Nature fought the Alaska Highway builders in 1942—fought them hard. And, for all their awesome power, sometimes even the monster dozers lost a battle.
At mid-summer, the soldiers of the 93rd Engineers struggled through Yukon. Nature opened her spigots and endless rain fell day after day. Long stretches of road turned to thick mud with the consistency of wet concrete. Sometimes an entire section of the road would slide down a hill. In Big Devil’s Swamp the mud immobilized trucks. The soldiers gave up on them, one by one, and pulled them to the side of the road.
Finally, inevitably, nature took down a bulldozer.
Growling through the muck, the dozer eased over into a muskeg bog. The catskinner threw his machine into reverse and accelerated, trying desperately to back away from the sucking mud. Great steel tracks spun and slung mud defiantly into the bog—to no avail.
Another dozer rushed to chain up and pull the victim free—too late. Big Devil’s Swamp swallowed the D8 whole. Prodding deep into the mud with a ten-foot pole, a soldier tried to locate the machine by feel—no luck. Big Devil’s swamp holds its giant mechanical hostage to this day.
At about the same time, up in Alaska, the soldiers of the 97th had worked their way to a notch in the Mentasta Mountains where they would cross the Continental Divide. Their dozers had to carve a ledge along a high cliff—a cliff made, not of rock, but of the fine, crumbling ground stone moving glaciers left behind. Their ledge tended to disappear under debris sliding down from above. More important, the outer edges of the ledges, the ones suspended in thin air, tended to crumble and fall away.
In his Northwest Epic, Heath Twichell describes the problem. “While working on the precipitous terminal moraine…the lead bulldozers repeatedly slipped off the narrow trail and threw a track. Reinstalling a track back onto its drive sprocket, 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.”
In an interview years later, a sergeant named Monk explained that the operator “…got to know how to drop that blade to keep from tumbling down the mountain.”