In May 1942 the men of the 93rd crammed into Yukon in enormous confusion. And the Yukon wilderness immediately fought back–with muskeg.
Arriving at Crag Lake, a few miles out of Carcross, Captain Boyd, commander of Company C, ordered SSgt Dunn, his mess sergeant, to spud a hole through the ice to access water. An hour later, Dunn presented his commander with a hole through six feet of ice that ended in frozen mud. In the end they chipped the ice and put it into mess cans to melt.
The North Country had bigger weapons; offered Muskeg—a soft mixture of dirt and decaying vegetation, swampy, frozen to solid ground in winter but boggy muck from spring to fall. Everywhere along the route of the highway, the Corps would deal with Muskeg from their first day in the woods to the last day of the project.
A thick layer of vegetation covered and insulated the muskeg, so the normal spring thaw turned it to mud but only a few feet down. Under the mud the muskeg remained frozen. The swamp had a bottom.
But when the 93rd, with its bulldozers and graders and hand tools, cleared the insulating vegetation, the bottom melted away. A company would move out on solid ground, their trucks and equipment moving over it without difficulty. Then, as days passed, that same equipment would sink inexorably into muck, seeking an endlessly retreating bottom.
Lt. Mortimer Squires, motor officer for the 93rd, remembered, “When we first got there the hydraulic brake systems had hose connections and the thick mud pulled the hoses loose and the brake fluid flowed into the mud.”
The engineers called their solution “corduroy”. They cut trees into thirty-foot logs and laid them perpendicular to the path of the road, covering them with gravel and dirt to create a smooth road bed. If the corduroy sank too deep, they installed another layer—and another. The fill in some places reached depths of six or more feet.