Kluane Lake lay in the path of the 18th Engineers, working north from Whitehorse, and when they reached the southern tip of Kluane in July 1942, their relatively easy going came to an abrupt halt. The Slims River brings glacial melt water to feed the lake there, and some men of the 18th stopped to bridge the river. The rest had to get themselves and their dozers to the far shore and build road north along it.
General Hoge dispatched the 73rd Pontoon Engineers to Kluane. At Burwash landing, north along the lake, they rented two motor launches; built two rafts; would load the bulldozers of the 18th on the rafts and tow them across the lake.
The recent tragedy at Charlie Lake down in the Southern Sector had taught the Corps a lesson about the apparently placid lakes of the North Country, about the hazards of towing heavily loaded rafts across them. In May seventeen soldiers had pitched from their overturned raft into Charlie Lake and twelve of them had drowned. Like Charlie Lake, Kluane Lake could boil up quite suddenly if the weather changed.
New rules decreed that personnel would ride on the launch, not the raft, but that didn’t resolve the safety issue. Carrying a twenty-three-ton bulldozer, a pontoon raft had little freeboard, rode very low in the water, and resisted the drag of the launch, pulling its stern deep into the water. Given the slightest turbulence both vessels took on water.
Fred Rust served with the 18th, remembered crossing Kluane Lake with his dozer. First, he had to wait for calm water; waited for several days. When the men of the 73rd finally judged the crossing safe, they loaded the dozer and chained it down, hitched it to the launch.
Three of them operated the launch. One of them steered, the other two bailed water. Out on the lake, forced to tinker with balky launch motors, they fell behind with the bailing. The pontoon men asked Rust to steer so all three could bail.
“It gave me a funny feeling to stand in that leaky little tub and look back a couple of hundred feet at my D8 riding sideways almost on top of the water.”
