Spyglass Hill Resort, Roatan

When people picture Roatan today, with paved roads across the island, it’s hard to imagine a time when getting around was next to impossible. But in the late 1960s, roads were little more than muddy scars in the floor, usable only in dry weather, and in the rainy season, nearly impassable. To build a resort on the north side of the island back then meant more than vision and money. It meant carving a road through some of the roughest terrain in the Bay Islands.

That’s exactly what had to be done for Spyglass Hill Resort.

Photo by A Roatan Odyssey

Lorenzo Dee Belveal, the developer, fired up with ambition, went straight to the top. He met with Ing. Roberto Cantero, the Honduran Minister of Natural Resources and Public Works, who promised, over endless cups of coffee, that a road would be built before the lodge was finished. The words were sweet, but they were empty. Meeting after meeting in Tegucigalpa brought the same enthusiastic nods and reassurances, but no bulldozers, no workers, no road.

So the job fell on his shoulders. He hired Lem Cooper as construction superintendent, brought in Chicago architects to design the buildings, and set local Punta Gorda men to work clearing land. The Honduran government “helped” by lending some machinery, which he had barged over from Puerto Cortas. Within a month, a serviceable road was hacked out from Punta Gorda to Oak Ridge. It was short, just a few miles, but it proved something important: it could be done.

But Spyglass Hill needed more than a local access track. Guests had to be able to travel from the airport at Coxen Hole, across the island’s spine, to the resort. That meant nearly twenty miles of new road, across high ridges, steep slopes, and thick bush.

Enter engineer Jorge Bogran, a bear of a man with the skill and toughness for the job. With no time and no budget for proper surveying, they came up with an unusual method: flour.

A helicopter was chartered, and 200 little paper bags of flour were bought from H.B. Warren and packed. From the open side door, the route was marked bag by bag, dropped from the sky. Each one burst on the ground below, scattering a white dot against the green bush. From French Harbor eastward, a dotted trail of flour showed where the road would climb over Plan Grande, struggle across Antigual Hill, and eventually connect to the Punta Gorda–Oak Ridge road already built.

Bogran then followed those flour dots on foot, hammering wooden stakes into the ground every twenty feet. Behind him came the bulldozers, graders, and loaders, chewing a path through the interior.

It was grueling, dangerous work. On steep slopes, one mistake could send a machine tumbling hundreds of feet into a ravine. Keeping the machinery fueled was another battle. Diesel had to be begged, borrowed, and hauled island-wide. Friends, neighbors, business owners—all chipped in. When supplies faltered, Mariscos Hybur stepped up, quietly keeping the machines running with thousands of gallons of fuel.

Lorenzo explained in 1997 "I begged fuel from one end of the island to the other. The trouble with naming names in an undertaking like this is that invariably you forget somebody. Or a lot of somebodies. But among the folks who gave me fuel (or money to buy fuel) for the tractors, I remember Dr. Polo Galindo, Dino Silvestri, Delmer McNab, Harvey Mayer, Ozzie Ebanks, Rex Gough, George and "Plenty" Jones, Stalin Jones, Bill Kepler, Larry McLoughlin, Albert Jackson, Teodoro Castro, Eric Anderson, Seth Arch, John J. Wood (although I seem to recall that it was Miss Catherine who actually handed the money to me), and there were others.

And I apologize to everyone I have left out. Blame it on faulty memory. It certainly isn't intentional. I think it was Albert Jackson who loaned me the flat-bed truck that we used to haul the 55-gallon drums of fuel, lube and water, from the pumps to where the tractors were working.

I have to point out that Allan Hyde was one of my first friends on Roatan, and to this day, remains my best friend. It's like we understand each other. So, when I needed a reliable fuel source, I naturally went looking for Allan.

After explaining the problem to him, told me that whenever I needed fuel for the machines and didn't have another place to get it, send the fuel drums to Hybur. "I'll fill 'em up for you," I remember him saying. And he did! I have no idea how many thousands of gallons of diesel fuel Mariscos Hybur put into "the road." But it was a lot. The earth-moving equipment never shut down again for lack of fuel in their fuel tanks. For other unavoidable reasons, perhaps. But we always had fuel".

Slowly, painfully, the flour trail became a dirt road.

Finally, after weeks of sweat and setbacks, the last berm of earth was pushed aside, connecting the new road with the Punta Gorda–Oak Ridge track. The impossible dream was now a reality. To celebrate, the builder threw his friend Ozzie on the back of a dirt bike, took a few celebratory swigs of Flor de Caña, and rode the new road Ozzie had sworn would “never happen in his lifetime.” They crashed once in the loose dirt, but it didn’t matter. The road existed.

That night, at Spyglass, there was a celebration like no other. Tractor drivers, bush cutters, neighbors, and friends—everyone who had sweated or helped—drank and laughed until the liquor shelves were nearly bare.

At first, many islanders had doubted the need for a road at all. Boats had always been enough. Roads, after all, cut through fences, split pastures, and made a mess of the green hillsides. But once the bulldozers broke through, attitudes shifted. Suddenly, “the road” was everybody’s idea.

It hadn’t been easy. Land disputes nearly shut it down, politics had offered nothing but empty promises, and the physical work was punishing. But in the end, a road stood where before there was only forest and mud.

And from that road, the story of Roatan changed forever.