Up to the Pass, the soldiers of Company D convoyed between towering cliffs of piled snow, rode benches on either side of a bouncing and sliding canvas covered truck bed, out into the valley beyond the Pass and on 50 miles to Tonsina. Six days later the soldiers of Company C followed them through the pass and then took the lead. Their trucks slewed and rumbled 163 miles, all the way to Slana, the end of Alaska Highway Commission maintained road. At long last, Colonel Whipple had soldiers at his starting point.
At the end of May, just as the trickle of vehicles and equipment coming into Valdez turned into a flood, the trip to deliver them to the line got much longer. And a lot more interesting.
A driver rumbled past the quickly emptying 13-mile camp, the foundations at Wortman’s and into Keystone Canyon. And, entering Keystone, he found himself in a different world.
From our book in Progress, A Different Race:
Suddenly climbing, he hurriedly shifted down through the gears to the lowest one. Towering rock cliffs punctuated at intervals by cascading waterfalls, Bridal Veil and Horsetail, closed in on him from both sides. 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 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 or tracks 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.
At the top of his climb the driver rumbled into Thompson pass. The civilians of the Alaska Road Commission and the soldiers of Company E had cleared a path through the pass, but snow still towered four stories high on both sides of the road. Occasionally a piece of the snowbank would collapse into the path, blocking it for a few hours while soldiers and civilians scrambled to clear it.
