Outdoorsmen helped to ‘locate’ highway

By Karla MarshSpecial to the AHN

Before the surveyors and trailblazers could cut a line marking the right-of-way for the Alaska Highway, the road first needed to be “located.”

The highway was to connect the existing airbases at Fort St. John, Fort Nelson, Watson Lake, Whitehorse, Big Delta and Fairbanks, known together as the Northwest Staging Route.

However, although It was known which towns and villages the route would connect, the actual location of the road between these points was still to be determined.

It was the process of deciding just where the road would go between airbases that made the services of the local men like George McGarvey so valuable.

George was an experienced outdoorsman who knew the winter trails and river crossings and it was for this reason that he was amongst the men hired to guide the first party of Public Roads Administration Engineers to Fort Nelson.

The Engineers wanted to make the journey overland so they could see the general lay of the land, and the rivers and streams that would have to be crossed.

In March of 1942, with the push on to have the road located so construction could begin, he set out with dogsleds from Fort St. John.

In April, after returning from the reconnaissance trip, George worked with a PRA engineer to mark out the actual location of the road.

The engineers used series of aerial photographs which when viewed through a special instrument, produced a three-dimensional image.

Using these, he would direct George to walk a distance ahead of him and at the engineer’s instruction, George would mark the spot.

Behind this crew, came the surveyors, who recorded the angles and the distances of the newly located road.

Unlike George McGarvey and the engineers he worked with, many of the soldiers who were working on the Alaska Highway found it difficult to maintain their sense of direction once they were in the bush.

George recalls one soldier becoming lost, and the army hiring a native man to track him.

According to George, the native man picked up the soldier’s trail and could tell that the soldier was tiring as he was starting to lay down more and more often.

The native man insisted that they would soon overtake the soldier, but unfortunately he was not believed.

The army called off the search and to this day the soldier has never been found.