Beyond Mile Zero. Lily Gontard

of constructing the Alaska Highway, but before that, he mapped out the Northwest Staging Route from Edmonton, Alberta, to Fairbanks, Alaska. The route was developed from 1940 to 1944 and was composed of airstrips that the United States used during World War II to transport combat aircraft to their Russian allies. Alene was a teacher in Charlie Lake and Fort St. John, and she learned accounting and bookkeeping working for the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. According to Ross, his father wanted to use the lodge as a base for his outfitting business and also have the year-round income from offering services on the Alaska Highway.

      Previous images: There is barely a stick of timber left of Trutch Lodge, but during the time the Pecks ran the lodge there was a post office, restaurant, accommodation and garage, among other services.

      Photos courtesy of Ross Peck.

      Peck family lore tells that in 1949, Alene moved from Mile 47 Fort St. John, British Columbia, to become the first teacher in the new school at Mile 1016 Haines Junction, Yukon Territory. At the end of the school year, in the spring of 1950, Don drove up the Alaska Highway and collected Alene, and on the return trip, the couple stopped in Whitehorse to get married. They arrived as newlyweds at Mile 200 Trutch Lodge, which they’d purchased from Harry Noakes. Mile 200 sat on the site of a former highway camp, and when the Pecks took it over, the property consisted of a café and a garage. You could say that taking over the business was their honeymoon.

      “In later years, they acquired some additional land in the vicinity, including some agricultural land down by the Minkaker River,” Ross says, “and an old gravel pit across the road.”

      Ross was born in 1951 and has three younger siblings: sisters Patty and Kathy and brother Timber. All the children, except Kathy, worked at the lodge, and Ross first started pumping gas at four or five years old.

      “Somewhere in there I got the idea of washing car windows and hanging around for a tip—an early squeegee kid,” Ross says. “That worked well until one day I tried it when it was a little too cold and left a layer of ice on a tourist’s front window. He wasn’t too pleased.”

      When the Peck family lived at Trutch Lodge, the local population included people from a Northwest Highway Maintenance Establishment camp, the lodges and a Canadian National Telegraph camp. There were enough children in the area to warrant building a school in 1956, which Ross attended from grades one through seven.

      Don and Alene worked side by side at the lodge. “When a cook quit you could see my father in the café kitchen,” Ross says, “and my mother would be out pumping gas when needed. Mother would cover in the café when needed—if the cook or waitress decided to run off with a truck driver.”

      Although Don had many bushcraft skills, he was not inclined toward automobiles, so Trutch had a mechanic among the staff. Alene used her bookkeeping experience to manage the finances. The business grew, and aside from the original café and garage, Trutch Lodge ended up with a store, post office, pool hall, motel, staff quarters, the Pecks’ house and an airstrip. When their business was at its peak in the 1960s, they had about forty employees and the lodge was running twenty-four hours a day.