A few weeks ago, I posted about the dramatic effort of the 35th Engineering Regiment to get to Ft Nelson before the spring thaw. On the first of April, bedraggled, surrounded by their abused and broken machines, the soldiers of the 35th bivouacked there.
General Hoge had ordered the 340th and 93rd Engineers into Skagway and Yukon to build road south and east. The 35th he ordered to build north and west over the Continental Divide to meet them somewhere near Watson Lake.
But between Ft. Nelson and Watson Lake an intricate system of rivers drains the Canadian Rockies. Where the rivers don’t cascade down precipitous mountain cliffs, they slow to create vast, intractable muskeg swamps. In the Rockies “Mother” nature would fight back–hard.
Long before the officers of the Corps of Engineers knew Ft Nelson and Watson lake existed, Knox McCusker had created a crude trail between them. Obviously Ingalls and the 35th could follow McCusker.
But McCusker had forged right over the most forbidding mountains in North America. Maybe the 35th could avoid those by following him out just 40 miles and then branching northwest to follow the Liard River to Watson Lake?
On April 16th Ingalls and some of his staff, including Lt. Col. Heath Twichell, boarded Hoge’s Beechcraft in Ft. Nelson for a reconnaissance flight. Twichell remembered looking down from the Beechcraft. “The country was covered with small spruce, the unfailing sign of muskeg.” The bane of the Alcan Project, muskeg is a soft mixture of decaying vegetation, swampy, frozen to solid ground in winter but boggy muck from spring to fall.
Increasingly discouraged, Ingalls and Welling flew recon over the area for days, reluctantly concluding that the Liard route wouldn’t work. Looking for alternatives, they encountered PRA engineer, Fred Curwen.
Curwen had just spent a month scouting the McCusker trail via dog sled. He had reached Summit Lake, ninety miles out, when the raging waters of the spring thaw forced him to turn back (just a few miles from Toad River). He hadn’t been able to scout the entire length of the trail. But he felt strongly that McCusker had picked the correct route.
As we have seen, the paths—the only paths—through the North Country had been handed down through time. If they existed, people who lived there knew them. The officers of the Corps were slowly learning to listen. Maybe McCusker had known what he was doing?