Building a highway is not the simplest of tasks around. When properly designed and executed, a road can last for decades with proper maintenance. Even without much maintenance, a well-built patch of road – as in the case of the Queen’s Highway, opened in 1953 – can survive many years of pounding by traffic, the sweltering sun, torrential rains and even the occasional use as a landing strip for ganja-ferrying aircraft.

But there are places in the world where highways are built every year, used for a few weeks or months at most before disappearing. The road builders come back and build the road again because, expensive as this exercise is, it is much cheaper than the alternative and in many cases is the only solution. Mystified? That’s because you have never heard of an ice road. Yes, a road across a lake or even a stretch of ocean!

Ice roads are a phenomenon in the countries of the far north, where the temperature drops well below the freezing mark and stays there long enough for a solid sheet of ice to form on the surface of a body of water. Countries which regularly rely on ice roads are Russia, Canada, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Estonia and the US state of Alaska.

Perhaps the most developed ice-road system in the world is in Canada, where without the roads certain kinds of industry would not exist. In recent years the energy companies have pushed exploration for new sources of oil and gas into the forbidding lands north of the Arctic Circle. The first big find was in Alaska several decades ago at a place called Prudhoe Bay. Engineers had to develop new techniques to deal with the harsh conditions and the remoter location.

When the oil started flowing, they built a pipeline traversing vast stretches of barren land, across rivers, mountain ranges and stretches of terrain used by vast herds of caribou for grazing and breeding.

The energy companies also looked at Canada’s Northwest Territories, whose 1.3 million square kilometres (a bit larger than Chad in west Africa) are inhabited by only 42,000 people. The main economic activities of the territory are mining and energy extraction. These enterprises are located in some of the most isolated places on the face of the earth, which poses huge problems in bringing in material, equipment and supplies as well as moving the products out.

Prospectors discovered gold in the territory in the late 19th century, but it wasn’t until the place opened up after the second world war that industrial mining was introduced. Uranium, silver, tungsten and other metals were also found, but most of these sites have been mined out and closed, leaving the installations to moulder away, forgotten and forlorn. A couple of decades ago, modern-day prospectors found rock formations familiar to geologists in southern Africa – kimberlite pipes. These columns of sediment contain diamonds, and a new industry was born.

In a very short time, Canada has become the third largest producer of diamonds in the world – after Botswana and Russia. Diamond mining is an activity for rugged individuals who are not fazed by isolation or harsh conditions. Those are plentiful in the Northwest Territories. Take the Ekati mine, for example. It’s Canada’s first diamond mine, and is located just south of the Arctic Circle, about 300 kilometres northeast of the territorial capital, Yellowknife. It extracts vast amounts of gem-bearing ore by digging huge pits in the ground as well as by traditional tunnelling.

There are three other diamond operations in Canada’s north, all located in the tundra of scrub, small trees and permafrost. Permafrost is the name which describes ground that is frozen down to a fair depth, with just the thin top layer thawing in the short Arctic summer. Because of this the surface gets soggy in the warm weather and is easily scarred even by footsteps.

This presents an insurmountable barrier to shipping in the huge pieces of machinery needed to build and operate a mine, as well as all the fuel for the vehicles, power generators and heating, chemicals for ore processing, dynamite for blasting, housing for the army of workers and groceries to keep them functioning. All the settlements in the north are connected to each other and the outside world by air, but this works only for transporting people and small, high-value items. The big stuff has to be transported in by truck, and that can be done only in the winter.

The temperature consistently drops below freezing by early November, but it takes several more weeks before the water in the many lakes which pepper the region freezes to a depth sufficient to bear heavy loads. That usually happens by late December and can last until April. When the ice is 30 centimetres thick (about a foot), small vehicles can safely drive on it, but it has to reach a metre before big trucks can safely traverse it. This is when the ice-road engineers spring into action. The area between Yellowknife and the main diamond mines is sprinkled with lakes, and the ice road meanders across the lakes and the strips of land that separate them, known by the users as portages.

Ice roads are found in the northern reaches of most provinces and are operated by the departments of highways or independent bodies specially created for the purpose. These people measure the thickness of the ice using a ground radar device towed behind a pickup truck as well as the old-fashioned method of boring holes in the ice with an auger and checking the depth with a measuring tape. Then they deploy snowploughs to clear away the snow and erect signs posting speed limits and directions to the various locations.

Speed limits are critical on the ice, especially when it crosses lakes. That’s because when a vehicle drives on the ice it actually causes the ice to sink and generate a wave. This wave travels away from the vehicle and upon hitting the bank bounces back and can cause the ice to fracture. So the ice road operators regulate both the speed of the trucks (typically around 25 kilometres an hour) and the spacing (generally about a kilometre apart).

In the case of ice roads on the Beaufort Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean, the vehicles are allowed to travel faster as the stretches of ice are far bigger than on the land-bound lakes.

It can be quite un-nerving to drive on the ice for the first time, as you are constantly reminded of where you are by the sound of ice cracking, squealing and groaning under the weight. Snow acts as an insulator, making the ice warmer than the air above it, which is one reason why the ice road builders clear it away. The other is that the smooth surface is easier to drive on. When the sun beats down for several hours, the ice thaws and re-freezes, leaving a glassy surface which provides very little traction.

In the early days of ice roads, driving was a hit-or-miss affair and it was quite common for vehicles to go through the ice. Nowadays, because of the close monitoring of the ice roads, such incidents rarely occur, and when they do it is usually the snowploughs, the first heavy vehicles on the ice, which are the victims. Nevertheless, ice-road truckers don’t wear their seat belts in case their truck does plunge through and they have to make a quick exit.

The truckers are a hardy breed who thrive on the hard conditions of brutal sub-zero temperatures made worse by howling wind, the idea that a mere metre or so of ice separates them from the lake or sea bottom under many metres of freezing water, and the presence of hungry polar bears or wolves. Their equipment has to be in top-notch condition, since a breakdown in the cold can be disastrous. It’s lonely out there, but long-distance truckers are used to that, and today’s trucks can be very luxurious, with comfortable sleeper cabins and even satellite TV. Above all, the money is very good – some drivers earn a normal half a year’s pay in just six weeks of ice-road driving.

Driving on ice has attracted both the adventurers (who don’t last very long) and the attention of a wider audience who are attracted by the romance of rugged people challenging nature at its rawest. A couple of years ago a US specialty TV channel, the History network, broadcast a series about these rugged men, their exploits and the little dramas which fill in the gaps between hours on the ice road. It attracted a fair amount of attention and positive feedback, and was carried by TV networks in several other countries.

Almost 70 years ago, another ice road made history. When Hitler sent his Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union in 1941, he drove one prong to the northeast towards the city of Leningrad, where the Communist revolution began just a scant quarter-century before. His forces lay siege to the city for 900 days, subjecting its inhabitants to severe privation.

But the German ring of steel had a gap behind the city, which backed onto Lake Ladoga, the largest in Europe. During the crucial winter months, when conditions in the city were at their worst, the Red Army set up an ice road, enabling them to ferry in supplies and remove a few people to safety. Although hundreds of thousands died from the shelling, starvation and lack of heat, the very existence of the ice road was enough to bolster the spirit of the survivors.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca