Building Canada’s Epic Ice Road (Popular Mechanics – December 18, 2009)

http://www.popularmechanics.com/

“If you want to learn about Canadian ice roads, sooner 
or later you have to talk to John Zigarlick.”

The truckers who haul 70-ton rigs hundreds of miles across Canada’s frozen lakes aren’t afraid of much — except warm weather.
 
The temperature: 10 below zero. The location: the middle of frozen Waite Lake in the Northwest Territories, 1000 miles north of the U.S. border. I’m with six Canadian ice-road experts on the shoulder of a highway that curves from the powder-frosted shoreline forest, across the lake and into the distance. In the pale light of winter, even the sun seems frozen.

Fifty yards away, a tanker truck hauling 40 tons of fuel oil inches forward, its huge diesel rumbling. I’m startled to hear the ice beneath our feet make a sound like shattering window glass, but no one else seems to notice. Apparently, ice that’s 3 ft. thick behaves this way when you drive a massive truck over it.

But something else I notice is definitely not normal. A few yards from the road, Waite Lake’s smooth surface rears up in jagged shards; beyond is a pool of black water. The formation is called a blowout, a slow-motion upheaval of ice that produces what looks like a bomb crater. As the tanker eases past, the water rises, laps the blowout’s shattered margins, then subsides. The experts watch intently in silence. When it’s your job to maintain a road made of ice, the last thing you want to see is water.

Here in the Northwest Territories, the terrain is all but impassable for much of the year, a vast wilderness of lakes, boreal forest and spongy tundra. Nearly twice the size of Texas, the Northwest Territories are home to only 42,000 souls and just 570 miles of paved road. If you want to get almost anywhere, you have to fly.

Then, in early November, winter comes. As temperatures plummet, the lakes freeze over and the marshes turn rock solid. Once the ice is a foot thick — usually by late December — snowplows fan out into the hinterlands, blazing routes to native villages and mining camps by clearing insulating snow off the ice to speed the thickening process.

When it comes to epic northern engineering, nothing tops the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road, a superhighway of ice that extends 370 miles from north of Yellowknife into the neighboring territory of Nunavut. To build it, 140 workers from the Nuna Logistics construction firm struggle through 20-hour nights and windchills that dip to 70 below. By the end of January, they have completed the longest heavy-haul ice road in the world, as wide as an eight-lane highway. When the ice thickens to 40-plus in. — typically, in late February — it is capable of supporting 70-ton eight-axle Super B Train articulated trucks.

The road services mines that tap into rich deposits of diamond-bearing kimberlite. Since the first samples were found here in 1991, Canada has gone from marketing no diamonds to being the world’s third largest producer by value (after Botswana and Russia). Last year, two mines in the territories produced more than 12 million carats, worth $1.5 billion (U.S.). This year another mine will open, at Snap Lake, halfway up the Tibbitt to Contwoyto road. To operate the mines, 300,000 tons of fuel, explosives, steel and concrete must be hauled in over the ice each year.

If you want to learn about Canadian ice roads, sooner or later you have to talk to John Zigarlick. In the early ’80s, as president and CEO of Echo Bay Mines, he oversaw the construction of a gold mine 250 miles north of Yellowknife, and the ice road to reach it. After Zigarlick retired in 1998, he waited all of about two weeks before founding a new company, Nuna Logistics, and convinced Echo Bay to let him manage the road.

In those days, before diamond mining, a typical winter saw 700 to 1000 truckloads run north on the ice road, mostly to the gold mine. Fast forward seven years: With the diamond business exploding, demand for haulage has increased tenfold. But there’s one problem facing Zigarlick’s road — a little thing called global warming.