In March 1942 began an engineering feat that seemed near impossible which was the building of the Alaska highway from Dawson Creek, BC through Whitehorse, Yukon Territory and ending at Big Delta, Alaska totalling 975km.
A road was built in 8 months that went through Permafrost, muskeg, bogs, marshes and an endless supply of mosquitoes and other blood suckers. It was an engineering feat like no other and was deemed near impossible to do.
Some things to note;
Canada saw no military value in building a road North as beyond Prince George, BC the country was sparsely populated and there were no major population centres north of Prince George until Whitehorse and unlike the Americans the Canadian government knew about the difficulties of road building in the north.
Canada allowed the US to build the road but the US would have to shoulder the entire cost on its own and within 6 months of the wars end the Canadian portion would be returned wholly to Canada.
The Americans were woefully ill prepared for the ruggedness of the Canadian north and often vehicles and equipment had as little as a month of service life until the vehicles and equipment were deemed unserviceable and abandoned where they sat.
The American military sent quite a few black labour regiments to build the road and provided them with basic needs(they lived in Canvas tents and basic kitchen and bathroom facilities)while the white labour regiments got to live in wood buildings and were afforded comfortable living conditions.
About 10,000 Canadian and American civilian contractors and engineers worked on the project.
There were no airports or airstrips outside of Whitehorse or north of Dawson Creek due to nothing could be built to support the weight of loaded aircraft on the permafrost or countless marshes, bogs and muskeg.
The Canadian winter killed many vehicles as they could not operate at -40 or -60c and there are multiple documented reports of vehicles literally falling apart as the frozen steel snapped from the extreme cold.
In the end the road ended up not being used as a military supply line as it was costly to maintain and vehicles would have to be staged along to route to replace the ones that were falling apart. Almost all military supplies ended up being sent by ship to Anchorage and gradually throughout the years the Alaska highway slowly turned into a tourist destination for many Americans looking to travel to Alaska. Today you can see the remains of the thousands of vehicles,equipment, fuel dumps and work camps that were abandoned shortly after the wars end. They were left there as it was deemed too costly to remove so there they have sat to this day.
I loved he Yukon and the Dempster highway.