Suddenly climbing into Keystone Canyon, a truck driver found himself working his clutch, hurriedly shifting down through the gears to the lowest one. Driving from the Port of Valdez toward the interior of Alaska he had just covered about 15 miles of rough, muddy, but misleadingly flat road. Now as his truck struggled up into Keystone, towering rock cliffs punctuated at intervals by cascading waterfalls, Bridal Veil and Horsetail, closed in on him from both sides.
Link to anothe story “The Richardson Highway”
His skinny dirt passage, cut into the cliff on his left, climbed; and, as he climbed with it, the cliff fell away on his right. At its bottom, the cascading water of the falls found the Lowe River and rushed back toward Valdez and the ocean.
The road wound along the cliffside. The canyon on his right got deeper. Periodic ruts and washouts narrowed the road to barely more than the width of his vehicle and his right-side tires rolled over crumbling dirt right at the edge of a precipitous drop that went, as he climbed, from hundreds of feet to thousands of feet.
One Highway—the Richardson–leads from the Port of Valdez into the interior of Alaska. Keystone commences the highway’s climb into the towering mountains and glaciers of the Alaska Range. And at the top of this first dramatic climb the truck rumbled into Thompson Pass.
In the 1940’s so much snow accumulated in Thompson Pass that the Alaska Road Commission had to close it for the winter. In 1942 with help from some soldiers of the 97th Engineers, they had gouged a path through Thompson and opened it in May. Snow still towered four stories high on both sides of the road.
The first soldiers through the pass convoyed between the towering cliffs of snow, rode benches on either side of a bouncing and sliding canvas covered truck bed, out into the valley beyond the Pass. Their trucks slewed and rumbled 163 miles, all the way to Slana, the end of one road; the beginning of the one they had come to build.