The Land of the Midnight Sun could offer a traveler the spectacle of a golden lavender sunset in the west and a rising moon, dusted with the same hue in the east. Oversized and spectacular, the land dwarfed every living thing in it—mosquitoes, moose, grizzlies and, very occasionally, men.
Winters surrounded everything in this country with temperatures that could freeze coffee between the pot and the cup. In spring red-purple fireweed blanketed the ground and, as the top layers of permafrost melted, stately spruce trees slowly leaned. Ice and snow melted into roaring rivers that scoured mountains down into flats and spread them in great alluvial fans of gravel and dirt. Water melted into the dirt and formed mud and more mud and, like lava, slowly swallowed random logs. It would soon be swallowing the bulldozers of the Corps.
The line on the map that the Corps of Engineers would turn into the rough draft of the Alaska Highway in 1942, started at Dawson Creek, British Columbia and ended at Delta, Alaska.
Link to another story “The Only Possible Route”
Important, powerful men in Canada and the United States had been analyzing and debating various routes to connect the Continental United States to its remote territory of Alaska for decades—analyzing economic impact, military effectiveness, and hundreds of other important considerations. Came the war, the Corps infuriated those men by blithely ignoring all their collective wisdom, pouring men and equipment into Dawson Creek, Skagway and Valdez before they’d even finished collecting the maps or started surveying the route.
They had no other choice. The North Country offered but one possible path and it had come down to the Corps from prehistory. Tracing that path as it existed, in those last days before the Corps descended on it, one knows that the Corps had little idea what lay in front of them. And those people scattered along that 1500-mile path, certainly had no idea what was about to descend upon them.
During the very short summers, the temperatures occasionally rose as high as 90 degrees. The mud dried into dust that truck tires would soon stir into small cyclones of grit that stuck to teeth and eyelashes. Young elk and buffalo calves with their mothers came to the rivers and lush fields to feed and drink. The rivers teemed with salmon and grayling. But the men of the Corps would find the water too cold for bathing. As they sweated in the sweltering heat, mosquitoes and no see ums would erupt from the boggy centers of disturbed muskeg to decorate pancake batter and torture skin.
Perhaps most important, the Corps would find that, unlike men, the North Country made no distinctions between those who challenged it. The mosquitoes and the no see ums landed and feasted on skin, utterly indifferent to whether it was black skin or white. They offered equal opportunity torture.