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Think your commute sucks? Try driving semi-trucks over frozen lakes in the Northwest Territories in the dead of winter. Already a hit in the US, History Television’s Ice Road Truckers is a look inside one of Canada’s most extreme jobs.
Trucking ain’t easy. It’s taxing both physically and psychologically: long, gruelling hours away from loved ones, confinement in tight spaces, sleep deprivation, the hypnosis of highways halos, and the monotony of passing road lines. It’s enough to drive any man to the brink of insanity. But, if life on the road wasn’t tough enough, add in the persistent fear of plunging through a frozen lake into an icy tomb.
That’s the scenario faced by the road warriors of the Northwest Territories, subject of History Television’s 13-part documentary series, Ice Road Truckers. These men, providing the remote diamond mines of the Northwest Territories with supplies and fuel, must traverse the most desolate, barren land in the country to reach their destinations. After departing their base at Yellowknife, NWT, the route is largely uncharted, unpaved and pocked with clusters of deep lakes. Their solution? Forging ice-paths over the water during the two coldest months of winter. It might sound completely insane – because it is.
So, what motivates these men to complete such a dangerous, lonely job? Money, of course. ‘The dash for cash,’ as the truckers call it.
Like The Deadliest Catch, the Discovery Channel series about the lives (and all too frequently the deaths) of king crab fishermen in Alaska, these are frontiersmen chasing big payoffs in the face of extreme danger. While the hefty paycheque such dangerous work provides is always a factor, it takes a special breed to become an ice-road trucker. The stress they face daily is to regular trucking what fishing for Alaskan crab is to dangling a line off a dock at the cottage. Creeping slowly over frozen lakes on their 20+ ton vehicles – at a maximum speed of 22 mph – the trail beneath them creaks and cracks, leaving varicose fissures in the ice. It’s a nerve-wracking experience for even the steeliest veterans. If trucks idle for too long, or if they reach a weakened spot in the ice, they’ll plunge into the depths. In -70 degree conditions, the surface will refreeze in minutes, permanently sealing victims in a frosty grave. Death by suffocation or hypothermia– neither a pleasant option. In case it wasn’t evident, these aren’t the shinny ponds of your youth.
That’s not even mentioning the whiteout driving conditions, or the complete isolation on the wind-swept tundra. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and the daily ordeals of these men give H.P. Lovecraft’s Antarctic terror-lit a run for its money – minus the alien civilizations, of course. With no taillights to follow or road signs to guide the way, if anything goes wrong it could be days before someone reaches you, or vice versa. And your truck could be at the bottom of a lake by then, anyway.
