North to the Arctic cont.

They special ordered several big Mack trucks with flat bed trailers that held over 5500 gals of diesel fuel in the bed and when the rig was loaded plus the wieght of the truck and trailer they grossed out over 350,000 lbs., these Macks plus the dozen or so Kenworths and the huge snow train with several big bulldozers made up the primary convoy. The Macks were shipped into Valdez, Alaska, loaded up and driven to Eagle on the Yukon, River a trip of some 500 miles with the last 168 miles into Eagle having to be cleared of snow, all of the supply's were trucked in and the convoy was off to the Arctic Ocean with the big Cats leading the way. They had mountains , river's and tundra to contend with, the rivers such as the McKenzie had to have an ice bridge built over it, this was done by pumping water from the river onto the existing ice and making a 60 ft. wide and 4 ft. plus thick ice bridge in order for these huge loads to go safely across, this was done on several river crossing's. Every inch of this trip up and back had to be bulldozed in front of the following convoy, 20 miles progress in one day was great but there were many days only a mile or two were made and mechanical problems at times shut the whole outfit down for many hours. A very bad accident occured with the snow train , it jackknifed into a canyon and burned up the engines and electrical system putting it totally out of commission, they offloaded the frieght and put it onto sleds behind the Cats and continued on. I will tell about my recovery of this big snowtrain in another chapter. In spite of all the problems these men never backed off and made their on towards their Arctic Ocean destination.---Continued.