LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

For more than 90 years, a single road has carried visitors into the heart of Denali National Park. But even before that, the ground there was shifting.

The place is enormous, remote and largely uninterested in accommodating us. For decades, along one particularly troublesome stretch of the park’s only road, the Pretty Rocks Landslide has been quietly rearranging the landscape.

Crews could, for the most part, keep up with it. They’d repair the road, regrade it and come back when the earth moved again. Then, in 2021, Pretty Rocks stopped being quite so cooperative. What had once been measured in inches of movement per year accelerated to inches per day — and eventually, inches per hour. It forced road closure and created a rather extraordinary problem you can read about in our cover story (starting on page 6).

Of course, it doesn’t always take something as dramatic as moving earth to make us reconsider how to approach what’s in front of us. Sometimes it’s a detail we overlooked — one that becomes obvious as soon as someone else points it out.

After our July/August issue went out, some of you pointed out something we should have caught ourselves: The workers pictured on our cover appeared to be working at height without appropriate fall protection. It was an especially unfortunate oversight for an issue that included our annual safety series — and a missed opportunity to reinforce the care for worker safety we hope to reflect in these pages.

We changed the cover image in our digital edition, and I’m grateful to the readers who cared enough to say something. Because credibility is built, at least in part, by paying attention when the environment shifts or when feedback says you have missed something important.

Our features this month are about technology, and so much of the tech use reshaping construction is about helping everyone (from the jobsite to the office) pay closer attention. We make the best decisions we can with the dataset we have. Then the conditions change, and maybe we learn something we didn’t know before. What we do with new information or perspective is still up to us.

Sometimes this can mean rethinking how to cross a portion of earth that refuses to stay still. Sometimes it means changing a magazine cover. Both require being willing to notice when something isn’t right — and caring enough to respond.

As always, we are grateful for your readership and support.

Wishing you a productive autumn,