4-6, Terminus, Connock Blue, 7500, heading for one shot, West Lawn.
What do you hear from the southeast forecast weather there, Don?
Yeah, I guess it's real marginal, but they're getting in snowflakes big as a cow, but they're getting in there okay.
Great, I'll be peeling out behind you here in about 20 minutes.
Okay, it probably couldn't get much worse, only get better, so we'll give you a report.
Yeah, we got to come out of there, which is about a quarter mile where there was zero visibility on the runway, and it's about a mile to three miles, or say about a mile anyway, from down the lower end of the air strip.
Okay, that's how it seems to be moving pretty quick across there.
Well, it's actually been dropping, and it's hard to tell if it's going to be blowing up the glacier or not, or if it's coming over from this side.
The natives call it Denali, the tall one, and explorers named it McKinley.
At 20,320 feet above sea level, it is the tallest mountain on the North American continent.
There is a unique group of aviators who make a living from this giant.
They are the Denali Flyers.
90 air miles north of Anchorage, nestled in the lowlands at the foot of Mount McKinley, is the town of Talkeetna, the place where rivers meet.
This tiny village is home-based to four air taxi operators who service the needs of hundreds of climbers and sightseers who visit the mountain each year.
He's going to need an ID.
I'm just going to wait.
Does he need anything out of his pack, any of his personals or identification?
I have all the money and personal information.
I have room on for one of yours out on the next trip.
I've got just two more, the Japanese party, and then I've got plenty of room.
They didn't have much gear, so if you need me to pick up one, I can.
Yeah, that'd be great.
Or if it's easier, people just throw a couple of duffels or whatever it takes.
Anything will help, I guess, at this point.
Okay, will do.
Please know the ceiling has lifted.
Come on in.
It's clearing.
Authorized by special permit from the National Park Service to operate within the boundaries of Denali National Park, these are the only air taxis in the world that land on glaciers as a daily routine.
These air taxis are more than just a ride. The pilots and machines that make up this unique service are the last and the first contact climbers and adventurers have with the real world.
In 1981, Jim Auchinac purchased K2 aviation after retiring from a career in the Air Force.
His interest in flying McKinley developed from his involvement in several air rescue missions on the mountain.
See you back.
Yeah, thank you.
Someone climb our mountain again.
We'll be back. We'll be back.
McKinley is the easiest and least expensive of all the major mountains to climb. The transportation is the key to that.
You can fly to Anchorage from anywhere in the world in half a day and beyond the mountain within two, three hours later, directly from Anchorage International, if you like.
From Talkeetna, round trip air service to the base of the mountain is only $220.
Everywhere else, it's a major ordeal to get there. In Nepal, you've got to walk for three, four weeks and you have to hire porters.
If you don't get to the mountain without hiring a whole raft of porters, there's permit requirements and waiting lists in a lot of the areas.
A unique relationship often develops between the men who fly Denali and their clients.
They can expect more than just transportation, and they have learned to do so. They correspond with us for sometimes a year or two in advance, and they're full of questions.
It's a trip of a lifetime and it's kind of a mystery in most cases, so they're asking how to get here and what they need to bring, and we help them with all that.
It can be bitter cold in the middle of the summer, and that cuts into people's ability to think and react and perform.
That combined with the altitude make it extremely difficult.
When I drop them off at the glacier, I try to remember to tell every one of them that the important thing is to get down safely.
I think some of them lose sight of that in their determination to make the top, and that they can go out there and have an awfully nice time and a very rewarding experience without making the summit.
When I go one step further, when I pick them up on the glacier, I don't immediately ask whether or not they made the summit.
They have to first of all have a good time and a safe time, and I try to instill that into the people that are going, particularly if they're inexperienced here or in Major Mountain.
I have people write back and tell me later, or after acclimating to Talkeetna again following a client, they'll come around and tell me they thought of that often when they were on the mountain, that my remark that the objective was to get down.
It can be a cruel, cruel place, and we lose a few people every year, and accidents will happen, but there's no need to overextend yourself.
Flying people in freight to the upper slopes of Mount McKinley evolved into a commercial venture in the 1950s when Don Sheldon pioneered the way to high-altitude glacier landings. Advances in aircraft design and the use of strong, lightweight materials for airplane construction provided Sheldon with equipment that could survive repeated rough landings and takeoffs.
These advances in technology and Sheldon's skill as a pilot allowed easy and safe access to the mountain for scientists, mapmakers, and adventurers. His flying career spanned two decades. After surviving several crashes and forced landings, he lost the battle with cancer on January 26, 1975.
Back down in the oven.
In 1956, Cliff Hudson began operating Hudson Air Service, hauling equipment, supplies, and passengers to and from the gold mines, trap lines, and homesteads that surround the Talkeetna area.
The mountain became a natural stopping off place as he made his daily runs.
Hudson has more than 30 continuous years of flying experience on and around the mountain.
Well, at that time there was only one air taxi operator. There were two air services. Now we've got about five air taxi operators up here and people seem to want to climb it more than they used to. We also have a large influx of foreign people who come in here.
There's many different people, different nationalities, characters. Some of them would rather not meet. You kind of got to handle everybody when you're in that type of business.
Well, the nature itself will determine whether the person is going to make a climb up there or not in the summertime or winter or any other time. I've seen moderate temperatures up to 20,000 feet up there before in the wintertime even, but sometimes you don't.
The boys, they come into Talkeetna all hopped up and ready to go, and if we have a couple days of bad weather, they go, why can't we fly? Why can't we fly? Let's get up there. Let's get up there. What's the weather like up there? Zero, zero. You can't see it up there.
Good contact with base camp up there. Anyhow, pretty soon the weather will let up up there. Sometimes you don't get through from this side up there. They don't understand that, so they just want to get there right now.
I tell you what, they get up there, and it's the same way coming back. They get down to base camp, they just can't wait to get on that airplane and get back down out of there. That's about the way 9, 10's of them are.
You know, we have these jet streams with winds up to, well, they've clocked them up to several hundred miles an hour, you know, 300 miles an hour or more.
You know, aircraft have flown in that stuff. It's well known. Once in a while, that dips down and kind of creams the top of Mount McKinley off up there, and I don't care what's up there. It's going to get blown off, you might say.
After a few years, you kind of anticipate that, and you watch for it, you know, or feel for it. You can't watch for it, you can feel for it.
You can also tell on the ridges a lot of times how the wind is blowing, because it's blowing snow off the ridges up there.
Occasionally, I remember one time I got stuck in there for three nights because the weather was a little socked in and stayed that way for three doggone nights, but I slept in the airplane, it was okay. Didn't bother me any.
The glacier does change around a lot. You're feeling the glaciers. I mean, you have to have a fair depth of perception. That's the main thing. Your lighting can be very miserable sometimes, you know, overcast, something like that, and if you don't have something to gauge it by, gauge your depth of field by, you can get in trouble real fast.
Throughout the years, if you don't learn a little, I mean, you better quit flying, and I've been very fortunate not busting up an airplane, that I couldn't fly out, and a lot of that was maybe luck or something like that, but still cautious.
I won't go bored into some place unless I luck it over real good, and maybe change my mind and land someplace else.
Like I say, flying is still interesting to me. I'm 60 years old, but I want to pass my physical and feel good, so what? Keep at it.
At the 7,200-foot level on the Kahiltna Glacier, the four air taxi services have a joint base camp operation, run during the climbing season of mid-April to mid-July.
The camp provides food, shelter, communications, and emergency gear for those who attempt the long climb to the top of McKinley.
You're going to have room for all these boxes here then? I hope so. They're not that heavy, they're just big.
Doug Geeding began flying when he was 14. He spent his early years as a flight instructor, performing aerobatics, towing banners, and working air shows.
In 1975, Geeding settled in Talkeetna to begin a career of mountain flying.
The dangers of flying the mountain would be getting in over your head, I think getting into places that, without thinking in terms of whether I can get in and get out of there,
because of the altitude of the glacier, because of the conditions of the glacier, with your airplane, with your crew.
A lot of the places that do require a little bit of thinking are some of the glaciers that a climber may want to go into to do a first ascent on a mountain,
and nobody's landed there before, so you have to go and speculate, look at the glacier, decide whether or not it's feasible to get in and get out of there.
So getting in and over your head, and not knowing your airplane, not knowing the conditions, the weather conditions, can result in accidents, and they have in the past.
The mountain is, to me, it's been sort of like a living and breathing thing. It's been known to eat people, it gobbles them up, it's windy, it's noisy, it's just very alive.
And dealing with it on a daily basis, anybody would become very close to something like that, and it really captures your imagination of things too, just its size, and there's just no other place in the world like it.
I think that after a while, and after the time that you spend on the mountain, that you become more familiar with what the conditions are going to be throwing at you.
You become more familiar with your landing areas, and you can work the mountain and work the weather a little bit more.
I think if you tend to just pry into it a little bit, stick your nose into it, and see what it's going to dish out.
It could also bite your nose off, and you have to know that very fine line of how far you can push it.
And that's the challenge, is working that fine line, is walking that line of knowing of how much you can push your airplane, or push your craft, and push yourself to working in that environment.
At the 14,000-foot level of the mountain, a team of doctors staffs a high-altitude research facility where they study the combined effects of altitude and latitude on the human body.
Lowell Thomas Jr. lands his turbocharged Helio Courier at the camp regularly to deliver supplies and ferry down injured or sick climbers.
Thomas bought Talkeetna Air Taxi from Roberta Shelton in 1980.
Yeah, I think my plane is the optimum for up there right now.
The Helio Courier was designed strictly for short field operations.
It's one of the original stole type planes, short takeoff and landing.
It's got leading edge slats that automatically come out at slow speeds to give you a lot more lift, and it has an enormous flap span.
It's almost full span of flaps.
And with a big load, I can still land it probably right around 40 miles an hour and land real short, and I can get out quicker than the other type aircraft just because it's got a bigger wing.
It's got these high lift devices.
Plus, with the turbocharger on the engine, I can develop full power right up to, actually, I can get up to 19, 20,000 feet and still have my maximum permitted climb power.
Don Lee began his flying career in the Alaska bush as a hunting guide and air taxi pilot.
In 1981, Lee gave up the wandering life and took a partnership in Talkeetna Air Taxi with Thomas.
The weather can change very rapidly.
You have so many different forces working on the weather up there.
You have this tremendous ice and snow and the cold, the temperature of the snow and the sun evaporation.
Then you have this warm inland air and the cold Arctic air all meeting in this one place.
And when the dew point and the temperature can change within a few degrees, within an hour, you can have a total change in weather.
It can be totally, absolutely snowstorm, blizzard, turbulence, to within two hours be clear and sunny and calm.
I guess the first thing you look for when there are clouds is indications of where the wind's coming from and how strong it might be,
so that you can figure out the downdrafts and whether or not we can get into the places where we're trying to go, like our base camp on the kiln or up on the roof.
And you look for lenticular clouds that indicate high wind over the summit, and you can also just tell frequently where the wind is coming and how strong it is
by the way the clouds boil up over the ridges and then as they pour over the other side, it's just like a waterfall.
And you have to learn to read all of those signs before you get in there and commit yourself.
Basically, we're landing on the snow-covered parts of the glacier, never on the bare ice.
And if there are no marks on the snow at all or just no detail, you can't tell where it is.
In a whiteout situation, it's really very dangerous.
So you look for visibility, and then of course you're looking to see where the crevasses are.
They're covered by snow bridges many times, and that can be very dangerous.
And you try to get a reading before you land as to where these bridges are and avoid them as best you can.
And if you're landing on a glacier in a new area, and I really get a kick out of that exploring some new part that's never been investigated before,
you've got to try to figure out the grade, the slope, and all of those things before you land.
The challenge of flying McKinley is intensified by the knowledge that success is tied to ability and judgment.
Meeting the challenge requires total commitment from the pilots who stake their reputations on their skills.
It's such a feeling of accomplishment when you can go in there and combine all your skills,
everything you know, everything you've learned, you've lived from your mistakes,
and you can go in and pull off a perfectly safe operation, bringing the people in and out, and do it safely and consistently.
But you have to be extremely careful, and I like to think if you really know what you're doing,
and you know your limitations and the aircraft's limitations, that you can do it.
The Denali Flyers have chosen lives of high adventure and excitement.
Their daily routines are filled with more splendor and danger than most people experience in a lifetime.
What is it that keeps these pilots pushing the odds day after day, year after year?
It just gives you such an opportunity to meet so many different people and fly into such remote places
and to deal with these people either when they climb, they're so elated that they made the climb,
they come back all sunburnt and they're real happy, or maybe it was a real bad climb and the weather was really bad
and they really had a bad time, or maybe even one of their party had been killed or something,
and then you share this tremendous emotional time with these people as well.
If you need a set of plates, we can take some of this stuff.
I like it for several reasons, almost more than I can tick off, I suppose.
But first of all, I'm a climber myself and I just love mountains.
And I'm a skier, I've skied all of my life, and I've been flying now for about 44 years, ever since World War II.
And all of these elements come together for me in flying around on McKinley and Foraker and St. Elias and some of the others.
It's a thrilling thing, it's an adventure, it's a real challenge.
If you don't do things right, you can pay a hell of a big penalty.
I enjoy showing everybody the mountain. The climbers have a special appreciation for it,
but the ordinary visitor and tourist, McKinley is the number one attraction in the state,
and we have a wonderful clientele of appreciative customers.
They tell us that a flight around the mountain, a landing on the glacier, is the highlight of their last adventure.
And it's fun to be a little part of that, that's what I like.
That's what I say, it's almost every trip, it's just different, you know.
Hour to hour it will change. That's what I enjoy. One of the things I really enjoy about it,
it's not just like a job, to me I make X number of dollars per flight or whatever,
I don't look at it necessarily that way, I look at it as something I enjoy doing.
It's also a bit of a challenge in that respect for me that I can work Mount McKinley
and I can at least spend my time up there and try to establish just better procedures
and in a manner to work it. It's my adventure up there, I think.
It's a way for me at least to keep the nostalgia going and the fun of it all, the fun of flying.
I feel real fortunate to be able to fly up there.
Music
Production funding for this program made possible in part by a grant from the Anchorage Times, celebrating 75 years of service to Alaskans.
When the 19th century ended and the 20th century began, the quest for wealth and land was never so great.
An attitude of prosperity, huge construction projects, inventions and expansionism prevailed around the world.
It was a time of giant engineering projects. The Trans-Siberian, Union Pacific, Santa Fe and Great Northern Railroads
crossed the hostile territories of Russia and North America, thus opening new lands to settlement and development.
The Suez Canal linked the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean and the Panama Canal was soon to connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
Suddenly people could travel from Liverpool, England to New York by steamship in six days
and then travel nearly 3,000 miles by rail to Sacramento, California in just another week.
The world was becoming smaller as we moved from horse-drawn stagecoaches to steam-driven trains.
In 1896, near Dawson in the Yukon Territory, the discovery of gold brought a stampede of men and women to Northwest Canada and the Alaska Territory.
Miners and entrepreneurs headed north to seek their fortunes in the gold fields. Stories abounded with tales of gold and copper deposits and of extensive coal fields.
These discoveries drew the interest of investors and speculators J.P. Morgan, the Guggenheims and a host of others.
A major factor in this rush for wealth was transportation. There were a few ways for the miners to get their supplies and themselves into this region.
A water route from the ports of San Francisco, Portland and Seattle ran northwest to St. Michael.
Travelers then transferred to riverboats that steamed up the Yukon River to Dawson.
A second sea route terminated at Skagway. Then goods were hauled by mule team dog sled and snowshoe over the summit of Chilkoot or White Pass to Dawson.
For even the most adventurous, routes into the gold field were few, time-consuming, expensive and physically demanding.
A railroad was needed to solve the problem.
On May 27, 1898, construction began on the first railroad on Alaska soil. The first 20 miles of the White Pass and Yukon Railroad lay in the territory.
It was the first of what would be more than 50 railroad ventures that would be proposed and promoted in the territory for Alaska.
Most railroads existed only on paper, but some companies did in fact survey preliminary routes and investigated natural resources along proposed routes.
During 1899, Congress passed a homesteading act to open up Alaska. That bill granted railroad companies land for roadbeds, terminals, timber and gravel fill along the right-of-way.
In 1903, survey work began in Seward for the Alaska Central Railway. The Alaska Central would link the ice-free waters of the Gulf of Alaska with the Yukon River and open the rich coal fields of the Matanuska Valley.
Construction began in 1904.
A year later, construction started on a railroad from Cordova north into the Wrangell Mountains. It was guided by the Alaska Syndicate, a group formed by the wealthy East Coast financiers J.P. Morgan and the Guggenheim brothers.
This would become the Copper River and Northwestern Railway that hauled copper and silver ore from the Kennecott Mining District to Cordova.
At about the same time in the Fairbanks area, construction began on the Tanana Valley Railroad, built from 1905 to 1907 by Falcon Joslin.
The 45-mile narrow gauge railroad would service thousands of miners working in hundreds of gold mines in the Tanana Valley.
Of the many proposed, only nine railroads were actually constructed and operated in Alaska, and for the most part they were short-lived. Gold, coal, or fish-hauling ventures that lasted only as long as the resources they carried.
In the East, political columnists began to accuse the Alaska Syndicate of attempting to create a monopoly. Why?
The Syndicate had acquired Northwestern Fisheries, which owned twelve of the forty Alaskan fish canneries.
Then, seeking to control ocean transportation, the Syndicate bought the Northwestern Steamship and Alaska Steamship companies.
The Syndicate needed coal to fuel its mines, railroads, canneries, and steamships, so it then sought to control the choicest of Alaska coal lands.
Fearing exhaustion of Alaska's natural resources, President Theodore Roosevelt, in November of 1906, signed an executive order withdrawing from claim and entry all coal land still in the public domain.
The act was an attempt to reserve Alaska's future coal and oil resources for those filing for land and mineral rights under the Homestead laws.
Alaska for Alaskans was the platform of James Wickersham, campaigning in 1908 for Alaska's one non-voting delegate to Congress.
And he was elected largely because of his anti-Guggenheim stand.
It was to play a significant role in the introduction and passage of the bills that would give Alaska home rule and build the Alaska Railroad.
President Taft, hearing a plea for help from Alaskans, sent Secretary of the Interior Walter Fisher to investigate the problem.
Fisher's report concluded that Alaska's economic malaise was due to inadequate transportation facilities and the coal land laws.
In February 1912, President Taft asked Congress for a $35 million authorization to carry out the Secretary's recommendations.
Instead, Congress passed a bill creating a legislative assembly for the territory of Alaska that provided Alaska with home rule.
The bill also authorized President Taft to appoint the Alaska Railroad Commission to study the question of transportation in the territory.
In 1913, a report entitled, Railway Routes in Alaska, recommended construction of two rail routes from the Pacific coast to the interior.
One was to go from Cordova up the Copper River Valley to the Tanana River and Fairbanks, connecting with the Bering Coalfields.
The other route was to run from Seward to the Matanuska Coalfields up the Susitna Valley to the Cuscoquin River.
In January of 1914, Alaska delegate James Wickersham delivered a five and a half hour speech on the floor of the House elaborating on the attributes of Alaska
and arguing for the government to pass a bill that would spend $35 million to build a railroad.
And on March 12, both the House and the Senate passed the Alaska Railroad Organic Act.
The newly elected President Woodrow Wilson was authorized to locate and construct a railroad in the territory of Alaska.
In addition to the $35 million provided by the act, the President was to take advantage of the machinery, equipment and materials left over from the construction of the Panama Canal
and use them for construction of the Alaska Railroad.
In early May, President Wilson authorized Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane to proceed with location surveys.
The President appointed the Alaskan Engineering Commission under the authority of Secretary Lane to supervise location work.
Three men were selected for the Commission.
W.E. Eads, the first Chairman of the Alaskan Engineering Commission, was at the time Chief Engineer of the Northern Railroad and had 30 years experience in planning and building railroads in the West.
Lieutenant Frederick Mears of the U.S. Army had worked on the Great Northern Railroad and had done construction work on the Panama Railroad.
Thomas Riggs Jr. had served as Chief Surveyor on the Alaska Boundary Commission, lived in Alaska for 16 years and had a vast knowledge of the territory.
By mid-June of 1914, most of the survey parties were in the field and main bases for supplies and equipment had been established, one at Ship Creek on the Kinnick Arm of Cook Inlet and the other in Fairbanks.
In February of 1915, the Commission submitted its report to President Wilson with no recommendation as to which route should be taken.
The report did seem to favor the western Seward-Fairbanks route.
The Commissioners felt that the western route offered the most effective use of Alaska's coal and agricultural resources.
On April 10, President Wilson announced that the government would build along the western route.
He also authorized the purchase of the Alaska Northern Railroad for $1.2 million.
Rumors of impending construction brought a stampede of people to Ship Creek.
When Lieutenant Mears landed at the base camp in April 1915, he found nearly 2,000 people living in ragged tents and temporary wooden buildings, hoping for employment on the government railroad.
The tent city on the banks of Ship Creek lasted only a few weeks.
The land along the creek was needed for railroad yards and buildings.
And fears of contaminated water in the temporary settlement prompted Mears to establish a permanent town site on the plateau south of Ship Creek.
The summer of 1915 saw employment reach about 1,400 workers.
A little more than half the workers were independent contractors, or station men.
They were called station men because the right of way was measured in numbered units of 100 feet, and contracts were awarded from station to station.
Many station men formed partnerships and hired workers of their own.
Throughout the construction of the Alaska Railroad, the workmen endured rugged living conditions, tents without floors, sleeping on pole bunks in honeycomb-like cells, covered with wild hay for mattresses.
New arrivals generally had to find a vacant spot or build their own quarters.
There was not much money to be made working on the railroad. Early wages paid to unskilled labor was 37.5 cents per hour, considerably lower than the going rate in the territory.
A report on wages in the weekly Alaskan states that at 37.5 cents per hour for outdoor manual labor, at $3.00 per eight-hour day, a worker would make $468.00 for six months of seasonal work.
And then there were the expenses, boat fare from Seattle to Anchorage and return at $110.00, six months room and board at commission prices, $225.00, laundry, clothes, shoes, shades, haircuts, and baths totaling $68.00.
Thus, after six months work, a common laborer would have net about $64.00 to last the six months when the weather didn't allow construction.
It is little wonder that the commission posted a notice in the Seattle Steamship Office's discouraging outsiders. Those going to Ship Creek, Alaska, with the idea of finding ready employment on the new work, will be largely disappointed.
But there were workers, and work to be done. Mears started clearing right-of-way in May 1916. By September, Anchorage and Seward were linked with telephone and telegraph connections.
And by the end of that year, grading had been completed for 35 miles, and right-of-way cleared for 40 miles, and track had been laid for 13 miles.
But it was the time of World War I, and in 1916, even though the United States had not yet entered the war, the commission began to feel its effects.
The railroad faced increased ocean freight rates and rising costs for material and labor.
But work did progress. On the Northern Division, a pioneer party reached the town site of Nenana, and began building a dock, warehouse, and wagon roads.
By the end of 1916, almost 800 people were living there.
In June of 1917, Secretary of the Interior Frank Lane announced the purchase of the Tanana Valley Railroad, the narrow gauge line from Fairbanks to Chattanooga.
This gave the government a right-of-way into Fairbanks. It added valued shops, stations, yards, and terminal facilities to the Northern Division.
By October, the first train reached the coal mines at Chickaloon, 75 miles north of Anchorage.
Six days later, the first shipment of coal returned to Anchorage. Employment peaked at 5,675 for 1917.
Though the greater part of the railroad was built on top of tundra-covered ground, there were many miles of heavy rock work, excavation, and tunneling.
During the five-month work season of 1917, over four million cubic yards of solid rock were hand-drilled and hand-excavated along the 30-mile shoreline of Turnigan Arm.
With the entrance of the United States into World War I, the Commission lost two key men.
Lieutenant Mears left to accept a promotion to Colonel in command of the 31st Engineer Regiment in France.
Thomas Riggs resigned to take an appointment as governor of the Alaska Territory.
It was left to Chairman Eads to build a railroad with a 50% cut in his workforce, as many Alaska workers left for military service,
while others were drawn to higher wages in the lower 48.
In spite of the many difficulties during the wartime period, construction continued.
By the end of 1918, 230 miles of standard gauge line had been built, with 30 miles of siding, spurs, and yard tracks finished.
Another 53 miles of line had been graded, 30 miles cleared, and steel gangs linked seward and anchorage.
In August, due to poor health, Chairman Eads resigned.
Colonel Mears returned and was placed in charge of the entire project as chairman and chief engineer.
During the war and for a time afterward, construction slowed due to a lack of funds caused by inflation.
The Commission had to ask Congress for additional money to complete its work.
In October of 1919, Congress authorized 17 million dollars.
Two years later, 1921, two steel bridges closed gaps in the line.
On February 2nd, the American Bridge Company completed the 504-foot span across the Susitna River,
and seven months later, the Hurricane Gulch Bridge arched over the Chulitna River at the midpoint of the line.
Most of the spring of 1922 was spent building the approaches for the Tanana Bridge site.
This was the most formidable river crossing of the entire railroad and required a 700-foot span.
With its completion in February 1923, the Alaska Railroad was almost finished.
It was left only to widen the narrow gauge rails from the Nanana north to Fairbanks.
Formal dedication of the railroad came on July 15, 1923.
President Warren G. Harding, the third president to be involved in the construction,
arrived in Nanana by special train to drive the symbolic Golden Spike,
signifying the completion of the federal government's Alaska Railroad.
From Nanana, the president traveled to Fairbanks, where he addressed most of the town's 1,500 citizens.
I do not suppose any individual or set of individuals would have undertaken the construction of such a railway,
that it had to be left to the government itself.
I am glad a generous government understood and carried to completion the construction of the Alaska Railroad.
The Alaska Railroad had taken more than eight years to complete and cost almost $60 million,
more than seven times the amount the United States paid Russia for Alaska in 1867.
The first order of business at the completion of the railroad was to bring the entire line up to reasonable operating standards.
Many stretches of original track and structures built in earlier days were near the point of collapse.
Many of the wooden ties, trestles, and bridges had been made from short-lived timber.
Tracks needed ballast, right-of-ways needed improved alignment and grading.
In 1928, Colonel Otto Olson was put in charge of the Alaska Railroad,
and for the next 17 years he would be its guiding force.
He was a familiar sight out on the line in his Dodge Railmobile.
By 1930, the combined population of Seward, Anchorage, and Fairbanks was only 5,400.
The population along the route was not large enough to support the operation of the railroad.
The annual operating statement of the railroad showed deficit after deficit.
Olson cut costs and reorganized the railroad.
And in 1938, for the first time since 1923, revenues exceeded expenses.
Starting in 1940, the Alaska Railroad set new records each year by carrying construction equipment, material, men, and supplies for the Army.
But the increased rail traffic brought rapid deterioration.
By October of 1942, Olson was complaining that due to the loss of personnel to the armed forces,
it was impossible to perform necessary ballast work or replacement of ties.
He had to ask for outside assistance to help transport the military supplies and keep the line operating.
On April 3, 1942, the 714th Railroad Operating Battalion was assigned to Alaska.
With a complement of 25 officers and 1,090 enlisted men, the 714th eased the railroad's labor shortage.
It became commonplace for an engine crew to consist of one civilian employee and one enlisted man.
And for the next 25 months, they worked side by side, keeping the supplies moving.
It was also during World War II, in an effort to safeguard the flow of military supplies from tidewater to anchorage and fairbanks,
that a branch called the Whittier Cut-Off was constructed under the supervision of the Army Engineer Corps.
The main line was extended from Whittier on Prince William Sound to Portage Station.
Completed in the spring of 1943, the new line was 12 miles long and included two tunnels through the mountains.
Construction gave the railroad two terminal ports, Seward and Whittier, where connections could be made with ocean steamships.
In 1945, at the age of 75, Otto Olson retired. Colonel J.P. Johnson was appointed General Manager.
The railroad was still in need of extensive repair and rebuilding, and Johnson's first action was an appeal to Congress for funding of major rehabilitation.
Congress passed $34 million in appropriations for rebuilding and the purchase of new equipment.
Johnson began improvements by eliminating dangerous curves, replacing wooden bridges with steel structures, and replacing 70-pound steel rails with 115-pound rails.
He coupled this program with the modernizing and improving of warehouses, shop facilities, freight depots, and other buildings.
In 1947, the railroad streamlined passenger travel for tourists.
The railroad's new passenger train, the Aurora, made its inaugural run on October 18th between Anchorage and Fairbanks.
By the early 1950s, the adventure of the steam engine had given way to the economic realities of the diesel.
Change also included competition. A burgeoning highway trucking industry brought losses in revenues to the railroad.
But other industry reacted with a containerization program pioneered by the Alaska Steamship Company,
whose move into piggyback shipping helped the railroad to again compete and regain lost revenues.
Alaskans and the railroad will long remember March 27th, 1964, as the Good Friday earthquake.
About $27 million in damage was caused to the railroad in those few minutes that the earth shook.
In spite of the damage, the line from Anchorage to Fairbanks was operational within days,
and the line from Whittier to Anchorage was opened a little over three weeks after the quake.
Between 1974 and 1977, during the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline,
the railroad prospered, hauling tons of pipe and other oilfield supplies and equipment.
The railroad emerged from this period of heavy usage in better physical condition than it was at the beginning of the period.
In January 1985, under the Alaska Railroad Transfer Act, the federal government sold the railroad to the state of Alaska for $22.3 million.
The Alaska legislature created the Alaska Railroad Corporation to operate the railroad and manage its properties.
A unique aspect of the Alaska Railroad is the rural or bush service.
It moves people and their belongings to remote areas not served by highway or air.
It's one of the few railroads left in the world where rural passengers can still flag down a train at almost any point for personal service.
The railroad also provides a unique service to Whittier by transporting not only foot passengers, but riders in automobiles and buses.
In the late 1980s, with the growing number of port calls by cruise ships, the general increase in tourism and the marketing of train trips as part of packaged tours, railroad passenger service has greatly increased.
Today, both freight and passenger service are available year-round between Anchorage and Fairbanks and Anchorage and Whittier, with summer service offered between Anchorage and Suey.
Hard work and the dedication of thousands of men and women of the Alaska Railroad opened up the last frontier and helped to develop Alaska into the country that it is today.
Music
Production funding for this program made possible in part by a grant from the Anchorage Times, celebrating 75 years of service to Alaskans.
Production funding for the Alaska Highway is made possible by the Alaska Division of Tourism.
Westmark Hotels, offering lodging, dining and northern hospitality throughout Alaska and the Yukon.
Gray Line of Alaska.
The Anchorage Times, locally owned and operated since 1915.
Called the longest main street in the world, the Alaska Highway runs from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, 1,422 miles to Delta Junction, Alaska. A journey that once took months now takes only days.
Yet, even today, 50 years after it was first opened, travelers driving this road still find a sense of adventure.
As a person drives north, there's a feeling of excitement at venturing along the same trail that trappers and gold seekers used over 100 years ago heading for Dawson Creek, Whitehorse and Fairbanks.
In 1899, E.H. Harriman, the railroad magnate, proposed building a railroad from Chicago to the Bering Sea, connecting the Alaska and Canadian gold fields with the continental United States.
When the claims played out, the gold seekers left and the idea of building a railroad became just another memory of the gold rush.
Plans to construct a road through Canada to Alaska surfaced in the early 1920s.
Donald McDonald, a locating engineer for the Alaska Road Commission, had dreamed for years of an overland coastal route to Alaska.
It would run north from Seattle across British Columbia through the Yukon territory to Fairbanks.
McDonald and a group of Fairbanks residents formed the International Highway Association to sponsor the building of a road to the continental United States.
Citizens of Canada and the United States lobbied for years to begin construction, but political, territorial and economic factors kept the great project stalled.
In 1933, Donald McDonald and the Automobile Highway Association, trying to draw attention to his proposed route to the states, helped finance an Alaska prospector and trapper, Slim Williams, to make a trip over McDonald's coastal route by dog sled.
Using primitive maps drawn by McDonald, Slim traveled from Fairbanks to Seattle in five and a half months.
In Seattle, Slim replaced his sled runners with wheels and outfitted his dog team with leather moccasins.
He then headed east, mushing 2,000 miles to the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.
Slim was a big attraction at the fair.
People from across the country came to see the man who had mushed a dog team from Alaska to Chicago.
After the fair closed for the season, Slim mushed on to Washington, D.C. to tell Alaska's representative to Congress, Anthony Diamond, about the possibilities of a road between Alaska and the United States.
Slim was invited to the White House to brief President Roosevelt on the proposed road.
Years later, Mrs. Roosevelt would remember Slim as the most vocal Alaska advocate for the international highway.
Late in 1933, President Roosevelt was authorized by Congress to set up a joint commission with the Canadian government to determine the feasibility of a road to Alaska.
At many meetings, the commission determined a highway was feasible from an engineering viewpoint, but expressed concern of its practical usefulness.
Representative Diamond, again voicing a need for the road, introduced a bill in Congress for a highway, but could not find any support.
As the years passed, pressure continued for a highway in the Northwest, prompting President Roosevelt in 1938 to appoint the Alaska International Highway Commission to make yet another study.
This new commission also submitted a favorable report and even undertook a survey of several possible routes.
The commission would end up suggesting three routes.
Donald McDonald's Coastal Route. Route A, starting in Prince George, going north to Hazelton and Telegraph Creek, crossing the Yukon by way of Whitehorse and reaching Fairbanks by the Tanana Valley.
Route B, which also started in Prince George, followed the Rocky Mountain Trench up the Parsnip and Fenley Rivers to Fenley Forks and Sight and Pass, then turned north to Dawson City, down the Yukon, then connecting to Fairbanks.
But once again, plans for the highway were tabled due to high construction costs and the uncertainty of what effect the intrusion of the United States government into Northern Canada would have on the territories.
On May 14, 1939, in another attempt to focus attention on the proposed highway, adventurers Slim Williams and John Logan and their dog Blizzard left Fairbanks for Seattle.
They traveled by motorcycle over the coastal route that McDonald had advocated for years and the same route Williams had used to mush his dog team out in 1933.
Slim and John, using maps provided by McDonald, followed pack trails for easier going, pushing their motorcycles across half-thawed muskeg on fallen logs, and ferried their motorcycles across rivers on canvas boats and wooden rafts.
Blazing their own trail part of the way, the two traveled 2,300 miles in six and a half months.
Slim said he and John never missed a meal, just got several days behind sometimes.
Arriving in Seattle in early December, they were introduced at a Chamber of Commerce meeting as the first men to motor the proposed Alaska-Yukon international highway to Seattle.
Early in 1939, with the rumble of war sounding in Europe, a string of air bases extending from Edmonton, Alberta to Fairbanks, Alaska was proposed.
The Canadian Department of Transport wanted to develop the bases to move people and supplies to Western Canada and Alaska.
Hitler's invasion of Europe in the Fall of France in 1940 alarmed the governments of Canada and the USA.
The move of Canada and Alaska became an issue of paramount importance.
The go-ahead was given for construction of more than 20 airfields and emergency landing strips that would become the Northwest Staging Round.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the threat of invasion on Alaska and Canada became a reality.
There was no certainty that the shipping lanes to Alaska could be kept open.
Both the U.S. and Canada realized the military need for an overland supply line secure from enemy attack.
In the interest of their mutual defense, the two countries finally agreed to build a highway across Canada.
Canada agreed to provide the right-of-way, wave import duties and taxes and allow the use of timber, gravel, fill and rock for construction along the route of the highway.
The United States agreed to pay for the construction and to maintain the highway for the duration of the war,
turning over the Canadian portion of the road to the Canadian government six months after the war ended.
A Canadian official said, We will supply the soil. The United States will provide the money and toil.
A highway would be built to Alaska.
With the signing of the agreement, an American cabinet committee consisting of the secretaries of Navy, War and Interior was assigned by President Roosevelt the difficult task of route selection.
They met and then transferred route selection to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Military considerations were recognized as the most important factor in choosing what path the highway would take.
The Corps decided the road would follow the line of the Northwest Staging Route airfields.
This route not only furnished a visual guide for the pilots, but would help supply the airfields and flight strips with fuel and materials.
The Corps requested permission from Canada to conduct a survey and construct a pioneer road.
They called for a rough working road, which would be, in part, the site of a permanent road.
Work would begin at Dawson Creek, British Columbia and extend northwestward to Big Delta, Alaska, just 98 miles east of Fairbanks.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineer troops would survey and construct a rough military road usable by all-terrain vehicles that would connect the airfields.
A billion contractors, directed by the U.S. Public Roads Administration, would then utilize the pioneer road in the location and construction of a permanent road.
Brigadier General C.L. Sturdivant, Assistant Chief of Engineers, was ordered to obtain survey reports and determine the availability of road building equipment.
Colonel, soon to be Brigadier General, Bill Hoag, was appointed Director of the project.
His orders from General Sturdivant were to push the pioneer road to completion with all speed within the physical capacity of the troops.
Hoag did a preliminary aerial reconnaissance of the route and found that the few maps that did exist were largely inadequate.
He flew over great stretches of unmapped wilderness searching for a route that would connect the airfields together.
Hoag discovered that existing access to the project was limited to three major routes.
By rail to Dawson Creek, British Columbia.
By boat to Skagway, Alaska and then rail to Whitehorse, Yukon.
By boat to Valdez, Alaska and from there by highway to Gulkana, Alaska.
Little did the towns realize the impact the construction of the road would soon have on their communities.
Speed was of the essence.
Top priority was given to cutting a passable trail through the short working season.
The northern climate dictated a construction period of six months or less.
Hoag had to move men, heavy equipment and supplies across the Peace River to Fort Nelson.
This task had to be accomplished while the river ice could still support heavy traffic.
The spring thaw would make the winter road out of Dawson Creek a sloppy mire that could swallow both man and machine.
Orders went out and men and equipment of the 18th and 35th Combat Regiments began moving north.
They came from all over.
Men and boys, officers and enlisted, black and white from Iowa, Georgia, South Dakota, New York, California and Florida.
Heading north by air, boat and rail.
Most of them not knowing their final destination.
Most of the men had never seen or used the heavy equipment that they would very shortly be operating.
They would learn by doing.
Soldiers from New York, Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles soon would become skilled woodsmen with their axes.
They would work in a land where summer was three months of daylight and where temperatures would rise to 70 degrees and sometimes much higher.
In winter there were months of darkness and prolonged periods of sub-zero weather when temperatures sometimes dropped lower than 50 below zero.
They would learn about the cold, ice and snow.
They would also learn to live in an environment that offered continuous daylight.
To have mud or dust mixed in with every meal.
And to sleep with flies and mosquitoes that were always on the attack.
Some would grow to hate the country.
Some would love it.
On March 19, 1942, two days after General Douglas MacArthur became Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific and still several weeks before the fall of Corregidor,
the men of the 35th Engineers arrived in Dawson Creek, unloaded their heavy equipment and began driving north overland in minus 35 degree weather to Fort Nelson, British Columbia.
Their trek of 325 miles would last 25 days in some of the worst weather the men had ever experienced.
Crossing the Peace River, the 35th Engineers laid planks and sawdust over the ice to form a bridge and drove across to Fort St. John.
They then pushed ahead 265 miles over frozen Muskeg to Fort Nelson.
Arriving in Fort Nelson on April 5, the men of the 35th had beaten the spring thaw and were ready to start the road westward to Watson Lake.
At the same time the Alaska Highway was beginning, plans for a second major building effort in northwest Canada were being finalized in Washington and Ottawa.
The Canadian Oil Pipeline Project, KENOL, called for construction of an oil pipeline and road running 577 miles from Norman Wells' Northwest Territory,
southwest across the Mackenzie Mountain Range, to connect with a refinery being constructed in Whitehorse.
This project would provide gas and diesel fuel for trucks using the highway and aviation gas for the fighter planes, bombers, and transports flying the northwest staging route.
The oil pipeline would take two years to build and employ the labor of over 14,000 engineers and civilians.
As plans for the oil pipeline were beginning, an army of road builders began moving into position to start on the highway.
In early April, the 18th Combat Engineers landed at Skagway and took the White Pass and Yukon Narrow Gauge Railroad, 111 miles to Whitehorse.
From there they began working on a trail westward to Kluwani Lake.
Skagway and the White Pass and Yukon Railroad would become a major port and supply route for troops and materials used on the construction of the Alaska Highway and the KENOL project.
In mid-April, the 93rd General Service Regiment and 340th General Service Regiment, consisting of black enlisted men and white officers, arrived in Skagway.
They landed without their heavy equipment and would remain in Skagway from mid-April to mid-May, awaiting their trucks, tractors, and graders.
The 340th was moved by rail to Whitehorse and divided, part working west, the remainder assigned to work south toward Watson Lake.
The 93rd was sent to Carcross and worked east to Teslin Lake.
In late April 1942, Lieutenant General Eugene Raybould, Chief of Engineers, split the project into two independent commands,
placing Colonel Patsy O'Connor in charge of the Fort St. John or southern sector and General Hogue in charge of the Whitehorse or northern sector.
Watson Lake was the dividing point.
The 95th and 341st General Service Regiments unloaded in Dawson Creek and were sent to Fort St. John to build the road north to Fort Nelson.
As construction began, survey crews were laying out the route for the Pioneer Road.
Bush pilots spent long hours flying aerial reconnaissance, taking Army and Public Roads Administration engineers up to check the terrain.
Possible routes were photographed to find the best location for the new road.
Aerial surveys were followed by ground reconnaissance on foot with packhorse and dog sled.
Canadians played an important part in the surveying and mapping of the highway.
Locals hired on as guides, leading locating teams and advising as to the best possible route, scouting the country for solid ground and good stream crossings.
Some stretches of the route followed old Indian and Trapper trails.
The primary road was cut with axes and bulldozers through forests of spruce, jack pine and aspen trees.
Sometimes when a clearing crew didn't have a surveyor, they would send a man out with an axe in the general direction of their objective with the bulldozers following along behind.
Some locators expressed fears of being run over by the heavy equipment as the tractors kept pushing forward.
While the road was being built, one soldier was asked what he thought about this part of the world.
He said, this country ain't nothing but miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles.
Living conditions were very difficult for the thousands of men building the road.
It was impossible to make the camps comfortable, since they had to be moved every few days to keep up with the road building.
Camps at the head end of the pioneer road were primitive, framed tents with field kitchens housed under canvas.
The GI stove never reached some outfits, so they used open fires and oil barrel ovens.
Most laundry was done the old fashioned way, hand rubbed in rivers, lakes and streams.
The 97th General Service Regiment landed at Valdez in mid-May and began working out of Slena in mid-June, northeastward towards the Tanana River.
By early June 1942, two combat regiments and five general service regiments with over 10,000 officers and men had arrived to work on the road.
The Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor and the seizure of Attu and Kiska Islands in the western Aleutians made construction of the road even more urgent.
The fight for Alaska had begun.
It was a race of men and machines against the vast wilderness of Canada and Alaska, against time and the enemy.
As the Army was issuing marching orders and moving troops into place, the Public Roads Administration, the PRA,
started gathering engineers and support personnel from district offices across the United States.
Civilians would also play a major part in the construction of the military highway.
The PRA would act as overseer on the project, contracting with and supervising the civilians working to widen and straighten the pioneer road,
and locate the road on a new alignment to be established by Public Roads Administration engineers.
The PRA first selected five management construction companies who then hired smaller individual Canadian and American companies
with their men and equipment on cost plus fixed fee contracts with the U.S. government.
The highway was divided into portions for various contractors, depending on their size and skills.
A call went out for shovel operators, cat skinners, welders, pile drivers, laborers, and cooks.
The contractors were hiring men and gathering trucks, tools, and other equipment and materials needed to build the permanent all-weather road.
Working conditions were severe.
Warning signs were posted in the contractors' recruiting offices, giving them some idea of what they would be up against.
Base camps were built at 25-mile intervals, with each contractor usually working in both directions to meet the other contractors halfway.
By May of 1942, the PRA had hired 54 construction companies, including 13 Canadian firms, engaging over 6,000 civilians to help build the road.
Vast amounts of equipment and supplies had to be shipped north to keep the construction moving.
Supplies by the rail car load began arriving at the Dawson Creek railhead.
Surplus equipment from camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Project Administration were located and shipped north for use by the Public Roads Administration.
During one five-week period, over 600 boxcars filled with equipment occupied every space in Dawson Creek.
The big question during the late summer and fall of 1942 was whether the road could be pushed through before winter halted all operations.
In July, the Army realized that if the access road was going to be finished on schedule, the engineer troops and civilians would have to join forces.
General Hogue requested assistance for the engineer regiments.
The PRA and civilian contractors were ordered to leave their work on the permanent highway to help finish the pioneer road.
Contractors were shifted up and down the line to supplement and speed up construction.
Some contractors were put onto the pioneer road to shape it up, gravel the surface, and improve the alignment and grade, while others were put to work on uncompleted sections.
It would become a combined effort with overlapping work responsibility.
As various regiments completed their sections of the road, they fell back and improved their original efforts.
It was a race of men and machines against the coming winter.
The many streams and rivers along the route posed major problems in the construction of the road.
By the time it was completed, over 130 bridges would be built.
Some streams could be forded, others required pontoon bridges.
At wider waterways, troops made rafts by lashing pontoons together and decking them with timber, powering them with outboard motors.
The 74th Light Pontoon Company hauled men and supplies across the Peace River at Fort St. John on the tug Alcan.
Tugs and barges also moved men and supplies back and forth on the Teslin River and on Teslin and Taggis Lakes.
Nothing was allowed to hold up construction.
If a truck or cat broke down and was holding up progress, it was pushed over the side.
Build the road was the motto.
During the first months of construction, a spirit of cooperation developed among all workers on the job, military and civilian alike.
Work, work, and more work was the schedule, seven days a week.
Sometimes four or five miles of road could be built in a day, as the summer daylight hours allowed the crews to work around the clock.
During July and August, in 90-degree heat, the men were forced to wear gloves and old-style hats with netting to protect themselves against swarms of mosquitoes, flies, and the legendary no-see-ums.
Despite long hours and tough going, the men kept a sense of humor.
Humor was everywhere. There were signs all along the road recalling memories of towns far away.
There was a story passed up and down the road about two mosquitoes in a tent who were discussing the merits of two sleeping soldiers.
One said, let's not eat them here, let's drag them outside. Oh no, the other replied, if we do, the big fellas will get them.
Sergeant Harold Hubbard's cartoons of Army life brought smiles and laughter to the men. If you can laugh at yourself, things don't seem so bad.
Entertainment took various forms, including cribbage, poker, horseshoes, baseball, photography, and watching the numerous bears that became attached to the garbage dumps.
A large sign was posted outside some of the construction campsites that read, warning, if you are being chased by a bear, don't run into camp.
Men adopted pets such as huskies, squirrels, and bear cubs.
Some former city boys became expert fishermen on the hundreds of lakes and streams along the route.
The men working on the highway dubbed the road the oil can highway because of the hundreds of empty gas and diesel fuel drums scattered along the road.
A lack of spare parts in the difficulty in making repairs were problems faced by both the Army and the civilian contractors.
Due to the great shortage of spare parts, it was necessary to cannibalize some machines in order to keep others serviceable.
Repair shops on wheels kept equipment in service. Portable refueling and greasing units kept the machines on line and crews working.
On September 24, bulldozers of the 340th Regiment, cutting a trail south from Whitehorse, and bulldozers of the 35th Regiment, heading north, met at Contact Creek, about 50 miles east of Watson Lake, closing the road on the southern sector.
On October 25, lead bulldozers of the 18th and 97th Engineers met at Beaver Creek, a few miles east of the Alaska-Canada border.
The two units had joined their sections by means of a winter road, which would be passable until spring break-up.
The Alaska Highway was officially dedicated at Soldier's Summit overlooking Kluwani Lake on November 20, 1942.
It was 30 degrees below zero and the men had a tough time keeping warm.
I desire to express the admiration of the Government of Canada to the American Corps of Engineers for one of the greatest engineering marvels in the whole world. Carry on, that splendid work.
This road is built for war, but this road will be used when peace and victory come back to us again. This road will again be used for the great purposes of reconstruction and of peace.
Eight months after construction began, the Honorable Ian McKenzie of Canada and E.L. Bartlett, Acting Governor of Alaska, cut the ribbon and trucks moved northward over the 1600-mile highway.
The objective of getting a road into Alaska that winter had been achieved, but the highway had exacted its toll of human life.
A pontoon ferry crossing Charlie Lake near Fort St. John capsized in a sudden squall, drowning two officers and ten men. Eight soldiers were drowned crossing the Peace River.
One death from exposure occurred when a driver tried to walk ten miles to camp instead of waiting for help in his disabled truck.
Workers lost their lives when trucks and jeeps overturned on muddy inclines.
All the drivers talked about one steep and treacherous spot at mile 108 called Suicide Hill. Several fatal accidents occurred there before it was finally leveled out.
Services were held and lost comrades remembered.
Work continued on into the winter under extreme weather conditions. Temperatures reached 72 degrees below zero on the northern sector.
At sub-zero temperatures, diesel fuel solidified and gasoline lines froze. Drivers kept engines running continuously or risked having their trucks freeze up.
Throughout the winter, convoys used the road to carry supplies to the camps and the airports. Sometimes punishment becomes a pleasure.
For a time, any driver who slid off the road got five days KP. Since most of the truck cabs weren't heated, a lot of drivers started sliding into the ditch just to spend time in a warm mess hall.
A new order was issued stating that the first order of business was for the driver to get his truck out of the ditch. Maybe then he would be allowed the honor of KP.
Many trucks and tractors dropped through the ice becoming trapped by the freezing water. They were left as a ghostly memory of what happens when you break down.
After the breakthrough, there was still a lot of work left to make the truck trail into a usable road. During the winter of 1942, the Army lowered design standards for the permanent highway.
Directing the Public Roads Administration to follow the early truck trail as much as possible in order to expedite completion of the year-round all-weather road.
The PRA spent much of the winter of 1942 on preparation for the next season's construction by repairing equipment and building shops and camps. Rest camps were established along the road to house truck drivers, road maintenance crews, and to service and repair equipment.
The steady stream of supplies was only halted when temporary bridges were carried away by ice or when heavy rains caused embankments to give way causing landslides that blocked the road.
With the coming of warm weather, long stretches of the pioneer road became impassable. Traffic would back up for miles. Trucks would jam up when the muskeg melted and the ground became a deep-rutted gumbo mud.
Permanently frozen ground became a bottomless quagmire when exposed to sun and air. The ever-present cats had to pull the vehicles through and get the traffic moving again.
Logs often had to be placed in a corrugated fashion to form a foundation for the trucks to drive over.
Washouts were a major problem. The first bridges built by the Corps of Engineers were temporary log bridges of untreated timber. Heavy rains on July 9th and 10th, 1943 destroyed 24 bridges and closed the Fort Nelson section of the road for 40 days.
At the beginning of World War II, less than 3% of the armed forces were black soldiers. The military had a policy at the time that used Negroes mostly as service troops.
There existed an attitude that black soldiers could not perform the complex jobs that the modern military required. Black soldiers working on the road would prove this attitude wrong.
Of the more than 10,000 troops working on the highway, 3,600 were black. The three black regiments served with distinction, receiving meritorious unit commendations.
They built not only the highway, but acceptance for all blacks in the military.
With the pullout of the Army engineers in July of 1943, it was now up to the Public Roads Administration to finish construction.
Workers leveled and straightened the roadway and improved the drainage system.
The best parts of the Pioneer Road were saved and incorporated into the final highway. The worst parts lasted long enough to serve their purpose and were replaced.
At the peak of operations, 81 contractors had 14,000 men working on the highway from Dawson Creek to Big Delta. Most of the contractors worked two 11-hour shifts a day, seven days a week.
Hourly pay rates ran from 96 cents for laborers to $2 for shovel, dragline, and crane operators. Truck drivers were paid from $1.10 to $1.40 an hour.
Women played an important support role in the building of the highway. They worked as cooks, clerks, secretaries, nurses, and some even drove trucks.
Wherever they went along the road, they brought smiles and memories of home to the men.
Another milestone occurred in early August of 1943 with the opening of the Peace River Bridge, located about 50 miles northwest of Dawson Creek.
Reconstruction of the Pioneer Road to a permanent all-weather road was completed October 13, 1943, with the reopening of a 40-mile section near the Alaska-Yukon border by the Utah Construction Company.
The building of the highway not only changed the land of the Northwest, but would have a lasting impact on its native people. The military and civilian workers brought different lifestyles and values to the area.
The soldiers and civilians unknowingly brought sickness. The Yukon Indians had no immunities to diseases like German measles, mumps, and influenza. Serious epidemics caused many deaths in villages along the new road.
The road also brought education, easier travel between villages, and made health care more accessible to the people of the Northwest.
The end of the war brought great changes to the highway. In compliance with the agreement signed in 1942, the United States was to turn over the Canadian portion of the road six months after the war ended.
On the 1st of April 1946, control of 1,200 miles from Dawson Creek to the Alaska border passed to the Royal Canadian Army. Headquarters for the newly established Northwest Highway System was in Whitehorse.
The new Northwest Highway System was primarily a military route. The Canadian Army was assigned the task of maintaining the highway.
Rough spots, washouts, and dust everywhere continued being major barriers in keeping the highway open. When the Canadians took over the road, they knew that they were committed to endless repairs and revisions, and would have to replace many of the earlier wooden bridges and culverts.
During the war, and for the first few years afterward, the road was closed to most civilian travel for lack of most of the regular highway facilities.
The only way a civilian was allowed on this military highway was by permit. Any civilian who wanted to travel the road had to get clearance from the military authorities in Dawson Creek before venturing up the Alcan.
The Alaska Highway lies along some of the most beautiful yet forbidding country in the world.
There were a few gas stations, motels, or roadside cafes. People who did travel the road travel through the kindness of those who lived along the way.
The highway was finally opened to civilian traffic in 1947. The road was gravel almost the entire length. It could be driven comfortably at 45 miles per hour.
There were some bumpy, rutted, and hilly stretches calling for speeds of 25 to 30 miles per hour.
A woman driving up the highway wrote a friend that signs were scarce along the road, but when you did come on one, you had better believe it.
In 1949, William Wallace, seeing there was a need for civilians using the Alaska Highway to know what services were available, published The Milepost.
The name Milepost comes from the familiar white mileposts which give the number of miles from mile zero at Dawson Creek, British Columbia.
The Milepost is an annual guidebook with useful information about services and accommodations offered along the road.
A large foldout map, mileage tables, and more. Now in its 44th edition, Milepost has become a popular reference for residents and tourists alike.
By early 1950, the highway had emerged as an important commercial supply line.
Highway traffic continued to increase with the flow of goods and materials moving north into the Yukon and Alaska.
An old trucker was heard to say, I get a new thrill out of every mile of this old highway, every trip I make.
At noon on October 16, 1957, girders of the Peace River Bridge failed and a 600-foot span fell into the river.
Traffic along the Alaska Highway had to be rerouted to use a railroad bridge three miles upriver.
The new Peace River Bridge was opened in January of 1960 to traffic.
On April 1, 1964, nearly 22 years after opening the Pioneer Road, the Department of National Defense transferred responsibility for the highway to Public Works of Canada.
Civilian traffic had greatly increased between 1946 and 1964. With increased traffic came demands for reconstruction and paving.
There were calls for feasibility studies on highway redevelopment and endless political debates on both sides of the border about spending large sums of money on a small population spread across vast distances and contributing only limited funds.
In 1967, local leaders in Whitehorse sponsored a 25-year Alaska Highway anniversary celebration.
Speakers called for paving the highway, arguing that a paved road would increase tourist travel, improve the flow of freight, and be an overall benefit to the people of the North.
Public criticism escalated as the increasing number of trucks and campers accelerated deterioration of the highway.
The government wanted to put responsibility of the highway into the hands of the provincial government.
The provincial government was not willing to accept the increasing costs.
By the late 1960s, some sections of the road were paved, some sections had a good gravel surface, while some sections were still dusty and substandard.
Broken windshields and headlights were common, and in dry weather dust clouds reduced visibility.
Construction of the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline and the proposed construction of a gas pipeline parallel to the Alaska Highway would bring an increased number of cars and trucks traveling the outdated road.
In 1973, the U.S. and Canada again opened negotiations for a cost-sharing program for paving the highway.
In 1978, the U.S. and Canadian governments agreed to the upgrading and paving of the Canada section of the Haynes Road to Haynes Junction and from there to the Alaska-Yukon border.
The 1980s brought more and more cars, trucks, and RVs up the highway.
Annually, more than 100,000 people were using the Alaska Highway for business and tourist travel.
Time brings changes. With each year, a mile is straightened here, a curve is taken out there, and a little more of the original route is lost to progress.
We end up bypassing parts of our past for the sake of convenience.
The 50th anniversary of the building of the Alaska Highway will celebrate the joint effort of the United States and Canada in the construction of the road.
Activities along the highway have planned a year-long calendar of international and local events called Alaska Highway Rendezvous 92.
Official opening ceremonies for the year-long celebration will be held February 16, 1992, in Dawson Creek, British Columbia.
International air shows will take place along the road, concluding with the rededication of the Northwest Staging Route on July 11 at Ladd Field in Fairbanks.
On November 20, soldiers' summit near Kluane Lake, Yukon, will again come alive with a reenactment of the original opening ceremony held in 1942, reaffirming the ongoing cooperation between the United States and Canada.
Throughout 1992, communities have scheduled festivities along the length of the Alaska Highway, as the people of the Northwest join together to celebrate the highway's 50th anniversary.
Today, the Alcan is 1,422 miles in length from Dawson Creek, B.C. to Delta Junction, Alaska. The Canadian portion of the route measures 1,200 miles from Dawson Creek to the Alaska-Yukon border.
The road is paved in most places. Less than 100 miles remained gravel as recently as 1991.
It has been called one of the most remarkable construction feats in history, built by thousands of soldiers and civilians, American and Canadian, built as a result of the military need to connect the continental United States with Alaska.
Donald McDonald said, a highway to Alaska must be built.
Slim Williams proved it could be done.
Thousands of men and women opened a road north.
The vision became a reality.
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