Beyond Mile Zero. Lily Gontard

bake these by the pan-load to satisfy the traveller’s appetite. North of Fort Nelson, British Columbia, at Mile 375 Tetsa River Lodge, Ben and Gail Andrews bake up to three hundred cinnamon buns a day. Tetsa cinnamon buns are known for a light texture, a sprinkling of spices and a sweet glaze with a slightly salty taste that will make you buy a second one.

      Lodge owners, such as Olivier and Mylène Le Diuzet of Pine Valley Bakery and Lodge, put their own spin on what their lodge offers. The Le Diuzets, who are originally from France, include quintessentially French quiche and crepes in their menu.

      North of Tetsa River Lodge, Donna Rogers, who owns Mile 533 Coal River Lodge & RV in British Columbia, with her husband, Brent, also bakes cinnamon buns. But from the shelves in her restaurant you can also buy homemade preserves and chocolates, and in 2003, she received a postcard extolling the virtues of her bumbleberry pie from a fan in the United States who’d driven the length of the Alaska Highway. “She wrote that it was the best bumbleberry pie she’d tasted,” Donna said.

      Even though husband-and-wife teams have run lodges since the 1940s, official business partnerships pre-1980 consisted mostly of the husband and another man; the wife was not included on the paperwork. The labour at lodges was (and often continues to be) divided along traditional gender lines: the wife/woman takes care of the baking, cooking, cleaning and restaurant operations, while the husband/man runs the mechanical side of the operation, including the gas station and repair shop.

      However, as is often the case in remote areas, traditional gender roles get thrown out the window when there’s no one to do the work or when one person happens to be good at and simply enjoys work that’s not traditionally associated with their gender. Siblings Ellen Davignon (née Porsild) and Aksel Porsild (whose parents, Bob and Elly, built Mile 836.5 Johnson’s Crossing Lodge in the late 1940s) say that after running the restaurant in the morning, Elly would take a Swede saw and cut kindling for one hour every afternoon, even though there were plenty of able-bodied men or boys around who could do that work. At Mile 436.5 Double “G” Service, Jack Gunness, a tall burl of a man serves up slices of his home-baked bread almost as big as dinner plates.

      On a highway lodge menu, you’ll find a breakfast fry-up of eggs and a side of bacon, sausage or ham, with home baking, and soup made from scratch, along with deep-fried offerings and burgers. Vegetarians may be hard-pressed to find a tofu-, lentil- or bean-based dish, but there’s probably an iceberg lettuce salad dressed with pale chopped tomatoes. Whatever you choose from the menu, there’s always either water-weak or turpentine-strong coffee to wash it all down.

      In fact, along this highway, where clean drinking water has at times been hard to come by, coffee was once the staple drink of lodge life. Gertrude Baskine recalled that in 1943, on the tables in the maintenance camp messes she visited, pots of coffee were replenished over and over, but no jug of water could be found. She felt she was being “weaned off drinking water” because she was told it was considered unsafe, since filtration and plumbing hadn’t been installed at the camps where she stayed.

      When old-timers reminisce about the good old days, it’s doubtful that they are referring to the early days of snow clearing along the Alaska Highway.

      Yukon Archives, Albert Charles Barnes, 89/99 #14.

      At Mile 836.5, which had been a military construction camp, the US Army made several unsuccessful drilling attempts for water so that access to it wouldn’t be at the mercy of the freeze-up in winter. The Porsild family opened the Johnson’s Crossing Lodge on the site in 1949, and for many years afterwards, they hauled water in a tank on a trailer from Brook’s Brook maintenance camp six miles east down the highway. In the early 1950s, Bob Porsild installed a waterline from the river to the lodge, which was only used in the summer months. Water continued to be hauled from Brook’s Brook over the fall and winter for several years.

      Luckily, in the twenty-first century, drinking water along the highway is not such a rare commodity as in 1943. The majority of lodges have wells. Mile 533 Coal River Lodge & RV is near the confluence of the Coal and Liard Rivers, and Donna Rogers is particularly proud of the taste of the water from her well. She serves a glass as if she were pouring from an expensive bottle of grand cru wine.

      Three things are necessary for lodges to operate: fuel, water and human power. Anything that affects the availability of those, influences whether a lodge can operate for another month, season or year.

      Today, when you drive the Alaska Highway, for every lodge that is open and offering hospitality and conversation, you’ll see one or two or three that are abandoned or have a For Sale sign posted on the property. If you look closely at the ground, you might see the outlines of old foundations. Sometimes, though, not even a trace remains: it could be that every hint of the lodge has disappeared, burned to the ground or been scavenged and carted away. The boom time of the highway lodges has passed, and what remains is a legend frayed on the edges.

      Memory is reliant on perspective and experience, making history a malleable concept, and the histories of some Alaska Highway lodges are easier to unearth than others. Memoirs exist, and there are descendants and friends who recall stories, with or without embellishment. Meanwhile, other lodges are recorded solely as names in a single edition of a guidebook or map, the owners known or unknown, the stories evaporated into the landscape like the buildings that have been bulldozed or reclaimed by nature.

      Early lodges were built using available materials such as the spindly spruce trees of the boreal forest.

      Yukon Archives, Rolf and Margaret Hougen fonds, 2010/91, #1008. Photo by Rolf Hougen, 1946.

      The Alaska Highway lodge community has evolved and devolved over time. Reliant on the highway traffic for its existence, the vitality of the community has been at the mercy of factors beyond its control, such as the “Black Monday” stock market crash of 1987 and the explosion of the American housing bubble of 2008, or the boom-and-bust nature of the oil and gas industry. The people who chose to open and/or operate highway lodges had to find within themselves the skills and resources to withstand outside forces, and continue to thrive, or not, whatever the case may have been. Beyond Mile Zero explores Alaska Highway lodges by sharing the unknown stories of a community that provides essential services along what remains a long and sometimes lonesome highway—a community that has been largely ignored by historians and journalists in favour of the hero-making effort that was the construction of the Alaska Highway.

      Abandoned Mile 351 Steamboat was burned down not long after this photo was taken.

      Note: Italic typeface is used to indicate businesses not in operation at time of publication.

      Mile 72 The Shepherd’s Inn

      Mile 101 Blueberry

      Mile 143 Pink Mountain Campsite and RV Park

      Mile 143 Pink Mountain Motor Inn / Buffalo Inn

      Mile 144 Sasquatch Crossing Lodge

      Mile 147 Beatton River / Tucker Inn

      Mile 162 Sikanni Chief

      Mile 171 Mason Creek

      Mile 175 Buckinghorse River Lodge

      Mile 200 Trutch Lodge