The challenge of building ice roads in the North
It’s a difficult and dangerous undertaking
Ice rescue expert Adam Woogh teaches Canadians how to read, respect and, if worse comes to worst, survive the increasingly unpredictable crust of frozen water.
“When a car breaks through the ice it doesn’t tend to sink like a stone. You have some time to get out, usually,” Woogh says.
I have been in Yellowknife, the largest town in the Northwest Territories, for a week and stories of people falling through ice have filled the local news. I have stood with Woogh on less than a foot-and-a-half of ice on Fiddlers Lake while making an ice road, the temporary access routes to communities and mines which spend nine months of the year cut off by land routes.
Seventeen inches should be enough to support five tons, according to a formula developed over the 80- year history of ice roads. That is double the weight of the Volkswagen Tiguans we have with us for this trip. But even the lightweight snowplow scraping the ice surface makes the ice pop and crack. I bounce up and down on the spot. I can feel the ice flex. It’s unnerving.
Ice roads opened the Arctic to gold and, more recently, diamond mining worth billions of dollars to the economy. But climate change, at least anecdotally, is threatening these winter lifelines.
We are on Fiddlers Lake because Great Slave Lake, a few miles away, is far from frozen enough. Barely 10 inches of ice cakes the tenth-largest lake on the planet. So, on hold for as much as a month is the opening of the Dettah Ice Road — the one we had planned to see being made and to be one of the first to drive this winter. We also had arranged to put a diver under the ice to photograph us. Fiddlers is our Plan B.
The man whose job it is to say go or no go for the Dettah Ice Road is Garry Snyder, local winter road guru for the government of the Northwest Territories. He has an arsenal of technology to test the ice. The most cutting edge is ground- penetrating radar, towed behind an Argo, a Canadian amphibious ATV. It scans the ice and the water below every half a metre and logs it on a laptop. Regardless of the predictability of the ice, all the occupants wear dry suits and have a rescue Argo travelling behind. There cannot be many more risky ways to survey a new road.
“Ice is considered a living entity,” says Snyder. “So when working on the ice we have to be cognizant of the gear that we’re using, the weight of it, and the ice thickness that we have. That is why we have allover safety protocol in place and our training and the equipment that we’re using here to ensure that the ice is safe for our crews to go out.”
With Dettah delayed, we get in contact with one of the oldest trucking and ice road companies in the Northwest Territories to make our own ice road. Blair Weatherby’s father was one of the original ice- road truckers after the Second World War and if anyone can put in an ice road, it is him. Fiddlers Lake is small, but its size and lack of flowing water means the ice his thickened faster and more reliably than other local lakes.
Ice is not all the same. If it freezes when snow is falling, it is not so pure and not so strong. The clearer the better. The ice on Fiddlers is crystal clear, albeit with a scary number of cracks and fractures. Cracking is good, we are told; it means the ice is flexible. That makes sense. An ice road is little more than a carpet of ice crystals floating on water.
To aid the thickening before we take the Tiguans out, Weatherby has used a sideby- side ATV to clear snow and expose ice to air that is sitting around -25 C. It should be closer to -40 C.
“There’s some formulas you can use to calculate the theoretical strength based on thickness,” explains Woogh.
“If you do the calculations on it, it’s a square relationship, so if the ice thickness doubles, the strength of it will quadruple. So, we know that if we have, say, 15 inches of ice, that’s not just three times as strong as five inches of ice; it’ ll be nine times as strong. Once we do that calculation we find something like a Tiguan can be supported probably by seven or eight inches of ice.”
To make sure the ice is t hick enough along t he length of the road we have made, bore holes are drilled to measure the ice every 20 to 30 metres. At its thinnest it is 14 inches and at its thickest it is 17 inches. This is illustrated when Bill Coltart, a cameraman and diver from British Columbia who filmed the Ice Road Truckers TV show, cuts out a triangle of ice for him to climb into the lake for our under-ice film shoot. Seventeen inches does not look very thick when it sits next to the Tiguan’s wheel; it barely reaches the axle.
The ice measurements finished, Blair is comfortable bringing our cars onto the lake. Coltart slides into the water to film us driving above. Seeing him slide below the ice is as eerie as seeing a ship sink.
On Adam’s say-so, we pull the Tiguans onto the lake and drive with seat belts off and (in spite of the frigid air) the windows slightly open to prevent the doors being sucked shut underwater. It’s the oddest of road-safety advice.
Having the window down also means you can hear the ice as the Tiguans’ winter tires roll over the floating road. The explosion of cracking ice is like driving on a bed of bubble wrap. Only Woogh’s reassurance that the bangs and pops are good makes forward motion feel like anything but madness.
As we reach the far side of Fiddlers, we celebrate being on one of the first ice roads made this year. With climate change, no one knows how much longer building an ice road will even be feasible.
“I think we all recognize that the ice is becoming more and more challenging to work on,” Snyder says. “And you know, it’s probably not going to be around forever.
“I think if ice roads ended we would have to look at other options for getting materials and supplies into the communities.”