Inching Up an Ice Highway in a 70-Ton Truck

"We can't afford another season like the last one," Madsen said.

So far, this winter has allayed fears that global warming will make last year's weather the norm. The winter road opened early, on Jan. 28, after a sustained cold snap, and has strengthened with steady arctic temperatures. Road controllers use ground radar and boreholes to monitor the thickness of the ice, gradually letting heavier trucks onto the road as the ice grows to 40 inches, at which point it can support a 70-ton vehicle.

But the road's hard appearance is deceptive: Ice bends, cracks, becomes brittle, flows and shrinks in unexpected ways.

"Ice is really kind of funny stuff. We really don't know" anything about it, said John Zigarlick. That's quite an admission from the man who built the first road as president of the Lupin mine, retired, then started Nuna Logistics, a company that does arctic drilling and construction, and rebuilds this road every year for the diamond mines.

Zigarlick's 140 employees here carve an eight-lane-wide path on the ice, build express bypasses for the returning empty trucks, and mend cracks and holes with water.

"We've gotten better at it," said Zigarlick, 69, who leaves his yacht parked in Vancouver to prowl the ice road. "But I think we're starting to push the limits of what this road will take."

The radios in his pickup yap away: the truckers on one VHF channel, nudging each other along and chatting to keep awake; the road crews on another, including the squad of retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers who spend their winters patrolling the ice road to keep the truckers' speed down.

The radio barks out news of an accident on portage 27.

"I hope there's no fuel spill," Zigarlick said with a sigh. "If you spill fuel, you have to dig up the ground, and it will take six weeks of explaining."

Zigarlick said no truck driver on the road has ever been lost to the ice, though the dangers are there. Several trucks have sunk, but their drivers scrambled out. In 2000, a snowplow operator died of a heart attack after his machine plunged into the frigid water. In 2004, the son of one of Yellowknife's major trucking company families drowned while clearing another short ice road near this one.

The drivers, however, say the biggest problem is tedium, as their loaded vehicles crawl along at mandatory speed limits of 6 and 15 mph to keep from damaging the ice.

"It's a different way of driving," Pashovitz said. "It's slow and long. You have to keep occupied." The radio chatter gets annoying. He has satellite radio and a CD player; others watch movies on mini-DVD players. Pashovitz swears he has seen drivers reading, and one serenaded his pals with a fiddle on the long straightaways.

The radio chirps with drivers reporting a rare sighting of a timber wolf. Caribou cross the road sometimes. Red fox dart tentatively amid the snowdrifts, searching for jack rabbits or ptarmigan. Ravens will fly idly beside the trucks or perch on the big rearview mirrors as the vehicles move, demanding a bite of a trucker's sandwich.

Pashovitz and his father run an organic grain farm in central Saskatchewan. There is not much to do in the long winter, so he has been coming north every year for 10 years. He works seven days a week for about 10 weeks, sleeping in a bed behind his seat in the roomy cab, with the engine running. He stops at the camps set up along the road to shower and eat, watch some television or call home.

Many of those plying the road are like Pashovitz: farmers or construction workers looking for winter work, or retired hands seeking the novelty and beauty of working in a subarctic winter. And the money: Pashovitz said he can earn $800 for the two-day trip to the BHP mine, more if he goes farther up the road. In a season, he can earn enough to help ease the squeeze on his family farm.

It also gives him some bragging rights, Pashovitz acknowledges. "Nobody back home has done anything like this."