Menace confronted the soldiers building the Alaska Highway at every turn. But the black soldiers of the 97th had to conquer the most fearful menace of them all—Mentasta Pass.
At the turn of the century the Army had built a pack trail from Valdez to Eagle. Alaskans found the trail dangerous, impossible to maintain and they quickly abandoned it. Unfortunately, it still showed as a line on maps the generals used to plan their assault on the northernmost portion of the Highway.
Link to another story “Trail to Alaska’s Interior.”
The soldiers of the 97th Engineers would make their way to the point where the old trail had been abandoned. From there they would upgrade seventy miles of it just enough to get their trucks and dozers through to their portion of the Highway on the Tanana River.
On June 7 the young soldiers of the 97th reached their starting point and started turning the Valdez-Eagle Trail into a road. Reality didn’t fit the Generals’ maps. The soldiers not only climbed abruptly into yet another mountain range, but they found that glaciers fronted these mountains. Mountains present rock cliffs. Glaciers present cliffs of glacial moraine—in plain English, sand.
Their cats started a side hill cut on what one officer called the Slana sand hill, and the operators were still getting the feel of their dozers and graders and carryalls when their road arrived at Lake Mentasta.
Massive mountains loomed out front. They would have to build up the side of a steep cliff to get to Mentasta Pass. At the lake, the young soldiers faced the menace; turned their dozers and carryalls east and started trying to gouge a road out the sand. Forward progress slowed abruptly.
The old pack horse trail had twisted and turned, hugging the side of the cliff, barely wide enough to pass a single file string of pack horses The soldiers had to build a trail to pass bulldozers and trucks.
They pulled it off, and they learned unique skills in the process. Threading bulldozer tracks back onto their sprockets while the dozer hung over a precipice turned out to be a skill not everyone could master. One sergeant explained in an interview years later that the operator “…got to know how to drop that blade to keep from tumbling down the mountain.”
