Fighting water came next for the soldiers of the 97th coming out of Valdez to the Alaska Highway. Soldiers driving dozers and trucks negotiated the narrow dirt road and the breathtaking cliffs of Keystone Canyon. Beyond the Canyon they passed through the narrow walls of packed snow that choked Thompson Pass.
Link to another story “Suddenly Climbing”
Out of Thompson Pass, the existing road they traveled descended past the Worthington Glacier and the glacier’s surging melt water had, as it did nearly every spring, washed out some of the old timber bridges. The process of fighting water began as the Alaska Road Commission rushed to replace them.’
But even intact bridges couldn’t support the heavy loads the 97th brought up the Highway. When heavy trucks and then bulldozers came, the soldiers had to bypass the bridges and ford the rushing water.
Roaring white water, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, changing depth abruptly, always frigid, cascaded through the streambed. A catskinner would carefully work his roaring dozer down the bank and out into the water, aiming upstream at an angle, knowing the current would push him downstream. Sometimes he made it to the other bank. Other times the dozer sank into the muddy bottom or simply “drowned” and went silent when the water reached the engine. Then the catskinner sat, trapped, on his steel seat in mid-stream while his buddies figured out how to tow him out. The troops got creative with tow cables, trees and other dozers.
