The Alaska Highway: A subarctic road to prevent invasion
Diane Selkirk/ BBC :
March 2022 marks the 80th anniversary of the start of construction on the Alaska Highway. Considered one of the most scenic highways in Canada, the 1,387-mile highway attracts more than 300,000 road trippers from around the world every year.
Beginning in Dawson Creek, British Columbia, and winding north-westerly 613 miles through BC into Yukon, and then another 577 miles to the US border, the road passes from the Rocky Mountains to subarctic alpine tundra to the jagged peaks of Kluane National Park and Reserve before ending at Delta Junction, Alaska. Along the route, parks, campsites, resorts and small towns welcome visitors while locals relish the opportunity to share stories about life in the northern frontier.,
Dawson Creek, a remote farming community located in the rolling foothills of the Northern Rockies near the Alberta border, might seem like an odd place for the start of an international highway. The town wasn’t much more than a 600-person rail terminus when Canada and the US first began discussing plans to build a road connecting the lower 48 states with the far-flung northern outpost in 1929. Until 1930, Alaska was only accessible by boat from the contiguous US, and as US relations cooled with Japan, the isolated territory seemed especially at risk against a potential Japanese attack against the North American mainland, as Alaska’s Aleutian Islands are just 750 miles from the closest Japanese military base.Several options were considered, but on 7 December 1941, the day the Japanese attacked the US’ Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the debate became urgent. The criteria – a route to send defensive supplies to northern military bases should mainland US or Canada be attacked, far enough inland that enemy planes couldn’t reach it – made the proposed route starting from Dawson Creek the top contender. Three months after the attack, thousands of US troops and an armada of heavy equipment arrived by rail at the little blip of a town to begin the US’ most expensive construction project of World War Two.
Originally known as the Alaska Military Highway, Alcan or Canadian-Alaskan Military Highway, the stunning $138m (the equivalent of $2.55bn today) feat of engineering is simply called the Alaska Highway today. Its initial military purpose began to fade from memory as soon as the route opened to the public after the war in 1948. Almost immediately, Greyhound buses braved the wilderness track, and before the end of the first year, some 2,000 tourist vehicles would follow in their dust. From there, the legend only grew the story about an impossible-to-build highway that could take visitors across some of the roughest and most beautiful land imaginable.
It’s a “bucket list road trip with jaw-dropping scenery”, said Maya Lange of Destination BC.
Leaving Dawson Creek, the Alaska Highway meanders past farmlands, forests and rivers to Fort Nelson, BC. It was here, while driving the highway last year with a group in search of winter’s Northern Lights, that I first got a sense of the effort involved in building the highway, which was considered the biggest and most challenging engineering project undertaken since the building of the Panama Canal.
At the Fort Nelson Heritage Museum, located about 280 miles north of Dawson Creek, an old-timer named Marl Brown (who sadly passed away in June 2021) told me he used to worry about the loss of the highway’s history. As a mechanic for the Canadian Army at mile 245 in the 1950s, back when much of the now-paved track was still gravel, Brown noticed that some of the 174 steam shovels, 374 blade graders, 904 tractors and 5,000 trucks used to build the road had been discarded and were rusting away.