This includes not only the actual cost of maintenance, but very extensive improvements, such as the metalling of the road from the so-called zigzag to Baguio, the construction of five steel bridges, and the replacing of all the original bridges on the road and of all the original culverts except those made of concrete or masonry.
On my arrival in Benguet in 1901, I found that good progress had been made on the upper end of the road, which had penetrated for a short distance into the canon proper without encountering any considerable obstacles.
On October 15, 1901, the commission stated in its annual report to the secretary of war, "He [509] has been much delayed by the difficulty of procuring the labour necessary for its early completion, and several months will yet elapse before it is finished!" They did! On August 20, 1901, Captain Meade was relieved, and Mr.N.M.Holmes was made engineer of the road.
On February 3, 1902, a little sanitarium was opened in a small native house at Baguio.

During the following July I was sent to it as a patient, and while in Benguet again inspected the road which had been continued high up on the canon wall to a point where, on a very steep mountain side, a peculiar rock formation had been encountered at the very grass roots.

This rock disintegrated rapidly under the action of the sun when exposed to it.

Comparatively solid in the morning, it would crack to pieces and slide down the mountain side before night.

A sixty-foot cut had already been made into the precipitous mountain side, and the result was an unstable road-bed, hardly four feet in width, which threatened to go out at any moment.
My trip to Baguio promptly relieved a severe attack of acute intestinal trouble from which I had been suffering, and when Governor Taft fell ill the following year with a similar ailment, and his physicians recommended his return to the United States, I did my best to persuade him to try Baguio instead.