The subarctic north lay in wait for the soldiers of the Corps of Engineers at the end of the 1940’s. A few daring men flew over it. A primitive system of primordial trails traversed it from the farming village of Dawson Creek through a string of tiny settlements to the almost city of Whitehorse and on to the hamlet of Delta.
Came the war, the Corps infuriated powerful men in Canada and the United States who had been debating and analyzing various routes for years by blithely ignoring their collective wisdom, pouring men and equipment into Dawson Creek, Skagway and Valdez before they’d even finished collecting maps or started surveying the route.
Link to another story “The Only Possible Route”
There was no other choice. The subarctic north offered but one possible path and it had come down to the Corps from prehistory.
The Northland offered 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, like lava, the mud slowly swallowed random logs. It would soon be swallowing the bulldozers of the Corps.
During the very short summers 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.
And 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.