At the end of June, civilian workers began piling into planes for the trip north. Forest fires raged north of Edmonton and the planes flew through heavy smoke. Max Smith wrote, “I am writing this letter from a plane 15,000 feet in the air going 165 to 185 miles per hour somewhere over the northwest Canadian Wilderness… the smoke was so bad we couldn’t see the ground…”
The civilians’ work would center around Gulkana, Alaska, a few miles north of Alaska’s version of civilization. Lytle and Green leased a “two-story, peeled log structure”, the roadhouse called the Gulkana Lodge, and made it their Headquarters.
Some of the workers flew to Fairbanks, made their way down the Richardson to Gulkana. Others flew into Buffalo Center, a grassy field near Big Delta. They too made their way down the Richardson. Still others flew to an airstrip near an abandoned gold mine at Nabesna, made their way back on the old mine’s access road to Gulkana.
Wherever they landed, the civilians stepped off their planes into the vast emptiness of Alaska. And no one had planned for empty.
Two hundred men landed at Buffalo Center—found no food, no place to sleep, just a big grassy field. Don Mathiason remembered, “After hours of waiting and still no help we realized we would have to fend for ourselves. We built campfires and huddled around them while eating corned beef sandwiches bummed from a nearby workcamp.”
Max Smith’s plane dropped him at Nabesna, “God Only Knows Where, Alaska”. He hiked out to the road to catch a truck that would carry him to Headquarters at Gulkana, but he got there too late, missed the truck. He hiked back to the airstrip and found that his luggage had gone on a truck “another way”.
As the workers made their fitful, halting way to Gulkana, a forest of tents sprouted around the Lodge, including a large circus tent. Don Garlock wrote home, “It was quite hot here Sunday, but Monday it rained all day and last night it froze ice and there was heavy frost all over. And me sleeping on a cot in a tent with no floor and no heat and 3 blankets over me…
