Subarctic cold threatened vehicles then the vehicles threatened the men who drove them. Treacherous winter roads caused wrecks that killed and maimed. Relatively good traction, in severe cold, disappeared when temperatures warmed toward freezing. Griffith in his Trucking the Tote Road to Alaska remembered, “I have seen tools, chains, men and even trucks sliding down [a hill] faster than a man could run.”
Balmy Above Zero to Thirty-six Below
Some drivers got good at negotiating the perils. Griffith wrote of a trucker named Lee McMillan who pulled feats on icy hills that few other truckers could duplicate. They called him lucky, but his ‘luck’ came from skill and experience. Lee’s trucks ran for him, subarctic cold be damned. When they didn’t, he could usually fix the problem with some tape, rope or wire.
Sooner or later, a driver’s truck rolled to the side of the road and quit. Truckers carried motley collections of scrounged tires and spare parts, and they repaired motors, transmissions and rear ends alongside of the road.
In subarctic temperatures, metal broke, fuel lines froze, oil and grease congealed. Drivers knew not to shut engines down. In parked trucks, engines continued to rumble under covering tarps. That kept the engine warm and its fluids fluid. But cold threatened more than just engines.
In the frigid fuel tank, tiny droplets of moisture condensed then travelled through fuel lines, freezing at choke points like the carburetor intake. Other parts of the machines—transmissions, drive lines, rear ends—all worked in lubricating fluids and severe cold thickened lubricating fluids into gluey sludge.
William Griggs of the 97th remembered that sometimes “you have to get underneath a truck with a blowtorch and heat up the transmission and the rear axle before it would move.” Some of the drivers placed lighted lanterns or even built open fires under idling machines. Others salvaged large empty tomato cans, filled them with sand and saturated it with gasoline. Fired off and placed under a truck, the tomato can heaters kept things warm and fluid.
But lubricating fluids tend to be extremely flammable. Lanterns and open fires and tomato can heaters often proved a less than satisfactory solution. All too often, idle equipment suddenly burst into spectacular flame.
Radiators presented especially difficult problems. In subarctic cold even Prestone freezes. During December and January when the temperature along the White and Donjek Rivers hit seventy below, antifreeze froze hard in its containers.
