FAIRBANKS, Alaska (Special) - Announcement that the U.S. had abandoned to Canada the Haines Highway from Fairbanks to Whitehorse has led to some of the "sourdoughs" up here opening up on the whole highway question.
Now that this section has been dumped back on Canada, it is up to the Canadian government to put up the money to maintain it. Ottawa cannot make up its mind
what it should do about it - let it go, or pour thousands per mile into it for upkeep.
One today asserted there was "a clique which wants a Haines-Fairbanks road" with "free corridor" through Canada for their road and "some of them have even advocated asking Canada for a cession of territory."
This man, who has been in the north more than 45 years and knows the country well, said he has followed closely construction of the Alaska road from Dawson Creek in British Columbia to its northern terminus here.
He dealt particularly with the Haines cut-off, which was started from Haines, not far from Skagway, and was to have connected with the main highway. This road, however, was abandoned by U.S. Army engineers.
He said "certain political influences" got this road started. In 1942 the bottleneck on the main road was north and west of Whitehorse, "but instead of working on this weak link they took men and equipment from the main road to start the cut-off."
'COMPLETE FAILURE'
But, he said, they hardly got a start on the cut-off before winter clamped down on them and the main highway west and north of Whitehorse (around Kluane Lake and beyond) was left in such a condition "that practically nothing went over it in the winter of 1942-43," and the road was utterly impassable from the spring break-up in 1943 and nothing at all went! over this stretch of road from April 15 to Oct. 15, 1943, when the tundra froze up.
This sourdough said "there is a clique in Alaska which wants to get a highway from Haines to Fairbanks and it has become an obsession with them - I have heard them rant and rave about it for hours. We should worry - except for a few hundred miles, the road would be in Canada and it is going to be excessively expensive to maintain such a road, largely because the main road west of Kluane Lake is in the wrong place. They worked on the Haines road all last summer and tried to use it last winter after the freeze-up. It was a complete failure; the snowfall is very heavy in this section, and they got a lot of
equipment snowed in and it stayed there until spring."
$100,000 PER MILE
He said there was no need of the Haines-Fairbank road from a Canadian standpoint, and the cost would be out of all reason. Many more millions would have to be spent, he said, to make even a passable summer road.
"In this last mad orgy of spending they must have put in nearly $100,000 per mile and they have no road yet," he said. "The people back of this Haines cut-off took advantage of war emergency to boost their pet along and they were willing and did cripple the main highway scheme to get this thing started. The highway south of Whitehorse functioned during the winter of 1942-43 and so did the railway (White Pass and Yukon Route), but the road north of Whitehorse was a hopeless flop."
The road was built to take care of an emergency, he added, "but if the emergency had occurred there they had no road - they could have been ready at half the expense if they had gone about it the proper way."
