Frank Hinkel, T4 bulldozer operator, pushing dirt over the wall of a canyon, got too close to the edge. His dozer followed the dirt over. Hinkel tried to jump but banged his head and sat back down; rode his steel mount down to the floor of the canyon. Luckily, the dozer landed on its tracks.
Link to another story “The Humble Culvert”
Hinkel worked on what Captain Boyd in his memoir, Me and Company C, called “Boyd’s Grand Canyon”. Over millennia a tiny stream had cut its way deeper and deeper into Yukon dirt, creating a canyon squarely across the path of the Alaska Highway. The stream required a small but long culvert, and once the soldiers had installed it, they had to fill the canyon with dirt.
Down on the timber culvert, the men ran out of the metal spikes they used to pin the timbers together. They resorted to drilling holes through the logs with a compressed air drill and shaping wooden spikes to drive in through the holes.
With the culvert in place, the men had a deep canyon to fill and a lot of dirt to push over its walls. To speed things along, the 73rd Pontoon Company ferried a bulldozer down adjacent Teslin Lake and unloaded it past the canyon. Catskinner Hinkle drove it back up to the south wall of the canyon, and bulldozers pushed dirt into the canyon from both sides.
Northern Sector commander, General Hoge, and his boss from Washington, Major General Sturdevant, in Yukon Territory on an inspection tour, planned a visit to Company C at Boyd’s Canyon. With all but perfect timing, Hinkle had his adventure an hour and a half before the VIP’s arrived.
Clambering down from his side of the canyon, Boyd found Hinkel shook up with a bump on his head.
“Who told you to drive that dozer over the edge of the bank?”
“Nobody, Sir.”
“Then what are you doing down here?”
“I really don’t know, sir.”
Boyd ordered Hinkel and his dozer back to work and when the Generals arrived they found a busy, normal work site.