Nine children ranging from 1 year old to 20 along with both parents made it to Anchorage, Alaska from Mobile, Alabama in a 65 Chevy van along with a homemade utility trailer. David Feldhaus started his comment on my Steamboat Mountain story with those words. His family made that trip in 1969. The comment …
Tag Archives: Alaska Highway
Albert Herda’s Idea
Albert Herda had an idea. He knew about the Alaska Highway. In 1946 it approached its fourth birthday. If a trucker, Albert thought, could load his truck with things tough, and expensive, to get in Fairbanks, Alaska and then get his truck to Fairbanks over the new highway he could make a nice profit. Link …
Every Bit of the Alaska Highway
Every bit of the Alaska Highway ran through as rugged a wilderness as exists anywhere. Through the spring and early summer of 1942 over 8,000 soldiers of the Corps of Engineers struggled against overwhelming odds to get themselves and their machines into that wilderness to the path of the Highway. Right behind the soldiers came …
Steamboat Mountain
Steamboat mountain quite suddenly took the relatively flat British Columbia terrain and swept it into the sky. Soldiers had dealt with muskeg and rivers and forests of pine and spruce. Now Steamboat Mountain, towering three thousand feet above the surrounding valleys, introduced them to the Muskwa mountain range and the Northern Rockies. Did the terrain …
Rusty Dow
Rusty Dow, the first woman to drive a fully loaded truck the length of the Alaska Highway, did it in 1944. She drove the 1600 miles from Fairbanks to Dawson Creek in seven days, and she astonished every man along the way. Rough Draft of a Highway Rusty had been driving trucks down in …
Kiskatinaw
Kiskatinaw Bridge, one of the true engineering marvels of the Alaska Highway did not get built until the Army had moved on. A river just a few miles out of Dawson Creek, Kiskatinaw may have given the soldiers one of their first clues in 1942 that the north country would fight back. But with the …
Essential but Not Enough
Essential soldiers in a stream of trucks arrived at the Slana sand hills. And now equally essential heavy equipment, especially bulldozers began unloading at the Valdez dock. Before the soldiers could start building road, that equipment had to get to Slana. To men operating bulldozers, the trip from Valdez out to Slana presented a whole …
Winter Still Gripped Valdez
Winter in Valdez, Alaska lasts well past April. The David Branch carried 1200 unsuspecting young soldiers 1,600 nautical miles north from springtime Seattle into a vastly different world. Valdez connected the rugged northern interior of Alaska to the oceans of the world. A long wooden dock traversed the mud flats at the edge of Valdez …
Leaving Florida for Subarctic Alaska
Leaving Florida, the white officers of the segregated 97th Engineering Regiment knew they headed from the Sunshine State to extended duty in subarctic Alaska. Few of the 1200 young black soldiers who worked for them knew their destination or what lay in store. For them a transcontinental train ride meant exciting adventure. At Eglin Field …
Malodorous Canvas
Malodorous Canvas supported life in bivouac on the Alaska Highway in 1942. Tents provided barracks, mess halls and offices. Men slept on folding canvas cots. Canvas “lister bags” stored treated drinking water. Canvas enclosures became mechanical repair shops. In malodorous canvas enclosures, soldiers transformed empty fuel drums into stoves, showers and bath tubs. Bivouac in …