Spinning steel blades shrieked as they sliced through trees harvested along the path of the Alaska Highway. Men stood above and behind the blades, pulling levers, guiding the logs through, and the spinning blades helped roaring trucks and dozers demolish the quiet of the deep north woods. Sawyers proved as essential to the massive project …
Category Archives: Construction of the Alaska Highway
Since 1942
Since 1942 thousands of men and two governments have struggled to complete the Alaska Highway. It hasn’t happened yet. In the summer of 2017, men and heavy equipment worked over several miles of the Highway north of Kluane Lake. Waiting for their turn to pass through the construction zone, some drivers got out to …
Muscle and Bone
Muscle and bone and sheer determination were, by mid-summer tearing a long Alaska Highway out of the subarctic wilderness. By July from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Tok, Alaska, against all odds, the Highway began to emerge, and the modern epic caught the attention of the outside world. Reporters bestowed nicknames on the project. …
Timber Bridges
Timber bridges installed by Alaska Highway builders speeding through the subarctic region in the summer of 1942 survived their first winter. Well… some of them survived. The soldiers, forced to add building timber bridges to their rapidly expanding skill set, learned speed not quality. North of Whitehorse, just forty soldiers built Jo-Jo River Bridge, forty …
Hinkle and Boyd’s Canyon
Hinkel, a Tech 4 catskinner in Company C, bulldozed dirt down the wall of Boyd’s Canyon. He got too close, and his dozer followed the dirt over the edge. He rode his steel mount all the way down to the bottom; and, luckily, the dozer landed on its tracks. Boyd, his company commander, hurriedly clambered …
Barge “Bridges”
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 …
Nature Could Beat the Dozers
Nature fought the Alaska Highway builders in 1942—fought them hard. And, for all their awesome power, sometimes even the monster dozers lost a battle. At mid-summer, the soldiers of the 93rd Engineers struggled through Yukon. Nature opened her spigots and endless rain fell day after day. Long stretches of road turned to thick mud with …
Caterpillar Dozers
Caterpillar dozers did jobs on the Alcan project that Caterpillar never imagined. One night a sergeant of the 18th Engineers, working his D8 into and through the trees, acquired a determined grizzly bear guide and companion. He swerved toward the giant bear and it ran away, but as soon as he returned to his work, …
Rippling Rhythm Boulevard
Rippling rhythm describes bouncing truck tires rolling over corduroy. And on the Alaska Highway in 1942 corduroy had nothing to do with fabric. The road builders fought one of Mother Nature’s fiercest weapons with their version of “corduroy”. From the southern end of the route in British Columbia to the northern end in Alaska, nature …
Chow
Chow is essential–Good, plentiful chow? Not so much. Swarming Road Builders Need Food and Supplies The soldiers who built the Alaska Highway counted their food as a primary source of unrelieved misery. In the early days, the soldiers ate C-rations. Everything else—milk, eggs, potatoes, and vegetables—came canned or powdered. Powdered vegetables tasted like cardboard. Monotonous …