How on earth did they find the only possible route?
Canada Used the Route Before the Corps
Drive the Alaska Highway, look left or right virtually anywhere along it. You look down steep mountainsides, you look up steep mountainsides, you look out across trackless swamps, you look out into hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles of untracked wilderness. It gradually sinks in that the Army, in 1942, built 1600 miles of Highway over the only possible path from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Big Delta, Alaska.
How on earth did they find it?
The answer is that they didn’t. Other men, over millennia of history, found it for them.
From time out of mind, those few men and women who lived in the great subarctic North had to travel through it to survive. Brutal mother nature let no one there sit still for long. The terrain and climate fought back at every turn; offered no easy routes and only a very limited number of possible ones.
The people of the First Nations had found those routes and established trails through the wilderness. Late in the game, when a few white men came looking for furs and later for gold, they learned routes from the natives and used the ones that served their purposes.
The Corps came in 1942 to serve the purposes of the larger outside world; carved a very long path, breathtaking in its scale. But the surveyors and bulldozers of the Corps gouged their road along paths trod for centuries by the moccasins of the First Nations, and the boots of the traders and the prospectors who had gone before.
