South Canol Rest Area looks like a normal roadside rest area, but on the Alaska Highway you know better than to expect normal. In this rest area you park among a collection of incredibly old, very rusty, and exceedingly cool abandoned cars and trucks.
Driving north through Yukon Territory, between Teslin and Whitehorse, you cross the Teslin River Bridge, pass the Johnson’s Crossing Lodge; and, spotting the abandoned vehicles, you pull off to check them out.
An old dirt road wanders away from the parking area—and away from the Highway. A big sign warns anybody who might be tempted to follow it “No Services Next 225 km”. An older, more weathered sign explains that you are looking at mile zero of the Canol Road.
Even before Pearl Harbor, Canada built a string of airfields they called The Northwest Staging Route to fly supplies north to Alaska. After Pearl Harbor, the United States Army built the Alaska Highway along the same route. It occurred to senior commanders in Washington that they needed a source of fuel and lubricants for planes and trucks along that route.
Norman Wells, 513 miles (825 km) north on the Mackenzie River offered a source of crude oil, and in 1943 the Army initiated the Canol (Canadian Oil) Project. They scrounged refinery components from Texas and elsewhere and assembled them in Whitehorse. And they dispatched construction crews to install a pipeline and a service road north from the refinery to Norman Wells.
As usual the generals thoroughly underestimated the impact of terrain and climate on the effort. Soldiers and civilian contractors did their best, but both the pipeline and the road fell well short of state of the art. And the generals paid no attention to finances. By early 1944 when oil first flowed through the pipeline, the Canol Project had cost five times its budget.
In early 1944 a senate committee led by future president Harry Truman investigated and turned the Canol Project into a serious embarrassment for the Army. In 1945, fittingly enough on April 1, the Army abruptly shut down the pipeline and closed the refinery.
Abandoning the Canol Road, they also abandoned vehicles and equipment. And some of it still sits at Mile Zero—The South Canol Rest Area.