The Alaska Highway
The Alaska Hwy runs northeast from Mile Zero at Dawson Creek through the Yukon Territory to Mile 1520 in Fairbanks, Alaska. Built as a military road, it's now an all-weather highway travelled by daily bus services and thousands of tourists out to recapture the thrill of the days when it was known as the "junkyard of the American automobile". It's no longer a driver's Calvary, but the scenery and the sense of pushing through wilderness on one of the continent's last frontiers remain as alluring as ever and around 360,000 people a year make the journey. As recently as 1940 there was no direct land route to the Yukon or Alaska other than trails passable only by experienced trappers. When the Japanese invaded the Aleutian Islands during World War II, however, they both threatened the traditional sea routes to the north and seemed ready for an attack on mainland Alaska - the signal for the building of the joint US-Canadian road to the north. A proposed coastal route from Hazelton in British Columbia was deemed too susceptible to enemy attack (it's since been built as the Cassiar Hwy), while an inland route bypassing Whitehorse and following the Rockies would have taken five years to build. This left the so-called Prairie Route , which had the advantage of following a line of air bases through Canada into Alaska - a chain known as the Northwest Staging Route . In the course of the war, some 8000 planes were ferried from Montana to Edmonton and then to Fairbanks along this route, where they were picked up by Soviet pilots and flown into action on the Siberian front. Construction of the highway began on March 9, 1942 , the start of months of misery for the 20,000 mainly US soldiers shanghaied to ram a road through mountains, mud, mosquito-ridden bogs, icy rivers and forest during some of the harshest extremes of weather. Incredibly, crews working on the eastern and western sections met at Contact Creek, British Columbia, in September 1942, and completed the last leg to Fairbanks in October - an engineering triumph that had taken less than a year but cost around $140 million. The first full convoy of trucks to make Fairbanks managed an average 25kph during one of the worst winters in memory. By 1943 the highway already needed virtual rebuilding, and for seven years workers widened the road, raised bridges, reduced gradients, bypassed swampy ground and started to remove some of the vast bends that are still being ironed out - the reason why it's now only 1488 miles (2394km) to the old Mile 1520 post in Fairbanks. All sorts of ideas have been put forward to explain the numerous curves - that they were to stop Japanese planes using the road as a landing strip, that they simply went where bulldozers could go at the time, or even at one point that they followed the trail of a rutting moose. Probably the chief reason is that the surveying often amounted to no more than a pointed finger aimed at the next horizon. Canada took over control of the road in 1946, but civilian traffic was barred until 1948. Within months of its opening so much traffic had broken down and failed to make the trip that it was closed for a year. Although the road is now widely celebrated, there are sides to the story that are still glossed over. Many of its toughest sections, for example, were given to black GIs, few of whom have received credit for their part in building the highway - you'll look in vain for black faces amongst the white officers in the archive photos of ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Another often overlooked fact is the road's effect on aboriginal peoples on the route, scores of whom died from epidemics brought in by the workers. Yet another was the building of the controversial "Canadian Oil" or Canol pipeline in conjunction with the road, together with huge dumps of poisonous waste and construction junk. Wildlife en route was also devastated by trigger-happy GIs taking recreational pot shots as they worked: the virtual eradication of several species was part of the reason for the creation of the Kluane Game Sanctuary, the forerunner of the Yukon's Kluane National Park .
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