John Burton Denison CM (June 30, 1916 – January 6, 2001) was a Canadian ice road engineer who operated in the Northwest Territories in the 1950s to 1970s.
[3] 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.
[citation needed] While Denison was not the first to attempt truck freighting on winter roads into Yellowknife (that honour goes to Al Hamilton of Grimshaw Trucking in the mid-1950s), he perfected the art of constructing ice roads and built them into some of the most isolated parts of the subarctic.
[6][7] Denison died at his home in Kelowna on January 6, 2001, aged 84, survived by his widow Hannah and four children.