The Muskwa Range loomed in the Southern Sector.
On the Alaska Highway project progress happened in June 1942 in Yukon. In Alaska and British Columbia, not so much.
In Alaska the 97th had struggled to get over Thompson Pass, still waited for their heavy equipment to make its way to Seattle and on up the Inside Passage to Valdez.
In British Columbia the 35th Engineers, trailed by two more regiments, struggled through endless rain and mud to make their climb into and over the Muskwa Mountain Range, part of the immense Canadian Rockies.
Forty miles out from Fort Nelson, quite suddenly the terrain climbed out of the muskeg and swept into the sky. Steamboat Mountain towered three thousand feet above the surrounding valleys.
The road had to get by Steamboat and the only way was around and up—and up.
Even a few months later, with the road around steamboat in place, a trucker named Cyril Griffith remembered Steamboat Mountain.
Mud covered the steep, crooked road and a trucker preparing to use it knew to be going as fast as possible when he started the climb. Even so, he would be in first gear within a few hundred yards, and he would crawl along in first for miles. Worse than going up, going down created the pile of wrecks that littered the bottom mile and a half.
The 35th celebrated July 4, 1942 at Summit Lake, Steamboat officially in the “rear view”.
And Chester Russel killed a sheep, the first fresh meat in a very long time.
