purington.1 ROADS AND ROAD BUILDING IN ALASKA. 225 
Several bridges of a permanent character have been built in the 
Territory, the principal of which is the Ogilvie steel bridge over 
Klondike River, the cost of which was $35,000. It is seen in PL 
XXXIX, A. 
The method of constructing the road in the Yukon Territory, where 
frozen muck and gravel flats are traversed, is illustrated in fig. V.h 
This section was drawn from information furnished by Mr. W. Thi- 
baudeau, Territorial engineer of the Yukon Territory. It has been 
the experience that over frozen ground this type of road, costing 
$3,200 per mile, can be maintained with much less expense than roads 
running along the hillsides. With roads of the kind here illustrated 
it has been found best to leave the moss intact under the bed of poles, 
for it protects the ground from thawing; the black frozen muck, hav- 
ing the consistency of solid stone, remains as a firm bed. The inside 
faces of the side ditches are not always banked with sod, but such bank- 
ing affords additional protection. The ditches are cut either entirely 
l^Vyf] Broken stone or grave/ D/M£A/S/OA/S 
/6 feet across top ofroac/ 
Brush /aid crosswise 
3 feet depth of ditch 
6 inches depth of 'stone oryrare/ 
l^ol Pc/es /o/of fenyMmse / f oot dept fy ofSrash 
[\-cH m oss 3 //7c/? es d'cm eter ofpofes 
M Frozen muck 
pjT^|] frozen y ray ei 
Fig. 49. — Method of constructing road over frozen muck, Klondike. 
in muck or partly in muck and partly in underlying gravel. These 
conditions vary with the thickness of the muck. 
On the other hand, when the moss blanket is cut into, as is neces- 
sarily the case in all side-hill cutting, the sun and the seepage water 
gradually thaw the frozen muck, which becomes a soft, slimy mass. 
The cost of maintenance of such roads has been found so much greater 
than that of roads on flat ground that the latter are now constructed,, 
even if the distance between terminal points is greater. 
PI. XXXIX, B, shows a 6-mule team hauling 8,000 pounds with 
a trailer on an upgrade stretch of road in Hunker Creek, near Dawson. 
PI. XL, A (p. 226), from a photograph taken in August, 1904, shows a 
6-horseteam endeavoring to haul a load of 3,300 pounds from Fairbanks, 
on Tanana River, to Cleary Creek, in the Fairbanks district of Alaska. 
Not half a mile from the point where this picture was taken, on the 
road to Cleary Creek, a cart bearing a L5-horsepower boiler was seen 
broken down, its wheels buried in mud and water. 
Bull. 263—05 15 
