A popular Alert urban legend has it that Caribou Road was constructed in an attempt to build a connection to Eureka, 480 kilometres to the south. A moment spent studying a map of Ellesmere Island will put that one to rest: the road would have to cross some impossible terrain along the way, passing over mountain ranges and icefields and fjords. Maintaining it would be a monumental undertaking for very little practical benefit. Nevertheless, everyone seems to have heard that story somewhere.
However, the true story of Caribou Road is almost as strange. It was built in 1979-80 in order to reach one of the Winchester Hills so that it could be used as an easily available supply of gravel. The Winchester Hills are glacial deposits consisting of loose, fist-sized rocks, so there’s something to the idea, and I don’t know exactly why it didn’t work out. A fair amount of bulldozing was done, though, and a few hundred truckloads of rock were used to build up the final two kilometres of the road, visible here in this photo.
It didn’t take long before things got weird, though. In the early 1980s, a colonel in some office down south came up with the idea of extending Caribou Road all the way to Lady Franklin Sound, about 70 kilometres south of Alert. A port would be constructed there, allowing annual sealift supplies to be dropped off and trucked up to Alert over land, rather than brought in via Hercules from Thule.
The logistics of this would be absurd, to say the least. Maintaining 70 kilometres of road across the brutally unforgiving tundra would not be an easy task, and Alert would become a hive of construction every summer. Plus, as anyone who’s driven Caribou Road can tell you, it’s not an easy drive. It’s bumpy and slow; covering the 10 kilometres from the station to the end of the road takes about half an hour at best. Driving out to fix broken equipment down at the port would be a huge journey in and of itself. God forbid you should forget a tool and have to go back.
Anyways, within a few years, Caribou Road had turned into a fun summertime diversion, a nice place to drive a truck on a pleasant summer day, and that’s how it remains today, a scenic monument to yesterday’s bright ideas.