Two crews, one road,
and a creek named for the moment they met.
In the spring of 1942, months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army set out to cut a road roughly 1,700 miles long, from Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Delta Junction, Alaska, through country that had never been properly surveyed. It had one construction season to do it.
There was no time to build from one end. Engineer regiments went in from both directions at once, pushing toward each other through boreal forest, rivers, mountains and muskeg.
The textbook sank.
The standard method was to strip the ground and grade it. In the north that was a mistake. Stripped of its moss, the permafrost thawed and the roadbed turned to swamp. Bulldozers sank to their cabs. So the crews changed the method in the field. They laid logs crosswise to float the road over the muck, left the insulating ground cover in place, and learned the terrain as they went. The heavy machinery was new to most of them too. They learned it on the job.
Contact.
On 24 September 1942, at Mile 588 near the British Columbia–Yukon line, the crew pushing north and the crew pushing south broke through the last trees and met. The stream there was named Contact Creek.
A month later, on 25 October at Beaver Creek, Corporal Refines Sims Jr. of the 97th Engineers and Private Alfred Jalufka of the 18th Engineers drove their bulldozers through from opposite sides and closed the final gap. The 97th was one of the segregated Black regiments whose soldiers built much of the road. The photograph of the two men shaking hands became the image of the whole project. The road was finished in just over eight months.
Why we took the name.
Small businesses and the defense mission are building toward each other from opposite ends. The Department of Defense needs more small suppliers. Small shops need a way in that doesn't bury them in paperwork, and operations that can keep up once they're in. New technology, AI above all, is today's heavy equipment: powerful, unfamiliar, and easy to sink if you use it the textbook way.
Our job is to work both ends until they meet, and to fit the method to the ground instead of forcing the textbook onto it. That is the whole firm, in one creek.
We carry the name with respect for the soldiers who earned it, including the Black engineers whose work went unrecognized for decades. In 2017 the State of Alaska set aside 25 October to honor them.