STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Hinkle and Boyd’s Canyon

Boyd’s Canyon after Hinkle and the others filled it.

Hinkel, a Tech 4 catskinner in Company C, bulldozed dirt down the wall of Boyd’s Canyon. He got too close, and his dozer followed the dirt over the edge. He rode his steel mount all the way down to the bottom; and, luckily, the dozer landed on its tracks. Boyd, his company commander, hurriedly clambered down the other side of the canyon; found Hinkel shook up with a bump on his head. “Who told you to drive that dozer over the edge of the bank?”

“Nobody, Sir.”

“Then what are you doing down here?”

“I really don’t know, sir.”

Boyd and his “Grand Canyon”

Soldiers built the Alaska Highway through some of the most rugged mountains on the planet. Melting snow and rainwater flowing down from the peaks, had formed into streams and cut channels—some mere dips, others that could only be described as canyons—across the path of their Highway. The soldiers had to bulldoze them full of dirt to level the path.

Problem. Filling a dip or a canyon did not make the stream at its bottom go away. Instead it created a dam. Behind the dam, water would back up, get deeper and deeper until it flowed over the fill, washed it out and recreated the dip or canyon.

They had to accommodate the stream with a culvert, a rough, square tunnel of logs and timbers, then dump their dirt on top of it. The length of a culvert depended on the fill. The sides of the fill had to slope from a wide base to the roadbed on top; the deeper the fill, the wider the base and the longer the culvert.

The men got good at building culverts. An outside contractor noted in his logbook that he had watched, impressed, as a black unit near Teslin built a fifteen-foot-wide and forty-foot-long culvert in forty-five minutes.

Sometimes it didn’t work out all that well.

Hinkle and Company C did not build and fill the culvert at Boyd’s Canyon in 45 minutes.

In his memoir, Me and Company C, Boyd remembered their effort. Having built an exceptionally long culvert, they needed a very deep fill. To speed things up they had moved Hinkle’s dozer around to the south wall so they could push dirt down from both sides.

Modern Culverts

Barge “Bridges”

Barge “bridges” solved a major problem in 1942. Building 1800 miles of road through the towering mountain ranges of Northern Canada and Alaska required building around, through and over a maze of rivers. In a wartime emergency, working against an unbelievable eight-month deadline, the soldiers “bridged” the biggest rivers with barges or pontoon ferries. Real bridges could come later.

Tagish River Crossing

In April in Yukon Territory soldiers of the 73^rd Pontoon Company followed the road building soldiers of the 93^rd Engineers through the woods to the Tagish River, dragging a barge. At the river, the pontoon men attached their fourteen-foot-wide by forty-foot-long platform to the top of five 4 foot by 24-foot pontoons, mounted three outboard motors and carried the road builders across the river.

The 73^rd and their barge remained in place for months, carrying equipment and supplies across, until the Corps had time to build a proper bridge.

Barge crossings became almost “permanent”.

At Charlie lake down in British Columbia the unlucky 74^th Pontoon Company built a broad, flat raft on three pontoons, equipped it with several outboard motors. On May 14, loaded with a radio car, a small angle dozer, two officers and fifteen enlisted men, the ungainly craft motored out onto the lake and headed north.

The Charlie Lake barge capsized, lost all the equipment, and drowned several of the soldiers.

North of Whitehorse the 18^th Engineers worked northward around Kluane Lake; ferried men and supplies across on two rafts built by the 73^rd pontoon engineers, towed by two launches rented at Burwash Landing.

Carrying a twenty-three-ton bulldozer, a pontoon raft had little freeboard, rode extremely 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 remembered crossing Kluane Lake with his bulldozer. Three pontoon engineers from the 73^rd operated the ferry, one to steer, two to bail water. Forced to tinker with balky motors, falling 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.”

Barges can still be a problem

Nature Could Beat the Dozers

A dozer brought to an obvious stand still.

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 93^rd 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.

Caterpillar Dozers

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 97^th 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.

This D4 didn’t fall off a cliff, it simply sank

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.”

Bulldozers still get in trouble

Five Things Define Carcross

If this doesn’t convey attitude, I don’t know what does.

Five things define the tiny town of Carcross in Yukon Territory, a train depot, an empty but famous hotel, Matthew Watson’s Store, the world’s smallest desert, and, most important, a full-time population of 512 people—people with attitude.

Tourists flock to the tiny downtown and provide life blood to Carcross’s economy. When you join them do not stop with the collection of attractions next to the depot. To see all five things, walk away down a side street or two. Talk to people you see and listen to their stories. You will see what I mean by attitude.

Bessie Gideon—A Carcross Legend

For centuries Caribou used the land bridge connecting Bennett Lake and Nares Lake. And for centuries Inland Tlingits, camping there to hunt and fish, called the spot Caribou Crossing.

Then the Klondike Gold Rush brought outsiders. Outsiders built a narrow-gauge railroad from Skagway up to Whitehorse and ran it through Caribou Crossing. A little town grew there; acquired a railroad depot, a hotel, and Mathew Watson’s Store. And the outsiders renamed it Carcross.

Trains out of Skagway headed directly up into the coastal range to Lake Bennett then ran forty miles along the lake shore to where Carcross nestled into the backdrop of Caribou and Nares Mountains. The little town existed to serve the outsiders who came to experience the famous old gold rush town, to hunt the animals of the North Country, or both.

In 1942 the Corps of Engineers inundated the little town much as the Gold Rushers had. They came, of course, to build the Alaska Highway. And like the Gold Rushers, they soon left the little town on its own again.

And Watson’s store, also as it exists today

But at the hotel Polly the parrot remained to sing operatic arias and offer a running commentary in the form of truly colorful and creative profanity. Johnnie Johns continued to lead hunting parties to bear, sheep and caribou.

As fascinating a place as you can imagine, Carcross still exists to serve us, the tourists who come to experience it.

Correction about D8 Caterpillar

Very few things could stand up to the big ones.

Correction. The historical accuracy of these stories is extremely imortant to me and I always appreciate a factual correction.

Last night I posted about Caterpillar bulldozers on the Alaska Highway Project. At one point I referred to the D8’s air cooled engine.

Caterpillar Dozers–the Offending Story

Those of you who visit and follow this blog are anonymous unless you choose to share your contact information, but I man I know only as “Don”, commented that the D8’s have never had air cooled engines.

I checked my source–a lecture delivered at the Army War College in the 1950’s. The lecture was written by an Army historian and I think it’s entirely possible that Don is correct and the historian is wrong.

For that reason I’m posting a correction and I apologize for the error.

Caterpillar Dozers

Caterpillar dozers did jobs on the Alcan project that Caterpillar never imagined. One night a sergeant of the 18th Engineers, working his D8 into and through the trees, acquired a determined grizzly bear guide and companion. He swerved toward the giant bear and it ran away, but as soon as he returned to his work, the bear returned. The sergeant finally turned decisively and gunned through the woods after the racing bear, raising and lowering the D8’s massive blade. The bear gave up and left.

The Rude Bear

Caterpillar built the Alaska Highway right alongside the soldiers. The D8 weighed in at twenty- three tons. Its six-cylinder, air cooled, diesel engine moved it over the ground at 5.8 miles per hour. Each regiment had twenty D8’s and an assembly of smaller tractors-D4’s, D6’s and D7’s.

The dozers forded small streams, ferried over rivers. But mostly they lumbered, often in tandem, through the woods. and my God could the massive dozers chew through the mud and the trees.

As proud catskinners worked the levers, D8 engines roared, spewing black smoke, and giant tracks ground through dirt and mud, alternately spinning and catching. Out front, giant blades pushed down trees; gouged out dirt and stumps. From his platform the catskinner couldn’t see over the engine and the giant blade to the ground immediately in front. Stories of commanders’ jeeps squashed and buried by marauding D8’s fill the annals of the Road.

The D8’s had no cabs. As a tree went down, its top could break and fall back toward the dozer. Leonard Cox, catskinner, with the 340^th, watched “the top 10 to 12 feet of the tree.” And sometimes he hurriedly bailed off. “It was very dangerous.”

A soldier in the 340^th watched a catskinner stand to back up his dozer. He failed to notice a long sapling caught on the blade. When the sapling broke loose and sprung back, the very tip of it caught one of his testicles and “flicked it out as clean as if a surgical knife had been used.”

Bison

Bison? When an old bull bison with a ridiculous short beard and a head twice as big as his backside ignores you, you, by God, stay ignored. And, if he ignores you, his entire herd ignores you. Even if you bear down on them driving a massive tractor trailer truck, you had better be laying on the air brakes. The buffalo won’t bother to get out of your way.

Obsession development July 18, 2013 involved bison

I watched an old bull, his front half covered with matted fur that drew clouds of insects to hang around him like an aura, ignore the insects. No tossed head or twitched tail for him. I thought I’d take a shot at getting his attention, told him I knew what he tasted like.

He didn’t care.

He really didn’t care that I knew what he tasted like.

Murray Lundberg on his website, exporenorth.com, explains that the Yukon Government imported a herd of 34 Wood Bison from Alberta’s Elk Island Herd in 1986. They imported more over the next few years, but, more important, the old bulls apparently do not ignore their cows.

Murray’s Site

The herd grew naturally.

By 2014 an estimated 1200 bison populated the Alaska Highway between Watson Lake in Yukon Territory and Liard Hot Springs in British Columbia. And they pose a definite hazard to navigation.

The two provincial governments have tried to keep them away from the Highway, trucking them to remote areas, hiring a man to drive along the way firing off noisemakers… But the buffalo find the grass that lines the highway irresistible. And they don’t just ignore truckers and me, they ignore provincial governments too.

Rippling Rhythm Boulevard

Rippling rhythm describes bouncing truck tires rolling over corduroy. And on the Alaska Highway in 1942 corduroy had nothing to do with fabric. The road builders fought one of Mother Nature’s fiercest weapons with their version of “corduroy”.

From the southern end of the route in British Columbia to the northern end in Alaska, nature fought the road builders with muskeg. At first glance it looked like regular dirt, but the soldiers of all seven regiments quickly learned different. Decaying vegetation resting on water froze to solid ground in winter. In summer, the top few feet thawed to boggy muck.

The Yukon Wilderness Fought Back with Muskeg

Mother Nature had left a layer of vegetation that covered and insulated the muskeg. A few feet down the water remained frozen and the muck had a bottom—until soldiers cleared away the insulating vegetation. Then the bottom melted away. Bulldozers would move out on mud, slewing through it, the ice would melt and then, as they passed through again, they would stop slewing and start sinking.

The soldiers found a solution in what they called corduroy. The big cats slewed through once, knocking trees down, then the soldiers on the ground would cut thirty-foot logs and drag them to lay side by side across the right of way. Covered with gravel and dirt the corduroy offered a relatively smooth roadbed. But muskeg did not give up easy. Often, the corduroy simply sank down into it. When that happened, they installed another layer—and another; kept layering until the corduroy stopped sinking.

In Yukon two companies took a turn at Big Devil’s Swamp between Summit Lake and Tagish. Captain Boyd’s Company C men came first, and they gave the road its name, Rippling Rhythm Boulevard. Central to the regiment’s area of operations, the road through the swamp carried heavy and essential traffic. And by mid-July Rippling Rhythm Boulevard had sunk back into the thick, soggy muskeg.

The soldiers of Company D made their way to the dreaded swamp to add more layers, and Donald J. Schmitt remembered, “[We] deposited layers of logs, gravel and dirt and as each sank out of sight, we added another layer. It took eight or nine layers before it stabilized.”

The idea of corduroy has been around for awhile

Marl Brown, At the Heart of the Alaska Highway

In 1957 the Canadian Army stationed Marl Brown on the Alaska Highway; put him to work fixing its new vehicles. But Marl fell in love with the old vehicles scattered along the road, rusted hulks with trees growing through them. The waste bothered him, so he devoted his life to rescuing them. Sixty odd years later you can visit Marl and his collection in his incredible British Columbia museum.

The Road from Ft Nelson

Fifteen years earlier soldiers and civilians, in a wartime emergency, had dug the Alaska Highway out of the mountains of British Columbia. They broke equipment doing that. And they didn’t have the luxury of time to make major repairs. When they couldn’t quickly put a bulldozer, grader, or truck back into service they simply shoved it out of the way and kept going.

Fifteen years later other men on the road saw junk, Marl saw historic treasure. In the 70’s he decided to collect it in a museum in Fort Nelson to share it with those who travelled the Alaska Highway. He founded the Fort Nelson Historical Society and they set about raising money to build a log building. It took time. To the horror of his wife, Marl even auctioned off his locally famous long beard—agreed to let the high bidder shave it.

The museum finally opened in 1987. Since then the town has moved its most historic buildings to the museum site—an Anglican Church, the old post office, a trapper’s cabin and a blacksmith shop. But pride of place goes to the old vehicles. Twenty-one automobiles sit in a car shed—two more than a century old and still running.

The Caterpillars and trucks from the Alaska Highway Project scatter among the buildings. The sight of them hammers home the immensity of the epic job they helped do.

The single most important attraction, though, is octogenarian Marl Brown. His Beard grew back snow white to match his shoulder length hair and he walks the site, answering question, charming and entertaining the thousands of visitors who pass through each summer, crossing the Alaska Highway off their Bucket Lists.

And then there’s his unique bicycle…

The Museum

Chow

Chow is essential–Good, plentiful chow? Not so much.

Swarming Road Builders Need Food and Supplies

The soldiers who built the Alaska Highway counted their food as a primary source of unrelieved misery. In the early days, the soldiers ate C-rations. Everything else—milk, eggs, potatoes, and vegetables—came canned or powdered. Powdered vegetables tasted like cardboard. Monotonous and unsavory canned food–Spam, chili, Vienna Sausage, corn beef hash and stew—did not help. And insects dotted the pancakes.

The soldiers did not look forward to chow time.

Years after the fact, the mere mention of the word Spam, nauseated some of them. Fred Rust of the 18th regiment insisted that the number of discarded Spam Sandwiches could have paved the road. Cpl. Anthony “Bobby Lee” Mouton remembered corned beef hash as “shit on a shingle”. The soldiers of the 18^th knew it as “silage”.

To some of the soldiers, shit on a shingle described creamed chipped beef over toast. And every soldier on the road despised Vienna Sausages–“Yukon Shrimp”.

“Big John” Erklouts of the 340^th remembered, “There were two foods we classified as battery acid, lemonade powder and chili con carne, the worst food I ever tasted. It was so hot you couldn’t eat it. The Army medics put a halt to it.”

The quartermasters sent bread to the regiments stuffed in mattress covers, trying to keep it fresh. Mattress covers or no, it arrived so hard, the cooks had to saw off slices.