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.”