King of The Road

by Alex Deborgorski

  Well, the problem is money. It takes a lot of money to build a landing strip for an airplane. How are you going to get the bulldozers up into some of these remote camps? And the drilling camps they use for mineral exploration tend to move around a lot. You can’t build a new airstrip every time you build a new drilling camp. You could move stuff in and out by floatplane, but floatplanes are small and can’t carry very much. Helicopters are even more expensive, at least a thousand dollars an hour. Mining supplies are heavy and bulky, and it’s so expensive to transport anything by airplane that economic development of the north would not have been possible if someone hadn’t come up with a solution.

  Tom Berry, a snowplow operator in John Denison’s original road crew

  John Denison proved that freighting with standard trucks right up into the Arctic is feasible. Take a load of lumber straight from Vancouver to Port Radium! Why not? This kind of operation is making this country! When he started hauling freight in trucks successfully this far north, even into the Barren Lands, he was the only man in the Territories doing it. Everybody said he was nuts. Everybody.

  The man who really pioneered the concept of the winter ice road was John Denison. He started off working as a police officer in the Mounties, but he got tired of following orders and went off to work for himself as a remote road builder. It’s a good thing he did, or there j might never be a show like Ice Road Truckers.

  From the 1950s to the 1970s John Denison learned just about everything there is to know about building roads across frozen lakes. He learned, for example, that snow is your worst enemy when you are trying to build a good ice road. Snow puts an insulating layer on top of the ice, and it’s impossible for the cold to get right down into the road. So he plowed the snow off the ice roads and even pumped water onto the road to make the ice thicker. He learned also that you have to make an ice road really wide or else every time the wind picks up the snow will drift into the roadway and it has to be plowed out again. If it’s wide, the snow drifts right across. It’s the same principle as a flat roof. You’d think the snow would build up, but the wind cleans it off.

  He also pioneered an interesting way to build a ramp from the lake surface up onto the shore. Sometimes there’s a drop of three or four feet from the land onto the lake surface. Instead of messing with planks and logs, he would build a ramp out of snow and soak it with water, adding one layer after another until it was hard as rock. He deliberately built his roads on the ice wherever he could, because it’s flat and easy going on the lakes, and built short passages through the bush when he had to go from one lake to the other. He called these short overland routes “portages.” It’s a French word that comes from the old fur traders who used to travel these routes and haul the canoes on their backs across the portage trails from one lake to another. Even with all the things that John Denison learned, it was very dangerous work, and his vehicles sometimes crashed through the ice, sometimes taking one of his drivers down with it.

  In the 1960s, a writer from The New Yorker heard about John Denison and his ice roads in the Canadian Arctic. Her name was Edith Iglauer. She was a city girl but a good journalist, and she traveled up into northern Canada to spend time with John Denison while he built a three-hundred-mile-long road above the Arctic Circle. You had to hand it to her—it was pretty tough cohabiting with all these rough men in winter bush camps where there really wasn’t even a way to wash yourself, let alone a place to dress or use a proper toilet. And by all accounts John Denison was a crusty and hard-driving man. Still, he and Edith ended up respecting each other, and she produced Denison’s Ice Road—a book that soon became a classic, and did a great job of explaining how Denison’s ice roads were going to make it possible to explore the north and extract its gas, oil, diamonds, and gold.

  Northern resource development starts with prospecting. Having been a gold prospector myself when I was a young man, I can tell you that it is a tough and risky proposition. We would never get anywhere without the prospector, but most of the time the prospector gets nothing for his money. Still, it’s the dream of hitting it big that keeps him slugging it out, living in the bush, eating bad food, fighting bugs, and hoping that Lady Luck is going to smile on him one day.

  Charles Fipke and Stu Blusson were prospectors of this kind. Fipke was obsessed with finding diamonds in the north even though everyone said he was crazy. He teamed up with this geology professor from South Africa, and they started tracking little particles of this type of rock called kimberlite that had been scattered across hundreds of miles of open terrain by glaciers thousands of years ago. It was like a Sherlock Holmes mystery. What they needed to do was follow the pieces of evidence, trying to track their way back to the source. Diamonds hide in kimberlite, and they followed this faint trail for 350 miles from the Mackenzie Valley to Lac de Gras. Finally he discovered diamonds around Lac de Gras, northeast of Yellowknife, and ended up making a fortune and owning a share of the Ekati Diamond Mine.

  Fipke and Blusson’s discovery launched the biggest prospecting stampede in North American history. My friend Gord Van Tighem, the mayor of Yellowknife, was a banker at the time and he says it was just pandemonium. The sky was full of helicopters and the lumberyards were running out of wood because prospectors were out there pounding stakes into every piece of exposed ground in the Northwest Territories. It made the Yukon Gold Rush look like a yard party.

  Nowadays Canada is the third most important producer of diamonds in the world and produces well over a billion dollars’ worth of diamonds every year. These mines require an enormous amount of material coming in and out every year, and that’s how I got involved. A couple of different companies partnered up to build temporary winter ice roads to these mining camps, and they needed good truck drivers who could handle big rigs loaded with heavy and awkward equipment and haul these loads reliably through some pretty tough terrain and terrible weather conditions.

  I’ve been involved in the whole diamond rush one way or another, from its beginning about twenty years ago. I helped Knut Rasmussen take the first bulk sample for Winspear, which became Snap Lake when DeBeers took it over. I trucked his equipment out to MacKay Lake on the ice and unloaded it on a snowbank. He had to push and drag it across country because there was no road to Snap Lake. Then I flew in and ran one of his CATs.

  Having lived here in the north over thirty years and the north being what it is—underpopulated with fantastic potential—when big new developments occur, everyone has the option of being involved.

  There aren’t too many guys out there on the ice roads with as much time on their hour meter than me. Ice road trucking is good money—more than five hundred bucks a trip—and it’s a short season, so there is no time for rest. When you have a family as large as mine, you are under constant pressure to keep the cash rolling in. My wife plans to work me to death, but I’m big and strong, so that’s going to be a long slow death for this Polack.

  They start building the ice roads in early November. About a hundred and forty guys from a construction company called Nuna Logistics work through minus temperatures that get down to 70 below and nights that are twenty hours long. In early December, helicopters fly the route and crews stop to measure the ice depth. Once it’s about twelve inches thick, these special tracked vehicles called Haglands drive out onto the portages to compress the snow and help the ground to freeze.

  When the ice is sixteen inches thick, Sno-Cats go onto the lakes to clear away the snow so the cold temperatures can get right down into the ice. The road is flooded to help increase the depth. This is the most dangerous time on the ice road. It seems like every couple of years we have a fatality. A plate of ice will fracture and the vehicle will tip into the open water. The ice closes back over the hole and you’re sealed underneath. The shore is also a bad place because of the sun and the thin ice, but at least the water is shallow there. When the ice is twenty-eight inches thick, the first trucks can go out, lightly loaded. Usually just a wheel or an axle will break through, a
nd you’ll jump out of the truck and wait inside the cab of another truck for the winch truck. You don’t even want to fall through shallow ice, up to your knees or waist, because the shock of the cold water can stop your heart.

  The ice gains thickness at about an inch every couple of days. Once there’s a minimum of thirty-five inches of ice, the road is ready for full five- and six-axle loads. The biggest ice road in the world is the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road, a frozen highway that runs out of Yellowknife and goes 370 miles into the northern wilderness. It’s as wide as an eight-lane highway and is the longest heavy-truck ice road in the world. But they still have to wait until late February, when the ice thickens to more than forty inches. By then it is strong enough to support the eight-axle “Super B” articulated trucks we drive back and forth to the mines.

  The ice roads only last for about sixty days, so you have to go hard to make sure that the mines have all the freight and equipment they need to operate for the other ten months of the year. During the ice road trucking season, I concentrate on the ice road twenty-four hours a day. Every day revolves around getting eight hours sleep, getting the next load and delivering it, missing weather and accident tie-ups, and getting back to do it again. I have to be very efficient and disciplined to haul the maximum number of loads in this short time frame. Taking Valentine’s Day or any other day off is not an option. In the old days before “risk aversion,” thirty-six hours of continuous driving was not unusual for some of us. It sounds easy, but going everyday for two months takes a lot of determination. Lots of the guys can’t do it without taking days off.

  It wasn’t very long after Fipke and Blusson struck it rich that prospectors and entrepreneurs of every sort started flooding into Yellowknife, hoping to make their own fortune. Pretty soon you’d be running into people from all over the world—Tanzania, Mauritius, Armenia, India. Many of them came to work in the diamond industry, either cutting and polishing diamonds or working in the mines. Other people got jobs in construction or heavy equipment. The ones who were capable of hard work have succeeded, and done well. The ones who are looking for a quick buck don’t usually last more than a few months. Anyone with a half-decent work ethic can come up here and make seventy or eighty grand a year, as long as they don’t mind hard work. But you have to be a digger. They’re building a bridge over the McKenzie River right now, and if you want to get an idea of the sort of work that people have to do up here, go down to that bridge and take a look. When it’s pitch-dark at nine o’clock in the morning, 35 below zero, you’ll see guys who have been working outside for two hours already. You have to be a special breed of cat to make it in the north.

  So now you’ve got these three big diamond mines, hundreds of miles north of Yellowknife, and if you climbed into the cab of my Mack truck one cold black February morning I’d take you for a little ride and show you what ice road trucking is all about. The first thing you would probably notice is, we don’t just drive across these lakes when it’s necessary. We drive on them whenever we get a chance. The highway engineers who survey and design these ice roads deliberately build them on the lakes wherever it’s possible. That’s because they know what the Indians always knew—it’s smooth going on the ice. The first couple of hours, driving north out of Yellowknife, we spend a lot of time on the land. And it can be rough going. You can go faster but you’re going up and down hills and around corners, and the road is narrower so you really have to stay on your toes and make sure you don’t run into some other guy who’s taking more than his share of the road coming around a sharp corner.

  Once we drive onto the ice, it’s a different game.

  Driving a heavily loaded truck down a hill and onto a frozen lake is easier than driving it down a mountain. But both are dangerous in their own way. The ice on top of a lake is flexible. It sags when it takes the weight of the truck, like a big trampoline. You’re not going to notice it sitting up in the cab, but it definitely sinks a few inches as the truck drives onto it.

  As we go across the lake, the truck will depress the ice and push a wave of water ahead of us. We need to go a certain speed, not too slow, not too fast. The road engineers will measure the thickness of the ice with sonar equipment and recommend an ideal speed. Trucks have to be a minimum of a third of a mile apart on the ice. They don’t want us to stop, either, because the truck’s stationary weight can damage the ice, and they don’t want us going too fast because we’re pushing that wave ahead of us. If we are going too fast all that water will hit the shore and cause a “blowout.” That’s when the ice erupts from underneath. Generally when a truck breaks the ice due to speeding, the tractor gets over but the trailer drops in. Often the offending truck goes over the wrecked ice, and the truck that is following goes into the hole. If the truck drops through fractured ice, we’ll have to bail out as quickly as we can, because it will open up for the truck and then close up afterward. The ice closes over like a slab, but more often than not like a bunch of broken chunks. Should the driver get out of the cab after the truck lands at the bottom of the lake, the broken pieces of ice on the surface can be too much to push apart to reach the air.

  Our biggest enemy here is actually the boredom. The long road is wide and straight, and some of the lakes are so wide they practically put you into a trance—especially at night when one’s gaze is trapped by the headlights. On top of that, you can only go about twenty miles an hour. We’ve got one lake called “Two-Movie Lake” because it takes two DVDs to cross it. But when you’ve been up and down this road as many times as I have, you never really relax. I’m always watching, waiting for something bad to happen. If the truck goes through the ice, you’ve got a couple of seconds to jump clear. We lost one twenty-three-year-old kid who was plowing an ice road, and his truck broke through and he drowned. We also had a guy die when his plow broke through the ice on the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road. The other guys from Nuna pulled him out, but the water was so cold he died of a heart attack.

  These guys would not have died if the ice had been thicker. It wasn’t cold weather that killed them. It was warm weather. We’ve had some real warm winters over the last ten years. I think 2005 was the warmest winter in a hundred and fifty years. They closed the ice road early, about mid-March, because the ice started giving out. We have some lakes that are worse than others. So the engineers do their best to keep the road safe. They build the road so it comes ashore at an angle, so the wave going ahead of the truck will deflect off the shore and be less likely to cause a blowout. Every day, a crew drives along the road dragging an electronic unit that sends four-hundred-megahertz radio waves down into the lake. The signal bounces off the surface of the water, under the ice, and measures the thickness of the road. Nuna has crew workers drilling with power augers to check the ice visually. They’ve also got engineers who are trying to put together maps of the world under the ice road—the reefs, the sandbars, and the hidden currents that can change the strength of the road. The thing is, they know how ice acts in the lab. But here in nature, it’s always changing. It flows and grows and shrinks and bulges by the day, affected by all kinds of forces the scientists don’t really understand. Like all things in nature, it’s a living thing.

  Jim Chapman, owner of Byers Transport, Yellowknife

  Our early drivers were daring fellows. Some of the drivers would drive on ice with the door open and stand on the running board and steer with one hand while the ice was bending underneath them. Very, very fortunate we never lost any men. We did lose, I guess, three complete units that went down at the bottom of Hottah Lake. We were never able to recover them. The bottom of those lakes is silty muck, about two feet deep. As soon as you touch anything it just riles up the muck and you can’t see a thing.

  The ice conditions at the time we lost those units were not bad. The ice was four feet thick, but it was so cracking cold! The ice was just as brittle as can be. Without warning a crack would open up in the ice and just run. The colder the temperature, the brittler the ice gets. I hav
e stood on the edge of a lake and watched a crack and listened to it. They come in the distance just like thunder and you can hear it go ripping across the lake. Pretty soon you see a crack two to four feet wide.

  And then when the weather turns warm and the ice starts to swell, the crack closes right up again. When it continues to get warm, the ice begins to pile. This is what you call an ice ridge. You are then either building bridges to take you across the cracks or chopping down huge mounds of ice to get through. Some of the ice ridges can be twenty-five feet high. The power of lake ice is just as powerful as tides in the ocean.

  How dangerous is ice road trucking?

  Well, we don’t fall through the ice very often, like you might think from watching the show.

  We’ve become pretty darn good at our jobs. The highway engineers know exactly what thickness of ice will support how much weight, and they know the best routes across each lake to avoid bad spots. They have sonar monitoring devices to keep tabs on the thickness of the ice on each section of the road. They only operate the ice road for sixty days every year, so we’re not taking chances and running heavy rigs too early or too late in the season.

  But it’s still dangerous. You’re driving on ice. You see jack-knifed rigs, collisions with other trucks, smashups with ice ridges, avalanches, and rollovers on mountain roads. Hell, just the frostbite can cost you some ears or toes. So how dangerous is it? Just look at the fact that some rookies quit after a few days. That should answer the question.

  There are some stretches of road that never freeze properly. So the road crews come up with some pretty interesting solutions, like putting down a network of steel and wooden beams called a “rig mat.” Once that sucker is frozen into the ice they’ll flood it with water to bridge the weak spot.