A vaguely malevolent sounding name, “Mentasta”. It describes a precisely malevolent stretch of road through the mountains of the Alaska Range.
Through late June and early July, the black soldiers of the 97th Engineers had finally begun to build road. The men of Company B forged out front clearing a rough right of way. The men of two more companies came behind them, widening, grading, installing culverts and bridges. Then, suddenly, July 9 found all three companies in one place—on the shore of Mentasta Lake. Company B soldiers, no longer out in front, had stopped making progress. Companies A and C had caught up.
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The old pack trail they followed had turned east from the shore of Mentasta Lake and advanced directly into malevolent Mentasta Pass, the only way through the mountains. In the pass, crumbling glacial debris spilled across and down the face of towering cliffs. The men who left the old pack trail had used hand tools to carve a narrow, precarious ledge out of the shale, a trail that served men moving cautiously and leading nervous pack horses.
Now the soldiers of the 97th proposed to move D8 bulldozers out onto the shale and carve a trail that could pass heavy trucks. The toughest terrain anywhere along the Alaska Highway, Mentasta Pass immediately slowed the regiment’s progress nearly to a halt.
Heath Twichell describes the problem eloquently in his Northwest Epic. “While working on the precipitous terminal moraine…the lead bulldozers repeatedly slipped off the narrow trail and ‘threw a track.’” Reinstalling a tread back onto its drive sprocket, relatively routine on flat ground, became something very different in Mentasta Pass. “…doing it on a 23-ton machine that was teetering on the edge of a crumbling slope of glacial debris called for great skill and calm nerves. Eventually the 97th’s inexperienced operators became masters at such on-the-spot repairs…”
Lee Young came to the 97th from Engelhard, North Carolina. Trained by trainers from Caterpillar at Eglin Field to operate a bulldozer, Lee trained others. “I was very proud when I was promoted to train the guys. I was one of the oldest operators there and I was only twenty-two.
Lee remembered the mountains. “We did more work in the mountains than any regiment. We followed the mountains around. The son of a gun got to know how to drop that blade to keep from tumbling down the mountain. The Army don’t tell you how to do it. They just tell you you’ve got to do it.” Sgt Clifton Monk also operated a bulldozer through Mentasta. Remembering his fellow operators, “They learned real fast. If anybody tells you a colored soldier ain’t a smart man and can’t learn anything, you just tell them they are a dog gone liar. Those men took that machinery and built those roads.