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Fairbanks, Alaska——The Alaska Highway has been handed its honorable discharge. It's not in the Army any more. But it's still under military control, and you can't drive on it without the War Department's okay. It's more than two years since Engineer dogfaces were clambering off the train at Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to start clawing out a pioneer trail 1,600 miles north to Fairbanks, Alaska. Now a thin trickle of troops is flowing back over the same path. They're headed for the States and maybe somewhere else overseas. The jobs they're leaving behind are passing to civilians hired by the U. S. Engineering Department. These are such jobs as barreling trucks through, giving the road its daily shave with graders and massage gravel, working in the repair shops, filling gas tanks and checking the course of all vehicles at relay stations. Soon the only soldiers you'll see on the Alaska Highway will be doing specialized jobs that Uncle Sam isn't ready yet to turn over to civilian hired hands. Now that they're turning back, the GIs are taking stock of what became of all their sweat and toil and some blood in the last two years. Some are flabbergasted at the size of their handiwork. The Alaska Highway isn't the Lincoln Highway, but it's not the Old Ox Road either. Just saying it's a whale of a project doesn't give you much of a picture, but here are a couple of angles that might. If you took the train from Miami to Tallahassee in Florida, that would be about the same deal as from Edmonton, Alberta, the "gateway to the Alaska Highway," to Dawson Creek, where the road really begins. Then, if you drove from Tallahassee through Birmingham, Ala., Little Rock, Ark., Oklahoma Cty,Okla., and then swung north and continued to a spot on the Missouri River above Casper, Wyo., you'd have covered about the same ground, with all the twists and turns, as between Dawson Creek and Fairbanks. The only town you'd bump into on that whole trip would be about where you'd hit Okahoma City. That town would be Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, a village smaller than Carson City, Nev. Or look at it this way. If you stretched the Alaska Highway in one straight line, including bridges, Winston Churchill could ride in a jeep from the White Cliffs of Dover across the Channel, through Belgium, Germany, Poland and Lithuania, and right up to Joe Stalin's front door in Moscow. As to scenery, there's no spot on the road as spectacular as, say, Yosemite Valley. The highway starts in the sprawling agricultural acres of British Columbia and winds up in the scattered farm patches around Fairbanks. In between it's mile after mile of skinny white birch, tall sticky spruce, scraggly jackpine, steep gorges, broad glacial bottomlands and rolling hummocky tundra. Curves are gentle and the hills are gradual. The highest point on the route is only 4,214 feet at Summit Lake, a pass through the Rocky Mountains 400 miles north of Dawson Creek. All those rugged-looking pictures you used to see of the highway during construction——just a pair of muddy ruts slashing through a narrow aisle in the trees——are ancient history now. For 90 percent of the distance the road is 26 feet between shoulders. In winter the graders keep the surface as hard and smooth as concrete. The speed limit is 35 miles per hour, but you could hit 60 with safety except that it's slippery as an oyster's abdomen. Last spring the thaw made many sections impassable, and ice wiped out a lot of the temporary bridges. The same trouble is expected this year, but on a lesser scale.
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It's no secret that nowhere near the amount of freight is moving over the road as there would be if the Japs were still giving us a bad time out in the Aleutians. But that doesn't mean the highway isn't doing a job. Actually it has become the main trunk of a network of facilities that have brought Alaska closer to the U. S. in two years than in all its previous history. Running alongside the highway is the longest open wire circuit in the world, connecting Alaska and the U. S. by telephone and teletype for the first time. Signal Corps and Engineer troops helped install the line, sinking about 35 poles every mile for the 2,026 miles between Edmonton and Fairbanks. The line, like the highway, cuts through four time zones. Late in 1943, about the same time the phone line was nearing completion, the longest overland mail route in the world was opened over the highway. This provided daily first-class delivery out of Edmonton. The mail truck makes it from Dawson Creek to Fairbanks in about three days and 19 hours. The service is operated jointly by the U. S. and Canadian Post Offices. For several hundred miles, the four-inch pipeline of the Canol project follows alongside the highway, and one of the main branches off the highway is the recently opened Norman Wells Road. Five QM drivers from Teslin were the first through a truck convoy to Norman Wells. They were Cpl. Joseph L. Frey, T-5 Joseph T. Adams and Pfcs. Otis A. Lunyou, Michael E. Doheny and Joseph T. Smallman. Another branch of the highway, the Haines Cut-off, gives the panhandle section of southeastern Alasa its first overland connection with the rest of the Territory. This road runs from the Army's old Chilkoot Barracks docks for 154 miles, along the trail trampled out by the herd of cattle Jack Dalton drove north to Dawson City in 1898 and sold as beef for almost their weight in gold. The Haines Cut-off hits the main Alaska Highway 100 miles west of Whitehorse. To top it off, Greyhound buses operated by the Northwest Service Command shuttle over the highway daily between Dawson Creek and Fairbanks. The buses carry GIs, going on and returning from furloughs, and civilian workers., In short, except for the sloppy season of thaw, traffic over the Alaska Highay is no longer a catch-as-catch-can affair. Freighting by truck is like the old pony-express system brought up to date. A truck leaving Dawson Creek is loaded, inspected and checked through the dispatch station. The driver jockeys it to the next relay station, about 100 miles away, where another driver takes over. Until the recent shift of administration of the road to the Northwest Division, USED, all drivers were GIs from QM truck companies, and the relay stations were manned by soldier clerks and repair mechanics. GIs also operated the highway patrol that covered the road in 100-mile segments. Each patrol car cruised 50 miles north and south of its station, reporting any bad spots on the road and giving aid to stalled drivers. Some of the men are seriously wondering what the post-war prospects are for the Alaska Highway. They'd like to open up tourist camps. S/Sgt. William V. Koeninger of Chillicothe, Tex., already has a spot picked on the shores of Muncho Lake at a site pointed out by Indian Charlie MacDonald, a guide who lives in that section with his 104-year-old father, four sons, six daughters, six horses and six dogs. Several others have their eyes on Lake Therese, a freak hot spring that bubbles up through the snow into a pool of water at a temperature of around 100 degrees. This is a mile off the highway in Tropical Valley, 213 miles north of Fort Nelson. Most GIs, though, claim they've had their fill of the highway for now and ever afterward. One of te stock gags is about the yardbird who wanted to get away so badly he was bucking for a Section 8 by biting trees to test their texture. This skeptical attitude is shared in part by Brig. Gen. James A. O'Conner, who commanded the highway's operations until he was succeeded by Brig. Gen. Ludson D. Worsham of the USED. "The average tourist has two or three weeks' vacation," Gen. O'Conner said. "In most cases it would take at least half that time just to reach Dawson Creek, where the road begins. Its more important peacetime function should be making new mining and settlement areas accessible." "Primarily the Alaska Highway was built for insurance. We wanted to be sure the line of communication with the north would always be open." |
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Post script - Newspaper item circa 1971. |
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Alaska Highway by bus
Item from the Chicago Tribune-reprinted in Youngstown(OH)Vindicator, March 16, 2003 |
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Offered March 2003 |
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