The pressure on the 97th and the 18th Engineers, working toward each other at the northern end of the Alaska Highway, ratcheted up on September 24. On that day, down in British Columbia, the 35th and the 340th Engineers met at Contact Creek and completed the Alaska Highway from Dawson Creek to Whitehorse.
LInk to another story “Climax at Contact Creek”
“Many miles of filling and grading in both directions from Contact Creek remained to be done, but the Army knew a good public relations opportunity when it saw one. On September 22, two young soldiers… loaded… a Dodge half-ton weapons carrier and left Dawson Creek with orders to get through to Whitehorse.” (Heath Twichell, Northwest Epic). It took Corporal Ottawa Gronke and Private Robert Bowe five days to cover the grueling thousand miles.
On September 27, photographers captured two grinning soldiers chatting with a Mountie in front of a dusty weapons carrier that bore a freshly painted sign, “First Truck, Dawson Creek to Whitehorse.”
The Army, and the Alaska Highway Project had caught the attention of the press. Correspondents descended on Northern Yukon Territory, observing and reporting the effort to “close the last gap in the Alcan Highway, a final effort to finish a race now watched by millions.”
Squarely in the hot seat, Colonel Earl G. Paules, commander of the northern sector needed his two regiments to meet—soon. The 97th had reached the international border. With luck the 18th could get graveled highway as far as the White River. But the fifty-five miles between the White and the border would run over a vast lake of permafrost.
Paules had one advantage—in October temperatures had dropped and frozen the permafrost to a solid base. Across that last fifty-five miles he would ignore the permafrost. He would build the highway on the temporarily solid base of ice. The press wouldn’t know the difference and when the permafrost melted in spring civilian contractors could deal with it.