History Of The Alaska Highway

So here we are setting off for Wonowon. You know it, of course, as milepost “one-hundred-and-one.” You don’t? Oops. Did I forget to tell you to buy a MILEPOST?

Yes, they even beat www.AlaskaTravelMagazine.com in search engine position when a person types in “Alaska Travel” —as they should. This video article is meant to sell the idea of driving the Alcan. It is not a day-to-day guide. Nobody does that better than the MILEPOST.
In the days when roadhouses kept track of wintertime Alcan travelers, there was a mimeographed MILEPOST on every dashboard.  We honor that history, every year, by buying the latest edition to check road conditions.

We also appreciate the MILEPOST’s continuing coverage of what has been called, “One of the Top 10 Construction Achievements of the 20th Century!” The total pioneer road constructed was 1543 miles long, inside of 8 months and 11 days. “Heck of a job Brownie,” of FEMA should take note; that works out to moving forward six miles through impossible conditions, each and every day.

I know, from having lived through WWII, that Japan would have been able to continue it’s invasion of the Territory of Alaska, and the Russians would have had difficulty fighting Hitler without thousands of U.S. supplied planes ferried through Alaska, if the Alcan had not been built! To us, at risk, this surly equals in importance the Italian Campaign.

Speaking of fighting for freedom, know also that nearly half of the engineer regiments that suffered through 12 hours each and ever day of mosquitoes, black flies in the summer, and frostbite in the winter, were what were called then, “Colored”. Hereto before Congress had not allowed African Americans to work along side of “non-colored” units, so the hard work and dedication of these men, “getting the job done,” led to integration of the armed services in 1947.

If you are a baby boomer, you perhaps may appreciate that this highway, in the chessboard style Cold War, countered the threat of the Soviet’s Trans-Siberian Railroad (what a great idea that was), and the Russian’s claim that Alaska really belonged to the, “people of their state.”

So, here is what I want you to do, motorhome traveler. Slip on some rubber boots if you have them, and see how far you can wade out into a muskeg, just like those of the tidal plains of the overprotected ANWAR, much further north, and wonder how it is that people who have never visited the North, want us to buy our oil from Middle Eastern countries that hate Americans.