Winding in and winding out… Retired Sergeant Troy Hise summed up his 1942 experience in northern Canada, “The Alaska Highway winding in and winding out, fills my mind with serious doubt, as to whether the lout that planned this route, was going to hell or coming out.”
Sgt. Hise, referred to a potentially deal breaking challenge that confronted the soldiers from the very beginning of the project. Mud, muskeg and permafrost covered much of northern Canada, and the extent and depth of it took the Alaska Highway builders totally by surprise.
Link to another story “The Swamp Claimed a Dozer”
Corduroy offered the obvious solution. Road builders, before they had concrete, had used corduroy to build roads over muddy, swampy ground for a very long time. The Romans built corduroy roads. During the French and Indian War, Soldiers under General Braddock installed miles of corduroy road from Cumberland to Pittsburgh. In 2017 construction workers in Grand Haven Township, Michigan dug up several feet of corduroy road that dated back to the Civil War Era.
Even today, environmentally conscious loggers in northern Canada, concerned that concrete roads block the flow of water and nutrients through the boreal forests, install logging roads with corduroy.
The Alaska Highway builders didn’t invent Corduroy roads. But the mud, muskeg and permafrost of the vast subarctic wilderness took installing corduroy to a whole new level and made the road builders masters of the art.
They chopped trees down by hand, removed limbs, cut the resulting logs to length, dragged them to the roadbed, laid them perpendicular to the direction of travel, and covered them with fill. More often than not the logs and fill would sink into the mud. The soldiers chopped down more trees and installed another layer. When the second layer followed the first into the mud, they installed a third. And so on…
In one particularly bad stretch through Yukon’s Big Devil Swamp, soldiers installed corduroy and fill six feet deep.Reinventing Corduroy Roads