Every bit of the Alaska Highway ran through as rugged a wilderness as exists anywhere. Through the spring and early summer of 1942 over 8,000 soldiers of the Corps of Engineers struggled against overwhelming odds to get themselves and their machines into that wilderness to the path of the Highway. Right behind the soldiers came …
Category Archives: Alaska Highway
Midnight Sun
Midnight sun meant that by mid-summer machines and vehicles ran nearly 24/7 along the emerging Alaska Highway. They took a serious beating. Truck drivers carried spare parts, scavenged from broken equipment abandoned by other drivers along the road–tires, axles, anything useable. A driver who left a truck unattended might well return to find a stripped …
Steamboat Mountain
Steamboat mountain quite suddenly took the relatively flat British Columbia terrain and swept it into the sky. Soldiers had dealt with muskeg and rivers and forests of pine and spruce. Now Steamboat Mountain, towering three thousand feet above the surrounding valleys, introduced them to the Muskwa mountain range and the Northern Rockies. Did the terrain …
Apology for Kiskatinaw Error
Those of you who read my stories know that I posted about a famous curved timber bridge on the Alaska Highway a couple of days ago. The bridge near Dawson Creek, BC is the Kiskatinaw Bridge. “I’m not sure if you have spelled the name incorrectly at least five times – perhaps because of some …
Rusty Dow
Rusty Dow, the first woman to drive a fully loaded truck the length of the Alaska Highway, did it in 1944. She drove the 1600 miles from Fairbanks to Dawson Creek in seven days, and she astonished every man along the way. Rough Draft of a Highway Rusty had been driving trucks down in …
Kiskatinaw
Kiskatinaw Bridge, one of the true engineering marvels of the Alaska Highway did not get built until the Army had moved on. A river just a few miles out of Dawson Creek, Kiskatinaw may have given the soldiers one of their first clues in 1942 that the north country would fight back. But with the …
Keeping Clean
Keeping clean isn’t easy when you live and work deep in the wilderness of the far north. Soldiers building the Alaska Highway tried keeping clean. They did not always (more accurately, they did not often) succeed. ‘Big John’ Erklouts of the 340th dealt with icy cold rivers and streams by washing half of his body …
Kluane Lake
Kluane Lake presented the soldiers of the 18th with a bridge problem that ingenuity alone would not solve. Fifty miles of their road to Alaska would run along the shore of Kluane Lake. Not a problem. But they had to get themselves and their equipment around the end of Kluane Lake before they could start …
Stockton Bridge
Stockton Bridge awaited the 18th at the Aishihik River about 80 miles north of Whitehorse. A conventional timber bridge, Stockton spanned a deep gorge and water fairly boiled through the deep channel between its solid rock walls. The 18th Comes to Skagway The surging water hadn’t bothered the original builders. Given solid rock walls …
A Thousand Pair of Army Boots
A thousand pair of Army boots had tromped across a railway platform into northern Canada in March at Dawson Creek, British Columbia. The second set of a thousand pair to tromp into northern Canada warmed—sort of—the feet of the 18th Engineers at the depot in Whitehorse, Yukon. The first troops to Dawson Creek When FDR …