This is a history of the people who helped open the doors to Alaska -- the people who accepted the challenges of the frozen North and built Roads across the tundra, brought schools to remote villages and spanned the mighty Yukon River with bridges to let the pioneers cross. These hardy builders knew the importance of Preserving the land in which they chose to live and, at the same time, of providing the necessities of the life that would bring people to settle the territory and the new state -- the housing, the commerce, the hospitals and the airports. Unless that history is recorded and passed to the next, history's details become lost. This book captures some of the challenges those first builders faced the permanently frozen ground, the vast empty spaces with no readily available transportation. Many of those challenges required solutions -- innovative and ingenious.