to ferrying passengers. Goods were unloaded at Telegraph Creek and transported by vehicle or pack train to remote inland communities. From the 1930s to the 1960s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was responsible for clearing the navigation channel along the Alaska reach, which is often clogged with snags and driftwood. The shallow channels of the Stikine delta were another hazard to shipping, with boats occasionally stranding at low tide. One of the last boats to operate regularly on the Stikine was the Judith Ann, which plied the river between 1950 and 1970. In the 1960s the Cassiar Highway was extended from the Alaska Highway to Dease Lake and Telegraph Creek, and the Stikine gradually faded in importance as a commercial waterway. Commercial boat traffic on the Stikine had mostly ceased by 1972. Another effort to develop the Stikine country and beyond was the BC government's effort to build a railroad to northwest BC starting in the 1950s. The "Pacific Northern Railway" (PNR) was intended to open up the mineral and timber resources of the area and was ultimately proposed to reach Alaska via the Yukon. The proposal died in 1964 due to increasingly poor economic justifications. However, a second attempt was made in the 1970s when BC Rail began constructing the "Dease Lake Extension" from Fort St. James towards the asbestos mines at Cassiar, BC. Construction was cancelled in 1977 as the project went over budget and global prices for copper and asbestos (the main commodities to be hauled by the railway) declined. At that point, of railroad grade had been completed to Dease Lake, but track had only been laid as far as Jackson, well short of the Stikine basin. The abandoned railroad grade still stretches across the Stikine basin today, following portions of the Klappan, Stikine and Tanzilla Rivers. It crosses the Stikine near the Klappan confluence on a steel bridge, which was completed at a cost of $3 million only a few months before the entire project was cancelled. This is the only bridge across the river other than the Highway 37 bridge. In the 1980s BC Hydro proposed the construction of two hydroelectric dams on the Stikine River and three more on the Stikine's tributary, the Iskut River. The dams were projected to add 2,800 megawatts of capacity to the electric grid. The Stikine dams, and high, would have flooded the entire Grand Canyon stretch