Too heavy, almost any piece of equipment could sink into British Columbia muskeg. After the war Chester Russel made a living during summers as a commercial fisherman, but in winter he returned to catskinnning. Over the years as technology changed and new tractors and dozers came available, he often thought about how the new equipment might have made the Highway Project easier. But it would not have worked there. Too heavy, too big, the new equipment could not have dealt with British Columbia’s muskeg.
Thinking about it, remembering piloting his beloved D8 through British Columbia, tearing out trees and creating Alaska Highway, he remembered occasionally finding the D8 too heavy.
“We got them all stuck there one time.” Only one D8 remained free and it sat on a knoll. Had it tried to move it would have stuck as solidly as the others.
The road builders had smaller D4 Caterpillars, and they didn’t stick as easily. But they presented their own problems. Mud got in their tracks and stopped them cold.
And, lighter or not, muskeg sucked them down too.
Chester thought about the D4 for a moment; remembered driving those through the muskeg, and a thought came, bringing a grin to his face. “In fact,” he allowed, “I think if you’d go up the road here, a mile or two, maybe you find one [an old D4].”
He had thoroughly stuck a D4 in the muskeg there, so many years before. And he remembered how he had dealt with the problem.
Grinning at his interviewers he suggested, “I think if you…go there, you might find it… Sixty years later, can they hang me?”
Interviewer Brown thought the stature of limitations had probably run out.
