The Fairbanks Freight would, if senior officers had anything to say about it, make scheduled runs north to Fairbanks from the Dawson Creek railhead through the winter of 1942/43. Convoys making their way over the brand new road that winter traversed a very rough draft of a Highway.
Link to another story, “Awards, Celebrations and Giving a Damn”
Soldiers camped all along the way struggling to keep the “rough draft” road passable and the Fairbanks Freight rolling. Lieutenant Mac McGara and his platoon, part of Company D of the 340th Engineers spent the winter on the shore of Teslin Lake. Enlisted men slept in tents, McGara slept in a tar paper shack. RHIP (rank has its privileges)
Donna Blasor-Bernardt recorded McGara’s memories of that winter in her Pioneer Road.
A small glacier south of camp took the road out every single night and McGara and his men kept it open with jackhammers and dynamite.
The trucks of the Fairbanks Freight crossed Nisutlin Bay, that first winter, on the ice. Its thickness varied constantly, and to keep it thick enough to support heavy trucks, the soldiers laid slabs and pumped water. They tried not to shut their equipment down but if something quit running, they had to heat it to start it. A GI coffee can with burning 100 octane gasoline did the trick. Eighty octane didn’t burn hot enough.
A soldier and a stove sat in a tar paper shack on the ice of the Bay. The soldier kept a hole open in the ice and other soldiers would periodically pull up in a Dodge pickup, dip water into milk cans and then speed back to their various camps. “The water would splash and the truck looked like a flying iceberg running down the road.”
On New Years Eve a platoon of soldiers camped at the river crossing at Little Rancho Rio. A D-8 cat had dropped through the ice and they struggled to recover it. They set fires, they dynamited, they brought two other D-8’s to pull it. But the ice refroze as fast as they could break it up.
Finally came a Yukon spring. The first time the temperature got up to fifteen degrees, they “rigged a platform with a fire under a fifty gallon barrel for an open air shower. That was the first shower we’d had in months. How great it felt!’