Slims River threatened to stop the soldiers of the 18th cold in July 1942.
At the southern end of Kluane Lake, Slims River feeds it with melt water from the Kaskawulsh Glacier. The road the soldiers built rounded the southern end of the lake, eight miles of deep muskeg and mud, to the mouth of the Slims. Across the river they would turn north and build their road along the lakeshore to Burwash Landing where they would turn west away from the Lake and toward Alaska.
Approximately half the regiment bypassed the river; ferried themselves and their dozers across the lake itself and went to work on the road on the far side.
More on Getting Across Kluane Lake
Other soldiers stopped to work on the eight miles of muskeg and mud around the end of the lake. Grizzly bears populate the Kluane lake region and a soldier named Cassell, remembered a grizzly that found a D8 dozer thoroughly captivating.
One night a sergeant of the 18th, working his D8 into and through the trees, acquired a grizzly bear guide and companion—a determined 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. Having tried this maneuver several times, he 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.
Richard McGuire’s Travel and Photo Blog
The remaining soldiers, the ones who spent July putting a 1044-foot bridge across the Slims had the most difficult job of all.
The bridge would, of course, sit on pilings driven into the river bottom. But solidly frozen gravel bottomed the Slims. The engineers rigged a way to pressurize water and blast it into the bottom to break it up, thaw and soften it. But doing that required working in frigid glacier melt against a current that flowed past them at six miles an hour.
Not a particularly deep river, the Slims complicates things by constantly changing its depth. And the depth of the river fluctuated, as much as ten or even eighteen inches on a particularly difficult day.
Great read and subject