John Denison

John Burton Denison (June 30, 1916 – January 6, 2001) was a Canadian ice road engineer who operated in the Northwest Territories in the 1950s-1970s. Biography Denison was born in British Columbia in 1916. His father Norman Lippincott Denison was descended from the affluent Denison family of Toronto. After training in mechanics, Denison joined the Canadian Army during World War II. After the war, Denison joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and was then attached from 1946 to the RCMP as a constable in Yellowknife. A year later, he was involved in a search for a missing fur trapper on the Barren Lands First Nation, and after freezing his fingers, feet, and face, decided the RCMP was not the career for him. A year later, he resigned from the RCMP, and his fiancée Hannah and he left Yellowknife for Edmonton, where they married. In search of work, Denison returned to the north in 1947 and worked on the cat trains supplying the mining camps with equipment. He eventually became associated with Byers Transport Limited, with whom he engineered a network of winter ice roads throughout the Northwest Territories to service various mines (including Port Radium, Discovery Mine, and Tundra Mine).