tower

This is an award-winning project on North Mountain in Phoenix that is one of the busiest hiking trails in the Valley that rises approximately 600 feet from the street. Millions of people visit this popular hiking destination yearly. The mountain also houses multiple towers that need restoration. The City of Phoenix needed to add a new 120-foot tower on top of North Mountain, which required a 200,000-pound crane to install. Hunter Contracting Co. (Hunter) rehabilitated 4,400 feet of the winding, private roadway to allow street access to the mountaintop and ensure there was an area large enough for the crane to maintain stability. The team built a new 13.5-foot-wide asphalt paved roadway and a three-foot-wide compacted decomposed granite shoulder with a concrete ditch, drainage pipes, headwalls, and a custom-designed retaining wall system with handrails that separate the road from the steep drop-offs.