Out of the Ashcan

ALCAN INTO ASHCAN read a U.S. newspaper headline six years ago. The U.S. Army, which built the Alaska (Alcan) Highway in nine hard-driving months of 1942, had just turned over to Canada the 1,221 miles from the starting point at Dawson Creek, B.C. to the Alaska border. The headline writer, like most Americans who gave the matter any thought, assumed that the Alcan--like its famed World War II counterparts, the Burma and Ledo Roads--was purely a product of military emergency, with no peacetime future.

They were wrong about the Alaska Highway: it is busier and better than ever today. Its immediate postwar traffic of 500 vehicles a month has zoomed to 1,000 a day. Even the new peak is expected to double after next June, when the connecting Hart Highway from the West Coast is completed. That will cut off a 900-mile detour and give traffic from as far south as San Diego, Calif, direct access to the Yukon and Alaska.

The men who maintain it call the Alaska Highway "the best gravel road in the world." Since 1946, Canada has spent $26 million in straightening, widening, bridging and otherwise improving it. Winter and summer, some 300 workers grade and gravel every inch of its surface at least twice a week. The result: a road on which even trucks and heavy tourist trailers can do up to 500 miles a day.

The highway runs through some of North America's most striking scenery, and some of its best fish and game country. It is drawing a steadily increasing stream of tourists and sportsmen to northern Canada and Alaska. It has also opened up a new avenue for prospectors, giving them access to a new mineral-rich area scarcely tapped before. In the last five years, new deposits of silver, lead, gold, zinc, copper, asbestos, tungsten, molybdenum and manganese have been found in paying quantities near the highway.

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