Standing on their heads to sleep, the men of the Canadian company, Tomlinson Construction, would end a brutal 12-hour shift by going to sleep in a bunkhouse mounted on a crew sleigh. The sleigh typically rested nearly vertically on a steep mountainside, chained to a tree.
Link to another story “Cooperation built the Alcan”
Canada went to war more than two years before the United States and Canada responded earlier to the Japanese threat from the west, knew that to meet it, they would have to get men, weapons and supplies across more than a thousand miles of northern Canada to Alaska.
In 1940 the Canadian government authorized a string of airfields across Alberta, British Columbia, and Yukon to Alaska—The Northwest Staging Route. With her soldiers already fighting and dying overseas, Canada built the NWSR with civilian contractors, and their experience presaged and informed the one lying in wait for the United States Army Corps of Engineers when they came to build a land route—the Alaska Highway—in 1942.
From Dawson Creek in the early spring of 1941 Tomlinson ran head-on into a gargantuan problem. Supplies and equipment came from Edmonton to Dawson Creek by rail. From Dawson Creek, though, the Tomlinson men had to get it all over heavily wooded mountains, across the Sikanni Chief River and on to the airfield site at Ft. Nelson.
With D8 Cats growling ahead gouging a path through the timber, D7’s towed a convoy of ten gigantic sleighs—five for freight and five for crew. The D7’s would tow sleighs to catch up with the D8’s and then go back for more. Progress through the frozen landscape was slow and incredibly difficult—but steady—until they reached Sikanni “Hill”—a steep drop down to the banks of the Sikanni Chief River. That last mile to the river took three agonizing days.
And then there was the river itself. It was still frozen, thank God, so the D7’s with their sleighs could make their way across. But then fifty feet from the west bank a tractor plunged through rotten ice to the bottom. The crew spent three days rigging a makeshift tripod of logs and cables to lift the tractor and get it to land where it could be dried out under a makeshift canopy and returned to service.
Still a long way from Fort Nelson, they struggled up the steep grade on the west side of the river and on through the deep forest to Ft. Nelson—standing on their heads to sleep. Getting through the never ending cold, ice, mud over some of the most unforgiving terrain in North America took four months.
