Franklin County commissioners directed the county’s road supervisor on Tuesday to immediately put up emergency cones and signs and to get a hole fixed by weekend on Byron Road in Township 6 North of Weld after a couple’s truck was seriously damaged.

The road holds the gateway to the very popular hiking trails on Tumbledown Mountain.

Linda Joyal, chairperson of the Byron Select Board, told commissioners that an Andover couple who had dinner in Weld last week drove into a hole in the road around dusk. A front wheel came off and the truck was significantly damaged, she said.

The occupants had to walk over 2 miles because there is no cellphone service. The road runs from Byron to Township 6 North of Weld. If someone was critically injured, it would take a long time to find them, Joyal said.

There were no signs warning of the road’s condition.

“It has become a huge danger in my opinion,” she said, noting the hole is at least 3 feet deep.

“It is a serious situation,” Joyal said, especially with 70,000 people visiting Tumbledown Mountain each year.

The large and expanding hole has been a recurring problem for several years. “I am tired of just talking about what we should do,” said board Vice ChairmanTom Skolfield of Weld. “We need to just do it.”

Skolfield brought up concerns about the the hole over a year ago, submitted pictures of it, and continued to mention it.

On Tuesday he made a motion to repair the road by the weekend, and to get cones put out immediately, which commissioners approved.

Byron gets a lot of complaints about the road because people think it belongs to the town, Joyal said. One section of the road is in Byron. Another 2.5 miles, including the section with the hole, is in the unorganized territory and is the county’s responsibility to fix, county officials previously acknowledged.

Byron’s section is in good shape and most of Franklin County’s is too, except for about one-quarter of a mile, Commissioner Fenwick Fowler said. The state owns the property on each side of the road in the unorganized territory.

Commissioners reached out to the state Bureau of Parks and Lands to help maintain the county’s section of the road a few years ago. The two entities reached a verbal agreement in 2023 that the bureau would collaborate with Franklin County on maintenance. But severe flooding hit the state that winter and the Bureau of Parks and Lands didn’t have the work crews and time to maintain it.

Legislation was submitted by Sen. Russell Black, R-Wilton, and other lawmakers in 2025 that would require the state to take over maintenance of the road.

The legislation was approved, but was carried over to 2026 and is still unfunded, commission Chairman Bob Carlton said.

Someone is going to get seriously hurt or killed, and it will be a liability to Franklin County if nothing is done, Joyal said Tuesday.

The county hired a Kingfield contractor to repair it, but the work hadn’t been done as of Tuesday, county road supervisor Robert Lightbody told the commission. That whole section of road needs to be cut out and redone, he said. He planned to try to reach the contractor again.

In September 2025, Lightbody told commissioners the condition of the road was concerning. Commissioners put $100,000 in the unorganized territory budget to repair the road in December 2025.