operated for eleven years. “Everything slowed up here two years ago,” Howard says. “It’s been pretty quiet since. There’s virtually no activity in the oil field–related stuff—basically the operator just looks after the infrastructure.” The slowdown in the oil and gas sector is reflected in the Shannon’s business, as they figure they are doing 40 percent less than they used to.
Fire has been the death knell for many Alaska Highway lodges. Buckinghorse River Lodge has survived two generator fires since 2006 and the cost of the fires has taken a financial toll on Vel and Howard Shannon.
However, the decision to put the twenty-four-hectare (sixty-acre) property up for sale two years ago was not because of the slowdown in business but rather a completely unrelated event. In 2008, Vel and Howard were in a car accident in Prince George that left Vel with a broken back and five broken ribs. “Her internal organs aren’t where they are supposed to be,” Howard says. “She’s getting to the point where she needs more medical attention.” That attention is a two-and-a-half-hour drive south. Howard also admits that at sixty-eight years old, he’s getting to the age where the work of maintaining the lodge is not as easy for him as it once was.
The Shannons keep their business open year round, which is easy for them since they live on the premises. “It’s a lifestyle for us, too, basically,” Howard says. “My wife says it’s like camping out all the time.”
The Shannons have played host to several celebrities, notably a grizzly bear who’s graced the silver screen: Little Bart, the bear you may have seen in Into the Wild. (Little Bart is eight-foot-one-inch tall and should not be confused with Bart the Bear, who was nine foot six and appeared in Legends of the Fall. Both bears were trained by well-known Utah-based animal trainer Doug Seus.)
“They were filming in Alaska and were bringing him down.” When the trailer transporting the bear pulled into Buckinghorse River Lodge, it was having trouble with the shower system to keep the animal cool. “They are out there spraying the trailer and I started giving him shit. Then I saw the bear and said, ‘If he’s hot then you’d better cool him down.’” The handler let Howard touch the bear. “He was massive—that bear stood about damn near five feet at the shoulders.”
Once the Shannons sell the lodge, they’ll hit the road. Their final destination will be southern British Columbia, where they have family, but first, they’ll head north. The farthest north on the Alaska Highway that Vel and Howard have been is Mile 351 Steamboat. “We’ll stop at Liard, and I’ve always wanted to go to Skagway and take the train,” Howard says.
Mile 200 Trutch Lodge
You can’t see the Trutch Mountain section—the highway now skirts around it—but it lives on in early highway stories as a sometimes impassable incline, and a treacherous decline. The remains of Mile 200 Trutch Lodge exist deep in the woods, a sketch of the business that—from 1950 to 1963—was run by Don and Alene Peck. An old guidebook states the lodge was at Mile 201, whereas Ross Peck, son of Don and Alene, says it was at Mile 200. There was a highway maintenance camp at Mile 201, which is most likely what the guidebook was referring to.
This property inventory accompanied the bill of sale for Trutch Lodge, which Don and Alene Peck ran for thirteen years. The list includes everything from a chain hoist to hose clamps to a water barrel.
Photo courtesy of Ross Peck.
Ross, who is a retired guide outfitter and a rancher living in Hudson’s Hope, recalls that there were a few “Trutches” close to his parents’ lodge: “Somewhere in there, another lodge came into existence at Mile 195, which was also called Trutch and was run until it was displaced by the highway relocation.”
Don Peck was a trapper, guide and packer who had worked with legendary surveyor Knox McCusker. As the Royal BC Museum’s online Living Landscapes project explains, Knox McCusker was a lead in the logistics of constructing the Alaska Highway, but before that, he mapped out the Northwest Staging Route from Edmonton, Alberta, to Fairbanks, Alaska. The route was developed from 1940 to 1944 and was composed of airstrips that the United States used during World War II to transport combat aircraft to their Russian allies. Alene was a teacher in Charlie Lake and Fort St. John, and she learned accounting and bookkeeping working for the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. According to Ross, his father wanted to use the lodge as a base for his outfitting business and also have the year-round income from offering services on the Alaska Highway.
Previous images: There is barely a stick of timber left of Trutch Lodge, but during the time the Pecks ran the lodge there was a post office, restaurant, accommodation and garage, among other services.
Photos courtesy of Ross Peck.
Peck family lore tells that in 1949, Alene moved from Mile 47 Fort St. John, British Columbia, to become the first teacher in the new school at Mile 1016 Haines Junction, Yukon Territory. At the end of the school year, in the spring of 1950, Don drove up the Alaska Highway and collected Alene, and on the return trip, the couple stopped in Whitehorse to get married. They arrived as newlyweds at Mile 200 Trutch Lodge, which they’d purchased from Harry Noakes. Mile 200 sat on the site of a former highway camp, and when the Pecks took it over, the property consisted of a café and a garage. You could say that taking over the business was their honeymoon.
“In later years, they acquired some additional land in the vicinity, including some agricultural land down by the Minkaker River,” Ross says, “and an old gravel pit across the road.”
Ross was born in 1951 and has three younger siblings: sisters Patty and Kathy and brother Timber. All the children, except Kathy, worked at the lodge, and Ross first started pumping gas at four or five years old.
“Somewhere in there I got the idea of washing car windows and hanging around for a tip—an early squeegee kid,” Ross says. “That worked well until one day I tried it when it was a little too cold and left a layer of ice on a tourist’s front window. He wasn’t too pleased.”
When the Peck family lived at Trutch Lodge, the local population included people from a Northwest Highway Maintenance Establishment camp, the lodges and a Canadian National Telegraph camp. There were enough children in the area to warrant building a school in 1956, which Ross attended from grades one through seven.
Don and Alene worked side by side at the lodge. “When a cook quit you could see my father in the café kitchen,” Ross says, “and my mother would be out pumping gas when needed. Mother would cover in the café when needed—if the cook or waitress decided to run off with a truck driver.”
Although Don had many bushcraft skills, he was not inclined toward automobiles, so Trutch had a mechanic among the staff. Alene used her bookkeeping experience to manage the finances. The business grew, and aside from the original café and garage, Trutch Lodge ended up with a store, post office, pool hall, motel, staff quarters, the Pecks’ house and an airstrip. When their business was at its peak in the 1960s, they had about forty employees and the lodge was running twenty-four hours a day.
