Barge “bridges” solved a major problem in 1942. Building 1800 miles of road through the towering mountain ranges of Northern Canada and Alaska required building around, through and over a maze of rivers. In a wartime emergency, working against an unbelievable eight-month deadline, the soldiers “bridged” the biggest rivers with barges or pontoon ferries. Real bridges could come later.
In April in Yukon Territory soldiers of the 73rd Pontoon Company followed the road building soldiers of the 93rd Engineers through the woods to the Tagish River, dragging a barge. At the river, the pontoon men attached their fourteen-foot-wide by forty-foot-long platform to the top of five 4 foot by 24-foot pontoons, mounted three outboard motors and carried the road builders across the river.
The 73rd and their barge remained in place for months, carrying equipment and supplies across, until the Corps had time to build a proper bridge.
At Charlie lake down in British Columbia the unlucky 74th Pontoon Company built a broad, flat raft on three pontoons, equipped it with several outboard motors. On May 14, loaded with a radio car, a small angle dozer, two officers and fifteen enlisted men, the ungainly craft motored out onto the lake and headed north.
The Charlie Lake barge capsized, lost all the equipment, and drowned several of the soldiers.
North of Whitehorse the 18th Engineers worked northward around Kluane Lake; ferried men and supplies across on two rafts built by the 73rd pontoon engineers, towed by two launches rented at Burwash Landing.
Carrying a twenty-three-ton bulldozer, a pontoon raft had little freeboard, rode extremely low in the water, and resisted the drag of the launch, pulling its stern deep into the water. Given the slightest turbulence both vessels took on water.
Fred rust remembered crossing Kluane Lake with his bulldozer. Three pontoon engineers from the 73rd operated the ferry, one to steer, two to bail water. Forced to tinker with balky motors, falling behind with the bailing, the pontoon men asked Rust to steer so all three could bail. “It gave me a funny feeling to stand in that leaky little tub and look back a couple of hundred feet at my D8 riding sideways almost on top of the water.”
