The Alaska Contractor: Special 60th Anniversary Issue

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Glen Chambers in Anchorage store after last addition.
mining operation in Alaska.
“Fiat-Alice Chalmers … they decided to close things out
and we just elected to mutually go our separate ways. It was
right after the pipeline was done. They decided we should
part company and we were most happy to. We came out real
good on that.
“By then we were taking on the Case line of equipment,
which is smaller dozers. Some of the stuff we called the
homesteader’s special because they’d use it to clean out and
get into their homesteads, building the little roads.”
Turning a bit nostalgic, Chambers softly continues, “John
Deere and Caterpillar are about the only old two tractors
still made in the U.S., and even Caterpillar engines are built
in Japan. So much of this stuff comes from Japan now.”
Equipment changes
“Everything was cable when we fi rst started,” Chambers
said. By cable he means that things like drag lines were operated
by a series of cables reeling and unreeling as the bucket
is fi lled, raised, emptied and returned for another scoop.
“Alice Chalmers was one of the fi rst to come in with hydraulics
and that just changes the picture completely. There
was no more cable.
“At one time we had a line of cable we sold … everybody
did … and we fi nally just went out of the cable business
New Case 475 Cable Trencher.
entirely. The manufacturer came up and wanted to know
why we weren’t taking cable—this was just right after the
earthquake.
“We were sitting up in the Petroleum Club on top of the
Hilton,” Chambers continued.
(Ed. Note: The Petroleum Club in those days looked out over
the Ship Creek area which always had all sorts of heavy equipment
in motion relating to the harbor and the Alaska Railroad.)
“The only piece of equipment out there with cable was
the crane. I said that’s why we gave it up; nobody’s using it
anymore.
“That [hydraulics] was probably the biggest change, and
now they’re getting electronically controlled. I’ve been out
[retired] 15 years, so some of that’s getting away from me.”
Alaska’s big projects
While Yukon Equipment has been involved in virtually
every large project in Alaska over the years, it’s not always
in ways you might fi rst think. For example, when the Parks
Highway was constructed between Fairbanks and Anchorage
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, about all Chambers
can recall providing are some scrapers and tractors to the
joint venture between GHEMM Co. and Rivers Construction,
which worked on major parts of the road.
For the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, Yukon Equipment was
pretty much left out in the cold as far as tractors were concerned—Caterpillar
had more or less an exclusive contract
to provide the heavy equipment.
But, about that time, “we had taken on the DuPont line of
explosives,” Chambers said. “We did the compressors at the
tank farm in Valdez and cut a nice deal on dynamite for the
pipeline. Thousands of pounds of powder on that. That was
our big thing … lots and lots and lots of dynamite and some
of this air stuff.
“We did a better job of taking care of the customers nonpipeline
related. It was a good venture.”
Partly as a result of the pipeline, Anchorage itself grew
at a rapid rate, particularly east of Gamble Street and south
of 15th.
14 The Alaska conTrAcTor 60th Anniversary Issue 1948–2008
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