ICE ROADS
of the Northwest Territories
One of the unique features of travel in the far north
is the intricate system of winter roads, ice roads and
ice bridges. The territorial government provides free
ferry crossings at major rivers for road travelers in
the summer months, which are transformed in winter
into ice bridges. When frozen over, the river can be
built up by using auger holes to flood and thicken the
crossing; these seasonal bridges last anywhere from
a few weeks to several months before they become
impassable. Ice bridges are maintained for the
Mackenzie River at Fort Providence, the Mackenzie
and Arctic Red Rivers at Tsiigehtchic, the Liard River
at Fort Simpson and the Peel River at Fort McPherson.
There are also crossings at Deline, Tulita, Nahanni
Butte and N’Dulee near Fort Simpson.
Northerners travel by car, truck, snowmobile and
dogsled on winter roads, which are often constructed
in areas where year-round roads are rendered
impractical by boggy muskeg land. The Mackenzie
Valley winter road system connects the communities
of Wrigley, Tulita, Norman Wells, Fort Good Hope
and Colville Lake. There are also winter access roads
to Gameti, Wha Ti, Trout Lake, Nahanni Butte and
Tsiigehtchic, providing a link to remote, off-highway
settlements for a few weeks each winter. The roads
play a crucial role in the transportation of bulky or
heavy goods such as fuel, construction materials and
heavy equipment to areas without permanent road
access, where air transportation is used most of the
year.
In terms of engineering, the ice roads are even
more of a marvel than the land-based winter
roads, passing predominantly over water. Where
permafrost conditions and terrain make the building
of a standard road prohibitively expensive, a solid
roadbed capable of supporting heavy load haul
trucks can be constructed by clearing a route across
the frozen ground and lakes. Near the Arctic Ocean,
the communities of Aklavik, Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk
are connected by ice roads. Dettah is an Aboriginal
village across the bay from Yellowknife that is easily
accessed by an ice road, which can provide visitors
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with an authentic taste of winter travel in the NWT.
Outfitters are available for guided winter road tours,
or visitors can plan their own trip on the public-use
winter roads. There are commercial-use routes such
as the Tibbitt to Contwoyto ice road that is monitored
by a private security firm its entire length, which the
public is strongly encouraged NOT to use, due to
heavy volume of traffic. Ice roads add about 1,400
kilometres (more than 800 miles) to the Northwest
Territories all-weather highway system.
Former RCMP officer John Denison originally
developed the concept of constructing ice roads
suitable for the use of heavy trucks in the 1950s.
Revolutionizing winter transport, he was awarded the
Order of Canada in 1998 for his ingenuity and efforts.
Working in the dead of winter with Byers Transport,
a company that helped pioneer the building of ice
roads, Denison punched a 520-km (310-mile) ice
road NNW through the bush from Yellowknife to a
silver mine on Great Bear Lake. Primarily following
Native trade routes, Denison and his crew also opened
a second ice road, running east from Yellowknife
to service gold mines up around Mackay Lake. He
even attempted to push the ice road as far north as
Coppermine (now Kugluktuk) in Nunavut on the
Arctic Coast. Where possible, ice roads are built
across lakes, which provide a flat surface that is easier
to clear a path across than bare land. Denison’s roads
from Yellowknife were almost entirely plowed across
frozen lakes, with short overland portages between
them. In the 1970s, Denison was the subject of a CBC
television documentary and the book Denison’s Ice
Road, by New Yorker magazine writer Edith Iglauer.
After John retired, others stepped in to carry on with
ice road construction. Ice road technology has improved dramatically
since the early days, employing planes, helicopters
and electronic sensing devices. Motorized augers
relieve the necessity of twisting pilot holes down to
the water by hand. But when it’s 50 below zero, tools
still shatter, axles snap, brakes and steering wheels
seize up and bare skin freezes to metal – and the lake
ice still cracks and sometimes gives way.
As heavy trucks move over the ice it bends,
creating an underwater wave that can blow out the
ice at weak spots. This is particularly dangerous at
portage approaches, when the wave moving ahead of
the truck reaches the shore and the hydraulic effect
can rupture the ice; coming on shore at a pronounced
angle redirects the wave down the shoreline, safely
dispersing the pressure. Large lakes also develop
pressure ridges, breaks in the ice created by sudden
temperature changes. Navigating the ice roads has
been likened to driving on floating pavement.
Where the ice is thin or broken, a hole is drilled and
water pumped up onto the surface to freeze, sealing
cracks and adding thickness. The ice can be reinforced
with branches, steel cable or mesh, and engineers
can lay portable steel bridges over gaps. Due to
direct contact with subfreezing air temperatures, ice
build-up on the plowed roads becomes heavier than
surrounding ice and is last to thaw, blocking sunlight
from lake plants; lingering traces of the roads can be
seen from the air as bare strips on the lake floor.
The Tibbitt to Contwoyto road is one of the world’s
longest and most expensive heavy haul ice roads, first
built in 1982 to service the Lupin gold mine. It begins
at Tibbitt Lake at the end of Highway 4 about 65
kilometres (39 miles) east of Yellowknife and winds
568 km (341 miles) north, linking four Barren Lands
diamond mines: Diavik, Ekati and Snap Lake in the
NWT and finally the Jericho diamond mine at the
north end of Contwoyto Lake, in Nunavut Territory.
The route is critical to remote mine resupply and
exploration sites, which depend heavily on the road
for transportation of construction equipment and
materials, generators, fuel and essential operations
goods; trucks can haul in a year’s worth of supplies
for one-quarter to one-eighth the price of air cargo.
Constructed in January, the road typically opens at the
beginning of February for about two months. Making
use of an extensive chain of lakes, only 13% of the
route crosses land, at 64 portages. In order to protect
people, the environment and the road, speed limits
Experience the North
TRAVELGUIDEBOOK.COM
ice bridge crossings, be sure to check with the NWT
Department of Transportation at 1-800-661-0750 or
www.dot.gov.nt.ca.
Stories from the Early Days
are strictly enforced by security personnel with radar.
The highest allowable speed for fully loaded trucks
on the ice is 25 km/h (15 mph), although ‘express
lanes’ allow returning, empty trucks to travel at higher
speeds. The road is designed wide at 50 metres (164
feet) with extra space for oncoming trucks to pass,
and traffic can be re-routed to new lanes to avoid
damaged sections of ice, which averages about four
feet in thickness.
Truck drivers are not allowed to travel the winter
road alone; generally three or four trucks are dispatched
from Yellowknife on an average of every 20 minutes.
With a record breaking 11,000 truckloads hauled in
2007 by over 700 registered drivers, there were only
nine accidents and one minor injury. Currently, Nuna
Logistics Ltd. is responsible for the construction,
maintenance, dispatching and catering services on the
main Tibbitt to Contwoyto road, while RTL Robinson
Enterprises Ltd. handles the annual construction and
maintenance of the secondary route.
Since 1973, there have been only three deaths
associated with the construction of ice roads in the
Northwest Territories: a grader operator, a plow truck
driver and a snow cat operator, who subsequently died
of heart failure after being rescued. Tragic accidents
though they were, all three fatalities happened during
the construction phase, before the roads were opened
to heavy truck traffic; there have not been any truck
driver deaths directly attributable to hauling freight
on the roads. One of the last breakthroughs on any
ice roads or crossings occurred in January of 2000,
when a Super-B-Train truck hauling diesel fuel broke
through the Mackenzie River ice crossing near Fort
Providence; the driver was treated for hypothermia
and charged by the RCMP. The crossing had been
open to light traffic only, up to a maximum of 4,000
kg, (8,800 lbs) when the 60,000 kg (132,000 lbs)
truck went through the ice.
Before traveling on any winter roads, it’s critical
to be well prepared with cold-weather gear and
emergency supplies. For up-to-date information
about highway conditions, winter and ice roads and
TRAVELGUIDEBOOK.COM
In the 1970s and ‘80s, I scouted, built, maintained,
policed and drove the ice roads on and off for ten
years, before the diamond mines existed – gold and
silver were king in my day. Today’s ice road is a cruise compared to the
conditions we worked in and the finished road we
drove. Our road was seldom wider than two widths
of a snowplough, often covered with a foot of snow,
and included several hills that could be difficult to
traverse and sent guys spinning backwards out of
control. Traffic was light, at 300 to 700 loads per
season compared to the 10,000 today. We sank a
few trucks and loads though the ice, but never lost
a man.
We ate on the go and drove fast. The portages
between the lakes were narrow and very rough.
Broken trailer springs were common. Frozen/clogged
fuel filters/line were a constant worry. Although not
the norm, days of -40 to -50 degree temps occurred
throughout the winter. We had no security or safety
patrol and only occasional primitive radio contact
with our base; we had CB radios which generally
only worked if you could see the guy you were talking
to. If we got stuck or broke down we either fixed the
problem ourselves or waited, sometimes a couple of
days for someone else to come along.
We operated two ice roads – one NW from
Yellowknife to Great Bear Lake, and starting in the
1980s, another that traveled NE to the north end
of Contwoyto Lake. Each year in January right
after New Years, Dick Robinson assembled a small
handpicked group of about half a dozen guys as his
ice road construction crew. We were a multi-talented
bunch; all of us were capable of operating any of
the equipment. We would begin construction from
the south end and depending on ice and weather
conditions and equipment failures, it could take a
month or longer to push the road through to the end.
Our first winter was the worst – due to warm
weather and very poor ice conditions, it took us over
two weeks to build the first 60 miles. It was Robinson’s
first attempt at building the ice road to Great Bear, so
consequently everything was trial and error. None of
our equipment was new and all of it had seen better
days. The first thing that went wrong, which plagued
us the whole trip was the Bombardier overheating. It
blew the head gasket and warped the heads, filling
the cab with a stinking mist of sticky and irritating
antifreeze mixed with diesel fumes. Our road scout
and foreman Dave and our mechanic Gerry lived
in the Bombardier until Gerry got pneumonia from
the fumes and had to be airlifted to hospital. Dave
continued to use the Bombardier as his sleeping
quarters for the rest of the trip.
We had no power auger that first year, so Dave
drilled every hole to check ice thickness – up to 4 feet,
sometimes only a hundred feet apart for well over
three hundred miles – by hand! Everybody except the
‘Cat Skinners’ slept on the seats of whatever unit they
were driving.
We sank and recovered our grader and I dropped
one track of my D-4 Cat in a lake. A crewmember fell
through the ice on his D-6 Cat while crossing Marion
Lake. The blade hung up on the ice in front of him, but
his seat was under water before he could even stand
up. Then he had to crawl out of the water and walk
a hundred yards soaking wet in –35 degrees because
the guy following him was too scared to drive any
closer. It took an hour to thaw before he could peel
his soaked and frozen snowsuit off.
Experience the North
Another time, he broke down and was stranded
for four days at the north end of Hottah Lake. He sat
there re-reading the same newspaper, running out of
food, then came so close to running out of fuel that
his truck quit as soon as its wheels hit the front of the
drop-down hi-boy that had been sent back to rescue
him. That was the last trip of the season, and his was
the last truck on the ice that year. Nobody missed him
for three days, then finally RTL took the plane out
looking for him.
Then there was the time he had a new driving
axel installed under the front of his 6x6 plow truck.
Unfortunately, the guys who installed it put it on
upside down, so the front wheels turned one way
(in reverse) while the back drivers spun the other
(forward). He didn’t discover this amusing concept
til he drove as far as he could into a snow bank, and
engaging the front axel to test it, got well and truly
stuck as his wheels spun in opposite directions.
About this same time, another lucky crewmember
was traveling by himself when his fuel froze up,
clogging the filters and killing his engine. He sat
there for a long time waiting for someone else to come
along. By the time they finally did, he’d gotten so cold
he was burning diesel fuel in an open can inside the
cab to try and stay warm. His face was black, his
hands were black, everything on him was black and
the inside of the truck cab looked like a soot bomb
had gone off in it.
We were a tight bunch of guys and I have lifelong
friends I’m still in contact with from those days.
It was a very cold night, in the minus forty range.
All of a sudden, this ‘squawk’ came over the radio.
Picking up my mike I asked, “What was that, did
someone say something?”
“Squawk squawk!” came the reply. One of the guys
behind me said, “I think it was our other driver and
he just broke through the ice.” I flipped on my backup lights and stopped, looking in my mirrors for head
lights, but in a panic to get out of his truck, the driver
had turned his headlights and radio off.
I must have been pretty brave, because I turned my
rig around and started heading back towards the big
white cloud of steam now reflecting in my headlights.
I didn’t get far before he came into view in his jeans,
sneakers and t-shirt, and an ever-spreading puddle
of water, hot-footing it towards me. He looked pretty
cold and quite upset. All his winter gear including
boots and parka were still inside his truck cab. He’d
been in such a hurry to get out, he’d left everything
behind and wasn’t about to go back in for any of it.
Stopping my truck, opening my driver’s door,
pushing my survival gear up against the passenger’s
side door and bending myself around the shifters, I
slid a cheek onto the passenger’s seat and told him
to get in the driver’s side. Wrong thing to say I guess.
“No effing way I’m getting in that truck!” he said.
“Why not?” said I.
“No effing way I’m driving that effing truck!” he
yelled again. He was so freaked out he was vibrating
and could hardly speak.
“I don’t want you to drive it, I’m just offering you a
warm place to sit til we get on the radio to Yellowknife
and figure out what to do.”
Silly bugger. He stared at me blankly for a few
seconds until he finally came to his senses and got in
the driver’s side. I don’t think he ever made another
trip that winter. Can’t say I blame him.
Stories courtesy of Nick Jones (icemannwt)
Copyright 2008
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