Army & Navy – COMMUNICATIONS: The Road

With small ceremony, the U.S. Army Engineers celebrated completion of the biggest job in their blueprints since the Panama Canal. Last week the last link in the Akan Highway was made ready for traffic. “The Road” was finally open: a two-way military highway which is the first all-year land connection of Alaska to Canada and the U.S.

When the speeches flowered at the formal dedication last November, The Road was hardly more than a slot in the trees. But while it was still a rough scratch on the earth the Alcan Highway somehow became a smooth fact in the pub lic mind. Travel-starved citizens dreamed of the day when they, too, might wheel the family sedan through Dawson Creek and Whitehorse, past Kluane Lake and Tanana (pronounced Ta´na naw) Crossing.

1,630 Miles, One Town. Actually, few stay-at-homes could visualize the immense and harsh reality of The Road : some 1 ,600 miles from end-of-steel at Dawson Creek in British Columbia to end-of-steel at Fairbanks, Alaska, over a hundred river crossings, through a wilderness so remote that it boasts only one settlement big enough to be called a town.

While the Alcan is officially “The Alaska Highway,” it carries only war traffic. It was built, not for the vacation trade, but to service and supply the chain of airports strung along the air route which it follows.

No tourist turnpike, it is 26 ft. wide, has not a mile of hard surface. Its graveled length and incongruously urban bridges serve only military necessity.

The Road’s cost seems high for what Sunday drivers’ maps would call a “secondary road.” It will total around $125,000,000—some $75,000 a mile for road built. But this price—the approximate price of a battleship—looked less steep when the Japs were in the Aleutians and the sea routes to Alaska were menaced.

To the Army, the Alcan was a vital line of defense.

New Route. As events have fallen, The Road gets its finishing touches in time to serve as a memorial of its own necessity. Already an additional route has been pushed quietly from salt water opposite Skagway to a junction with the Alcan, 1 08 miles west of Whitehorse.

The new Haines cutoff was slammed through the wilds this year, now carries some truck traffic. Scheduled to be finished before freeze-up this fall, it shortens the truck haul to Fairbanks by a thousand miles, supplements existing rail and water routes to the interior.

With the sea lanes to southern Alaskan ports open the year round, the southern half of The Road may not see much through traffic. Greyhound busses, operated for the Northwest Service Command, now run the thousand miles from Dawson Creek to Whitehorse, average 22 m.p.h. Trucks will continue to supply the big airport at Watson Lake, even with the pipeline punched through from Whitehorse—location of the refinery for oil from Norman Wells (TIME, Oct. 4). But no postwar commercial or tourist development now in sight will justify maintenance of this stretch of The Road.

More likely for future development is the northern half of the Alcan, with its link to Haines. From tidewater on the Inside Passage at Haines (site of Chilkoot Barracks, longtime Army post) the cutoff climbs through Chilkat Pass, lower and easier than famed Chilkoot Pass of gold-rush days. Scenically the route is as spectacular as the well-advertised Banff-Jasper Highway in the Canadian Rockies.

Engineers Are Pioneers. As on the Alcan itself, the Army Engineers did the tough pioneering for the Haines cutoff. Without adequate maps or a ground survey, three companies of the 340th Engineers pushed into the snow late last winter. Location parties used dog teams and native guides. Working with limited equipment in winter weather, the “Hairy Ears” found a way, slashed out a tote road.

The Haines and the Alcan Highways surmounted the usual difficulties of wilderness construction, plus some special troubles native to the region. Muskeg and niggerhead swamps, hard to locate on the air maps, had to be skirted or heavily filled. North-country rivers looped their way all over the route.

When the ice went out in the Donjek, the White, the Robertson, the Johnson, the Duke and the Beaver, it took most of the timber bridges with it. Then the rains sluiced down. In some places The Road melted into the tundra. From April 15 until last week, there was no through traffic between Whitehorse and Fairbanks.

Opening of the Alcan and its connections eases but does not end the prodigious labors of the Engineer troops who blazed the trail and the civilian contractors of the Public Roads Administration who ripped the permanent road through the North. Many a load of gravel will be dumped before the Engineers and the P.R.A. can dust their hands and call it a day. But the hard part is over.