Yukon who is who

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Leo Proctor
	
The Wind River Trail was the brainchild of Leo Proctor, a Whitehorse contractor. In the fall of 1959, the Amerada Petroleum Corp invited tenders, on a ton-mile basis, for hauling a drilling rig, camp and geophysical equipment to various locations in their Bell River Block on Eagle Plains. The method of hauling was up to the bidders and Proctor proposed a winter snow road and trucks rather than the tractor trains that had, to date, been exclusively used for off-highway hauling. By using his road building equipment and then White Pass trucks to haul, he avoided building heavy and costly custom sleighs.((Al Wright, "Wind River Interlude." //Whitehorse Star// (Whitehorse), 29 April 1981.)) Leo thought of building winter roads when he was cutting and selling mine shoring to Keno Hill Mine. The cheapest and best way to get the timbers out of the bush was on packed snow. He sold the idea to Secony Mobile with the guarantee they could service their camps by pickup.((Bob Erlam, "Leo Proctor: a great builder of the Yukon." //Whitehorse Star// (Whitehorse), 28 June 1996.))
	
Construction began in October 1959 and averaged three-to-four miles a day. The route was generally laid out by aerial reconnaissance but the lead tractor operator, Frenchy Lavoie, used maps and good judgment to lay the route on the ground. Some thirty miles of the Dempster Highway was already built (up to North Fork Pass), but Proctor chose a route from the Elsa area and followed Braine Pass and the Wind River valley where extensive gravel deposits were reported. The road swung west along Hungry Creek to the mouth of the Hart River, then climbed to the Eagle Plains Ridge system. Proctor’s equipment reached the Hart River and Amerada Geophysical Site B1 on December 12th. They reached the second geophysical site B2 on the southern edge of Eagle Plains on December 17th.((Al Wright, "Wind River Interlude." //Whitehorse Star// (Whitehorse), 29 April 1981.)) 

In the early 1960s, Bob Erlam and Proctor travelled up the Dempster for thirty miles and then onto Proctor's Wind River Road in a Pontiac sedan. The winter road was packed with snow and moss and was just like pavement. Leo drove a steady seventy miles per hour. They stopped at trailer camps along the way, but it was too cold to get the camp heaters working so they slept in their clothes inside sleeping bags. Leo's equipment ran twenty-four hours a day in the cold. At night the blades were rested on snowbanks. In the morning the equipment backed up and the weight of the blade dropping forced cold oil past the hot motor and warmed the hydraulics so that the system worked. Proctor communicated with his cat operators by flying over them in his Cessna. His unique system was to put a message in a tube of toilet paper and stuff the openings with paper. Then he heaved the roll out of the plane and it would unwind as it dropped, marking the spot where it was for the operators. Leo build roads all over the Yukon with the help of two tough road foremen - Henry Kabanak and Frenchy Lavoie.((Bob Erlam, "Leo Proctor: a great builder of the Yukon." //Whitehorse Star// (Whitehorse), 28 June 1996.))
	
Leo Proctor was inducted into the Transportation Hall of Fame as the 2007 Transportation Pioneer and a man with vision and determination. Proctor forged ahead despite being told it couldn't be done. He built a 385-mile winter road and delivered six million tons of equipment to an oil and gas drilling site, sixty miles inside the Arctic Circle.((Yukon Government Press Release #07-112, 4 June 2007.))