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Chapter XVII
Down the Road  to Fort Nelson Hotel

Despite bright sunshine the air was still sharp with overnight frost when we left next morning at eight thirty. Smoke was coming from the chimney of my over night friend’s store, but the door of the Hudson’s Bay Company was locked. Except for two small children who stood staring at the bus and the husky idly sniffing about, the Post seemed still asleep when we turned from its clustered huts on to the Highway.

For the next two hours we twisted through burnished forest. Once an approaching cloud of dust turned into a red truck whose driver waved as he whirled by. We saw no game. It seemed we were the only living beings astir.
Thirty-two miles after leaving Lower Post Barney slowed for me to read the marker on the bridge spanning Contact Creek.

“THIS CREEK MARKS THE SPOT WHERE U.S. ARMY ENGINEERS WORKING WITH CATERPILLAR BULLDOZERS FROM THE NORTH WERE MET BY ENGINEERS WORKING FROM THE SOUTH. THIS MARKED THE BREAKING THROUGH OF THE ALCAN MILITARY HIGHWAY, November 1942”

“And did they celebrate – Oh boy!” Barney added.

A sudden swing of the Road forty miles farther on disclosed the magnificence of the Liard River Rapids, leaping green and silver in the sun, and just beyond we turned into a muddy clearing among the trees – Mile Post 343 Maintenance Camp. It seemed deserted, but vigorous tooting of the horn brought a tall young man to the door of one of the nearest huts accompanied by a dog and a small boy in a yellow jersey.

“Everybody dead around here?” enquired Barney. Smilingly the young man guessed not and propped himself against the bus door. Barney handed out a timetable of the new winter schedule and they exchanged news while the small boy gazed at us with unwinking interest and his dog, having investigated us all in turn was difficulty to be enticed out of the bus when we left.

For a few miles the Road followed the course of the Liard River, flowing in wide loops of tumbling rapids. At times the bus was almost level with its banks before swinging away to climb until we could look down across limitless miles of orange forest and the River. We crossed a bridge over its wide, pebbly bars flecked with nuggets of coal, some the size of boulders washed down from the deposit farther upstream.

Here was Mrs. Kennedy’s home at the Post that she and her husband ran for the B.Y.N. Company. The sound of the bus brought him and two little boys to the door.

“Mum! Mum!” they cried in shrill excitement. Skipping up and down and in his eagerness to welcome her, the two year old tried to scramble up the bus steps. We all went in for coffee where I asked Mr. Kennedy, a pleasant red haired young man, if he had a pair of white moccasins. He ransacked his shelves, finally producing the only pair he had left – men’s brown ones! A fortnight, even a week ago he assured me ruefully, I could have had them, but it was now late in the season and all summer there had been such a run on them by tourists going North that his stock was exhausted until the Indians brought him in a fresh supply. He and his wife were really disappointed at being unable to supply them.

Mr. Kennedy glanced through the pile of mail and supplies which Barney had dumped on the counter, but the parcel of seal ivory he had ordered from Juneau was not in it. To my ear the very sound of ivory holds a rich, almost exotic note and this casual reference to it as part of his normal stock sounded almost disrespectful before I realized that for him its non arrival was of less importance than that a fresh supply of kerosene or a case of biscuits!

Scattered across what at this time was still a remote northern world, these cases served a similar purpose as ‘the shop’ in rural England before supermarkets and modern transport scared them out of existence. For up here, in addition to sacks of potatoes and flour and sugar jostling in corners, one could sit on a stool at the counter drinking coffee and eating thick slices of plum cake while discussing the news or buying cheese. Fill a store-cupboard for weeks and months ahead and outfit oneself and/or one’s family, including snow shoes and a winter parka.

Mr. Kennedy told me his people had come out from Ireland, asking eagerly if I had been there. He was so hoping to go. After a while, I went outside and strolled back to the bridge. The river was low at this season and I slithered down the almost sheer ten foot gravel bank beneath the bridge to pick up bits of brownish, shale coal that crumbled in my fingers.

It was time to leave. The friendly Kennedys, still lamenting their lack of white moccasins, clustered waving in the doorway until a distant bend hid them.
Some twenty miles on, a little group of Indians standing near the roadside stared without waving as we passed, and Barney said they were Smith River Indians and not very friendly.

Near Mile Post 496 he pointed to a narrow trail telling us it ran east for about half a mile into one of the so-called ‘tropical’ valleys, one of several in this area. In this one, Teresa Hot Springs, a pool sixty feet in diameter and more than fifteen feet deep held waters that remained the year around at about 115 Fahrenheit. During the War the U.S. Army had damned the warm creek and built a bathhouse, and in an outside temperature often well below zero, the troops – many of them coloured – had enjoyed unlimited hot baths!

Later in the morning we crossed the Liard by one of the only two suspension bridges on the Highway at this time – the other crossed the Peace River several hundred miles south. The tremendous strength of the Liard’s currents had undermined its foundations causing them to sink and crack so that as we neared the bridge, it was evident that it had a perceptible tilt and Barney said a constant watch was kept on it with reinforcement work going on almost continuously. But a violent cloudburst or added strain such as the sudden release of surging water after the Spring ice break-up could spell disaster, and it seemed inevitable that it would be only a matter of time before the present structure, which had cost two million dollars, would have to be reconstructed.

The Road began climbing again and from a high ridge we caught our last sight of the River. It was difficult to realize that those waters now swinging away from us into the north west would eventually find their way to the Arctic Ocean after joining the Mackenzie and flowing north for a further thousand miles to empty finally in the vast delta beyond Aklavik, far up in the North West Territories.

From where we were now, buried deep in a tangle of mountainous forest to the north east was the legendary Nahanni Valley, known as ‘headless’ because of the tales of miners and prospectors attempting to penetrate it by the South Nahanni River and never heard of again, or found headless. Despite sinister tales with their rumours of unfriendly Indians – even dark hints of the supernatural – having later been diagnosed as the work of grizzlies, nobody had so far succeeded in exploring the entire length of the valley.

“There’s a couple of million dollars buried in it anyway, whatever else there is!” Barney told us, jerking his head towards the densely forested peaks on our left. Somewhere among them he explained, three bombers had crashed during the War, and although their crews had escaped and hacked their way out, it had been impossible to salvage the aircraft.

At Mile Post 478 yet another River, the Trout, appeared green and swift, darting in bends to twist. At times, level with the Road then dropping away again as we climbed with the sunlight glittering in its crystal rapids. Like all these northern rivers it seemed possessed with a life of its own as remote from our understanding as the mysterious flight of the birds. We wound on along a level stretch towards a clearing – one of the old Army construction camps Barney told us as he slowed to a stop.

“You wouldn’t think it, but there’s ninety-two houses in there! The men had their wives and families living there too, but since they cut down on Maintenance there’s only the Captain. He and his wife still live in one of the huts – must be kind of lonely for them I’d think with all those empty ones around, but they don’t seem to mind. Wonder if he’s about – he might have some mail he wants taken.”

His enquiring hoot brought a wiry, fair young man running from a nearby hut, waving a packet of letters. The sudden draught of air that blew in with the opening of the bus door was icy!

The Captain’ said there had been a light snowfall that morning.

“Winter’s coming!” he smiled, leaning against the door, his sleeves rolled above his elbows.

Barney added his packet of mail to the growing pile on the shelf beside him.
“Nothing you want in Dawson? – O.K.”

“Cheerio!”

We waved back to him as Barney let in the clutch and the young man strolled back among the empty huts.

At this date the bus drivers on the Alcan seemed the counterparts of the packmen of the past and, like the coach drivers of the 18th century, served the isolated communities throughout its length as postman, messenger, news carrier and general helper, known by and welcome to everyone.

“You’d be surprised how much money I get to carry sometimes,” Barney told me, “seven thousand dollars I’ve had on this bus before now! Folks give it me to pay bills for supplies they’ve had, or stuff they want me to bring out from the town. Often they hand over all their takings from the store and ask me to bank it for them in Whitehorse or Dawson – never ask for a receipt or anything – just hand it over! It’s a real job sometimes, keeping it all sorted out.”

The early morning snowfall had melted on these lower levels, but before long the Road began climbing again and we emerged from the brilliant tunnel of forest into a world tinged with snow. To the very verge of the Highway it had crept down the slopes, silvering their orange crests, tipping the spruce and every leaf and blade of grass. As we climbed higher it seemed the transformation scene in some fairytale, the snowy mountain streaked by riverlets of vivid orange trees, their tips often veiled by drifting snow showers. Barney himself, driving the year around on the Highway as familiar with it as other men know the streets of their own town, exclaimed he had never seen it like this!

And still the Road climbed, leaving the last streaks of forest and winding into the bare bones of the hills. Barren, craggy peaks, seamed with moraines of ancient glaciers, wide arid rivers of stone and boulders, skeletons of the vanished ice that had gouged them from still higher peaks.

Throughout our journey we had seen no sign of the game which Barney had told me inhabited the entire region. Black and brown bears, grizzlies, mountain sheep and goats, caribou, moose and wolves. The plumy brush of a fox he had inadvertently run over a few months previously dangled crest-like from the windshield. Now, below a steep escarpment he drew the bus to a stop, searching with binoculars for a herd of mountain sheep he had seen feeding among the crags there last week, undisturbed by the sound of the bus. Today, however, the slopes were deserted, and disappointed we jolted on.

We crept round a crumbling edge where graders were at work shoring up and leveling the Highway which here levered by the snow, relentless pressure of moving ice beneath it, was slipping to one side. Throughout Alaska and the Yukon are vast tracts of such land where only a few feet of soil rest upon a core of solid ice, the gradual accumulation of ages. Only for a few short months each year does this top soil itself become unfrozen, the ice beneath having no chance to melt and so remains a perennially moving foundation, often thirty or more feet in depth.

The cold emptiness of the hills ahead was filled suddenly by the waters of Muncho Lake. A single sunlit cloud hanging above it like some luminous golden balloon, it occupied a vast fissure in these hills, lonely, brooding and magnificent. So far, Barney told us, the depth of its waters was unknown. It was so translucently jade that even from the brink one could toss in a ten cent piece and see it glint two hundred feet below.

Following its shore, the Highway was cut shelf-like from cliffs only a few feet above the water, around which it swooped in a series of breath catching bends. Hooting constantly but without slackening speed, Barney raced calmly around them and informed us in a conversational shout that a few months before, a man and a girl had been drowned here but nobody knew what had happened, it had been presumed their car had shot off the Road.

“They never did find them!” he concluded, as the side of the bus bulged perilously close above the water!

It seemed a very long time before the southern shores of the Lake appeared and we swung from it around a final curve and then uphill along the side of a rocky gorge to mile Post 456. Here was a maintenance camp and repeater station and we stopped for lunch.

Inside the little coffee shop an old Indian was sitting at the high lunch counter wielding a knife and fork with the slow deliberation of a child. Beneath a wild thatch of black hair streaked with grey, a face like chiseled bronze was thrown into relief by the vivid green kerchief knotted around his neck. Barney knew him well, and after greeting him told us over lunch that this old man, Charlie Macdonald (his father was a factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company),  had come from Scotland three quarters of a century before. He had helped the U.S. Army plot three hundred miles of the Highway here, guiding its surveyors and engineers through the unexplored, densely forested maze of surrounding mountains. Another party of northbound travelers came in; two women and three men. The old Indian, after carefully replacing his knife and fork, climbed off his stool and squatting down in a corner of the room, watched them while they ate.

Their talk with Barney as always at such chance encounters was of the Road. Driving on the Alcan was no prosaic undertaking. Created for his convenience but never entirely subdued to his whims, no matter how often a man might traverse its length and know by heart, and in the dark, its every hill and twist and creek and bridge, he had always to reckon with the incalculable. For this reason the law demanded that prospective travelers driving their own cars or trucks must prove possession of three hundred dollars. That was deemed a reasonable enough sum when accident or breakdown might involve a tow of several hundred miles, the need for vital parts, or maintenance, possibly for days, of a stranded family. It was a road on which a sudden landslide caused by some subterranean movement of ice or a heavy fall of rain or snow could loosen a culvert or trap a bend with fallen rock. Since one or several such chances might have occurred since last he passed along, even the previous day, a man was always eager for news of the way ahead. Its gossip too, was endless: Of friends met and messages to be brought or taken; reports of game or hunters’ tales, rumours of gold or maybe oil, or silver, that Peter this or Joe that had gone after or stumbled on.

Motionless in his corner the old Indian listened to it all. Only the brilliant, watchful eyes seemed alive in that inscrutable face, carved like one of the hills. I wondered what he was thinking of all these people and of their Road, which he had helped them to pierce through his land.

It was time to leave. Again we were surrounded by forest and at the top of a long steep rise, Barney pointed to a narrow trail which led to Charlie Macdonald’s home; five miles back among the towering forested peaks he lived in a hut with a wife and by Barney’s reckoning, about twelve children!

From this point, perhaps one of the most spectacular on the Highway, it seemed vain to imagine tracing even a pathway through the tangled maze of mountains jostling one another in crowding, forested magnificence. As we swooped from their tangled crests, the full realization of its achievement was borne in on me afresh.

For many hundreds of feet it fell now to the floor of the Toad River Valley, so named because of the vast number of toads reputed to inhabit its banks. Aglitter in the sunshine the river shimmered, stippled with the trees’ reflected gold and for twenty miles the Road followed its course. Far above and ahead lifted wide-flung snow streaked mountains, their rocky lower slopes coloured pale violet and tawny grey, ochre and cream, many of the formations fantastically patterned as though by tools. Where the strata, forced up by the pressure of some gigantic upheaval, was set endwise and aslant, forming a central panel between the normal horizontal structure on either side. Further on, another cliffside had been pressed and etched into sweeping whorls, the exact colour and graining of fine walnut. It was as though some long lost race of giants had amused themselves tracing designs on the hills.

From Mile Post 418 we had our first, distant sight of Racing River, named for the striking swiftness of its waters but it was another twenty miles before we reached the bridge spanning it and halfway across, as though yielding to an impulse we all shared, Barney switched off the engine. Regardless of time schedules, “we’re late anyway”, he said comfortably. He and Nancy strolled about taking pictures.

Every river possesses some inherent quality by which it holds the memory: The unsleeping, secret, almost sinister force of the Yukon; the Liard’s leaping remoteness; the bubbling echo of the Trout and the beckoning, sun rapt colour of the Toad. Everywhere there was the sounds and individual music of lesser streams, of countless little lonely wandering, unnamed creeks, each with its own character. Even those mere threads of water welling through the moss which I had glimpsed so briefly and whose purpose I could never know.

Now, standing on its bridge I thought that Racing River was the most joyous I had ever beheld. Down its wide valley, bounded to the north west by a strange, flat-topped mountain spread like a table below a mass of loftier peaks – “magic casements opening on faery lands…” its waters hastened merrily towards us, sunlight quickening its dancing ripples which rang on the snowy silence like a chime of hurrying silver bells.

Reluctantly we returned at last to the bus, and now the Highway continued to mount steadily for many miles. Across far sunlit valleys scarf-like snow clouds still brushed the orange slopes with silver as they floated idly past, but here the surroundings were becoming wilder and more barren. Laboriously we ground up the long spiral of a gorge high above MacDonald Creek named after Charlie MacDonald’s father and now so far below as its waters appeared as a mere trickle on the floor of another stony valley. Somewhere among that tangle of peaks and orange gorges was the way we had come, now lost in haze. These desolate uplands were caribou country, and Barney told of the herd he had once seen up here during the building of the Highway which for three days and nights had held up all work on it as thousands of animals drifted across the site on a mile wide front during their annual migration.

About four o’clock we met a party of returning hunters. Down a slope towards us they came ambling, three riders, between them, strung out in Indian file, three pack ponies, a fine caribou head slung across the back of the second one. They trotted past, their hooves crisp in the gravel, and the last rider reined in beside the bus to talk with Barney. Then away down the hill they went, northward, until a sudden dip hid them from sight.

At the next Camp a new Post was going up, Barney told us. Nice people they were and making a good job of it; we could stop there for coffee and we might like to see how they were getting on with their construction work. At this Camp the huts were spread over a high, flat area, ringed by mountains. Oh how cold it felt as we climbed down from the bus! The slow drip-drip of icicles fringing the roof of the new store sounded distinct in the sudden silence.

The contrast inside was immediate as Barney pushed the door open and was greeted by the owner’s wife, a cheerful smiling woman who radiated welcome. In no time we were all sitting round the counter drinking hot coffee while we gazed around at the well-stocked shelves. Of course we could see her new rooms – things weren’t finished yet of course, and they were still working hard on the bathrooms, but some of the bedrooms were completed, and already they had had several travelers staying overnight. She took us along a passage leading from the store and opened the doors of several rooms. Her taste was excellent. Comfortable beds with softly shaded spreads and windows were hung with gaily patterned chintz. With only a log wall between their warmth and the icy mud and wind scoured wilderness without, this woman had created a haven of comfort.

Laughingly she admitted that it had been a job to get all the stuff up here, hauled by truck from Dawson, and there was still any amount to do – this was only the beginning of what she hoped it would be, by next season! She spoke so eagerly, lightly dismissing all the difficulties.

Throughout the length of the Highway, a strong thread of homespun woven into its tapestry, such women were playing a vital part in the life shuttling past their doors. They were capable, self-reliant and cheerful in their stout determination. Dealing with the unexpected, calmly and without fuss they were prepared to serve, often single-handed, a sudden influx of twenty or more travelers from the bus with a lavish, steaming meal, or a stray truck-driver hungry for breakfast. In a part of the world where work ended when the job or the journey was completed, a man needed to eat when he was lucky enough to arrive, which might be at any hour.

Brisk and friendly, of all ages – little mousy women in flowered overalls with neatly combed hair, ‘Ma’ to all the Maintenance men: large full-bosomed buxom young women in coloured jerseys and well cut tweed skirts. Others: thin, grey-haired and middle-aged, slender girls with lipstick, nail varnish and an up-to-the-minute hairdo – two characteristics were common to them all - competence and nylon stockings! Still a rare and prized luxury to me.

At last, with mutual good wishes, we said goodbye and jogged on, still mounting, for we were approaching the Summit, at 4,253ft, the highest point on the Highway. Near this, three isolated rocks jutted from a hillside; shaped somewhat like begging dogs, or possibly kangaroos, they looked as if the same giant engravers of the escarpments we had passed farther back had again amused themselves by fashioning these grotesque models, petrified into brown rock.

The Summit itself was a long, shallow plateau, its northern end marked by a tiny lake, now just a scoop of grey ice water. For with the golden orange valleys we had left behind the sunlight of the afternoon had also faded, and during the last few miles we had passed into an increasingly grey world. Just ahead, Summit Lake, a long, narrow sheet of water draining from either end, looked stark and forbidding, the air sharpened by hovering snowclouds creeping down its shores.

Towards its southern end the iron roofed, cement huts of the Maintenance camp huddled together, shivering and forlorn in their colourless, mud bound isolation, but from one of the doorways a large dog appeared and came wagging his tail delightedly along the Road to meet us. Barney told us this was Bob, a retired sleigh dog who now lived with the Maintenance men. A friend of all the bus drivers knowing the times and days of their arrival, always going along the Road to meet them in order to get a ride back. Stopping the bus, Barney opened the door for him, and after greeting us all in turn he returned to Barney’s side until we reached the camp. Here the boys told us he never made a mistake – always going in the right direction to meet either the south, or northbound bus. Often he heard it long before they did and even when asleep, would rouse up about a quarter of an hour before one was due to be ready to welcome it.

While Barney was getting gas and having a tyre repaired I crossed over to the Lake. A fine, bitter drizzle was falling and from its sheer banks the water sank deep, grim and icy. I wondered what winter must be up here when blizzards scalped this funnel-like depression. At length we said goodbye to the Maintenance men and Bob, who had to be deterred from accompanying us, and hastened on. There were still another ninety-two miles before we should reach Fort Nelson.

The Highway now was drawn across seemingly illimitable tracts of land stretching to the horizon in every direction. From these heights they appeared  wild and remote scrawled over valleys and great rivers, dwarfed by distance to wandering green threads; stippled with mountains, their peaks as petrified drops of spray up flung from some golden ocean. Primeval, untrodden and unmarred save for the ochre ribbon of the Road uncoiling ahead, empty beneath a stormy sunset sky. Now we crossed barren reaches blackened by forest fires and bristling like a badly shaved face with stark, charred tree trunks and climbing again up the sides of queer, flat-topped gorges, its surface here treacherous with glistening mud. Climbing higher still, twisting around sharply coiled bends where a layer of snow lay on the blackened earth like frosting on a chocolate cake, cloaking the naked trees.

From the summit of Steamboat Mountain we looked across spruce bordered forest dropping in terraced orange gorges laced with snow to the Teton River Valley, and remotely far, dimmed by the gathering evening, the distant ramparts of the Rockies. Then began a slow, fourteen mile descent, over a surface spread with mud like dusky cream, the light draining away as the Road plunged deeper into the gorges.

Here Barney remembered he had once chased a moose. It had leapt out onto the Highway almost under the front wheels of his bus and bewildered by its lights had kept ahead for a time before plunging wildly back into the bush below. “The only time I ever saw a moose run.” He finished, “Usually they trot or gallop.”

We gained the valley floor at last and for another thirty-five miles followed one of the most tortuous stretches of the Highway. Barney told us, it was one of the worst to drive on. Tracing the labyrinthine roots of the hills, it spiraled and doubled back on itself with no straight stretch for more than a hundred yards as we followed it through woods of giant, silver stemmed cottonwoods, their foliage still blazing overhead in the last sunlight far above the fast dimming earth beneath. That, too, was extinguished, and the final few miles sped past in total darkness.

At last we arrived, stumbling somewhat wearily from the bus into the lighted lobby of the hostel functioning under the rather grandiose title of the Fort Nelson Hotel. Here, Nancy was immediately hailed with loud effusion in the corridor by a merry gentleman who,  she told us, was her father! Nonplussed by this obviously unwelcome encounter, she received his expressions of astonished delight at her appearance with marked dismay, evading all his questions as to the reasons for her journey by uncommitted vagueness – she was just going down to Fort St. John. Her embarrassment deepened when he insisted on accompanying us to the dining room and airily announcing that he had himself already dined, chiefly I presumed on the bottle of whiskey he was brandishing. He varied his importunities to treat all three of us to dinner with pressing invitations to Nancy and me to accompany him to a dance at the airport! At last, finding that neither threats or cajoling could persuade us, he departed, and I told Nancy, from whom all the perkiness had evaporated like air from a pricked balloon, that I would find out later if there were any keys to the doors.

Throughout all this I had noticed the proprietor hovering about the doorway eyeing the man somewhat in the manner of a policeman waiting for an agitator to overstep the mark. Later after finishing our meal I went to look for him and found him, a grey man in a grey suit who looked as if he would be more at home in some city office, sitting in the lobby with Barney, who was giving him his views on running his establishment. It seemed that the proprietor, bemoaning the difficulties of getting adequate help had asked Barney for his opinion of the food. He received the uncompromising reply that he served the worst meals on the Road!

“And I’m not the only one that thinks so.” Barney added frankly. “You can ask anybody on the Road! What you want”, he continued, “is a couple of really good waitresses – girls that know their job – and pay them well, ‘stead of all that lot you’ve got – you don’t need half of them!”

He continued in this vein for several minutes, countering the proprietor’s rather feeble pleas by instancing the efficiency of other far smaller places along the Highway. When there was a lull, I asked if there were any room keys to be had. The proprietor regretted that there weren’t adding further regret for the annoyance caused at dinner by ‘that man’. I told him I didn’t mind about that but I did want some sleep, which it appeared doubtful I should get without a key to my door which he admitted was next to that of the nuisance.

Then, as if struck by a sudden idea he suggested he could give me a different room. The hotel was practically empty – though last night he added hastily, he had had thirty guests! He could give me the room the Governor General had had when he stayed there. His tone was almost obsequious. Unimpressed by whether China’s President or the Shah of Persia had last occupied the room, I followed him down a passage behind the dining room to another wing, where he flung open a door and somewhat reverentially ushered me in. In his eyes it seemed the bed had the same glamour as those patronized so variously by the first Queen Elizabeth!

I felt rather base about deserting Nancy, and when the proprietor had departed after bringing over my suitcase and taking with him as a final touch of luxury my mud-caked shoes to be cleaned, I went back to the other corridor and knocked on her door. There was no reply and I tapped again.

“Who’s that?” Evidently she had been asleep, for there was a scared note in the sharp query. I reassured her and after a minute’s scuffling, the door was opened a few inches and she peered suspiciously out, a blanket slipping from her bare shoulders. Poor little Nancy! I have never forgotten her handsome little face, its green eyes wary and the knife, which she had taken from the dining room and stuck in the jamb of the door, glittering in her hand.

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