Ice roads ease isolation in North, but melt hits sooner now
Warming planet means window for transit is shorter.
communi- and the plan- ning stages.
But that still leaves 10 of the territory’s remote communities dependent on winter roads and ice bridges across lakes, rivers and permafrost, delic ate ground t hat has been f roz e n for thousands of years.
Keeping those roads solid requires constant maintenance by crews with the fortitude to endure hours of toil in the arctic elements.
On a recent visit to the t e r r i t o r y, t h e t e mp e r a - ture was minus 18 degrees Fahrenheit and falling as Michael Conway, who supervises ice-road crews in the North Slave region, drove a t r uc k s moothly a c ro s s Marian L ake, 21 mile s of snow- covered frozen water.
T h e s t r e t c h i s p a r t o f the 285-mile Tlicho Winter Road, which links remote communities to Yellowknife, the territorial capital.
Conway turned off the truck, got out and brushed aside some snow to reveal more than 3 feet of gleaming ice beneath.
In the almost extraterrestrial silence of arctic winter, a deep pop could be heard below, like the bursting of a distant balloon.
A few seconds later came a c r a c k l i n g s ound l i ke a candy-bar wrapper being crushed.
“Ice is like a living thing,” Conway said. “It breathes.”
A g e n e r a t i o n a g o , h e said, the lake would naturally freeze thick enough for crews to drive a plow across it without concern.
B u t i n r e c e n t y e a r s , the warmer autumns and deeper snow, which ac ts as an insulator, have made for much thinner natural lake ice, making road construction a cautious slog and delaying openings to traffiffic.
To ensure that the roads are safe, road crews now use ground-penetrating radar to check the ice’s exact thickness.
When it is too thin, they bore a hole for a hose and then spray torrents of lake water out over the surface to freeze and build up additional layers of ice.
Conway said that even those precautions are not always enough.
“A guy parked on the ice overnight,” he said, “and when he came back in the mor n i n g , h i s t r u c k wa s gone.”
Even permanent roads are not immune to the shifting climate.
On the region’s main highway back to Yellowknife, entire guardrails have sunk into the roadbed, and a ribbon of asphalt that was once entirely flflat now swells and di ps bec aus e of t hawing permafrost.
With a harrowing winter coming to an end, ice-road truckers are wondering how many more years they will be able to stay above water.
“Thi s has b e e n o ne o f mos t d i f f i c u l t a n d c h a l - l e n g i n g s e a s o n s w e ’ v e e v e r f a c e d , ” s a i d Ma r k Kohaykewych, president of Polar Industries, whose flfleet of 42 trucks hauls freight across northern Manitoba, Ontario and Alberta.
About three-quarters of those journeys are on winter roads, he said.
Kohaykewych has been in the ice-road trucking business for eight years, but only in the last two has he had to divert winter cargos to airports because of unseasonable weather.
Freak rainstorms made several ice roads unusable for a while in February, he said, and he spent the fifirst weekend in April rescuing a stranded trucker’s rig that had broken through lake ice.
But at least the truckers can drive away.
“The communities are the ones really suffffering,” he said.
“Without ice roads, how will they fifix homes or build schools? You can’t flfly in a bulldozer.”