The Canadian government, as well as scientists in Alaska, Russia and other cold places are supporting research on permafrost — support that would have meant the world to the men who carved the pioneer road out of the forest.

A Strategic Corridor

They began with only a vague idea of where it should run and hardly any idea at all of how to build it.

People had argued about building roads in the region since the Klondike gold rush at the turn of the 20th century, when stampeding miners took boats to the Alaska panhandle town of Skagway, hiked across the mountains to Whitehorse and boarded paddle-wheel steamers for the trip up the Yukon River to the gold fields. Many would-be road builders argued for a coastal path.

In 1942 it was clear that the military road had to be out of reach of carrier-based Japanese bombers. Moreover, it would have to link to the Northwest Staging Route, a series of highly primitive airstrips built between Grand Forks, N.D., and Fairbanks for ferrying Lend-Lease planes to the Soviet Union.

In the end, planners sketched an inland route and assigned five regiments of the Army Corps of Engineers to move men and equipment over frozen rivers, set up base camps and get ready to build.

But how? Heath Twichell, a historian and retired Army colonel, tells the story in “Northwest Epic” (St. Martin’s Press, 1992), a widely cited history of the road. Their first step, he writes, was to dispatch a surveyor or two on horseback or dogsled, accompanied by a native guide. They would stake out a possible route for the road.

Behind them came men on bulldozers who knocked down the trees. Behind them came another bulldozer team to clear debris and build bridges and culverts. Next came surveyors to mark out centerlines and edges, then a team to fill low spots and construct drainage ditches.