Ice Roads

The song Ice Roads came about after spending some time with friends of mine who take these jobs in the dead of winter and early spring up in the North West Territories. They've got stories to tell about how the ice creates a wave in front of their truck and they travel along at a slow speed for dozens of miles riding in the pocket behind the wave as the ice up out in front of them. They slow down before leaving the lake and watch the water squirt out from under the ice and then they drive off. Not a job for the faint at heart. I heard about one guy who builds the roads drilling holes around his rig in order to test the depth of the ice on the roads for the other truckers. Minutes later it was half way through the ice and they worked at it for the next few days getting it out. OOPPS!  Then there's the ravens that sit on the snowbanks waiting for that familiar truck to go by that fed them a sandwich last week. Imagine waiting on a snowdrift of a few days looking for that sandwich truck again in the middle of the night. The ravens then tuck themselves behind the wind deflector on the hood and stare you down until you feed them again. I've got to write a song about these birds. -40 doesn't even make them shiver. So with all of the stories I've heard over the years I thought it was about time to write a driving song for the men and women on the ice roads. I hope you enjoy it.

Ice roads (ice crossings, ice bridges) are frozen, human-made structures on the surface of bays, rivers, lakes, or seas in the far north. They link dry land, frozen waterways, portages and winter roads, and are usually remade each winter. Ice roads allow temporary transport to areas with no permanent road access. Seen in isolated regions of northern Canada, Alaska's Bush, northern Scandinavia and Russia, they reduce the cost of materials that otherwise would ship as expensive air freight, and they allow movement of large or heavy objects for which air freight is impractical.

Ice roads differ from winter roads in that they are built primarily across frozen waterways. Ice roads may be winter substitutes for summer ferry service. Ferry service and an ice crossing may operate yearly at the same time for several weeks.

Function

Because ice roads are flat, devoid of trees, rocks and other obstacles, they have a smooth driving surface. The roads from Yellowknife to Port Radium by John Denison, a pioneer of ice roads in the Canadian Arctic 1950s-1970s, were largely plowed across frozen lakes, with a short overland portage between the shoreline of one lake and the next. Similar to ice roads, ice runways are common in the polar regions and include the blue ice runways. Ice is used as an emergency landing surface.

In general, these roads occur (often with human assistance) in areas where construction of year-round roads is expensive due to boggy muskeg land. When frozen in winter, these obstacles are easier to cross. Ice roads such as the stretch between Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, Canada provide an almost level driving surface with few detours several months of the year.

Ice roads and winter roads are used where year-round roads are expensive or impractical. When frozen in winter, the waterway crossings can be built up with auger holes to flood and thicken the crossing. Clearing snow (which insulates and warms) makes ice thicker, more quickly. These seasonal links last anywhere from a few weeks to several months before they become impassable.

After an ice road is plowed across a lake, the ice there gets much thicker than the surrounding lake ice, because the snow cover is swept off — exposing the road directly to subfreezing air (temperatures as low as −60 °F (−51 °C)). When a lake thaws in the spring, the ice under the road is the last to melt, and in the summer, traces of the roads can still be seen from overhead in a bush plane, as bare strips remain on the lake floor where the ice blocked light and prevented plants and algae from growing.

Driving

While easier to drive across in the winter than land, roads over water present a great danger to anyone using them. Speeds are typically limited to 15 mph (24 km/h) to prevent a truck's weight from causing waves under the surface. These waves can damage the road, or dislodge the ice from the shoreline and create a hazard. Another hazard on large lakes is the pressure ridge, a break in the ice created by the expansion and contraction of the surface ice over time due to heat.

The roads are normally the domain of large trucks (e.g. tractor-trailer units), although lighter automobiles, such as pickup trucks, are occasionally seen, as are snowmobiles.

Use of ice as the main construction material allows unusual construction techniques: for example, to make a ramp to get the road over a step such as the shore of a lake, lake water is pumped out and mixed with snow to make slush, which is formed into the shape of the ramp, which in the intense cold quickly freezes hard. To resurface a worn and damaged road surface, it is flooded with shallow water, which quickly freezes hard.^[1]

Around the world

Antarctica

The McMurdo-South Pole highway is approximately 900-miles (1450 km) long and links the United States' McMurdo Station on the coast to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. It was constructed by leveling snow and filling in crevasses, but is not paved. There are flags to mark the route.

Canada

Winter roads and ice roads in Canada are found primarily in Northern parts of some provinces, as well as the sparsely-populated northern territories of Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut. In Nunavut, while there are a number of permanent roads within the territory, the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road, linking Nunavut to Tibbitt Lake in the Northwest Territories, forms the territory's only road access to the rest of North America's road network.

Winter roads in the Northwest Territories, most notably the Tuktoyaktuk Winter Road, link various isolated communities and mineral exploration sites to the territory's highway network.

Winter roads may also be found in the sparsely populated northernmost regions of some Canadian provinces. Most communities north of Ontario's Albany River are served by winter roads. Most of these roads in Northwestern Ontario are linked to the Northern Ontario Resource Trail, a permanent gravel road which extends northerly from the end of Highway 599 at Pickle Lake, the northernmost community in the province with year-round highway access. In Northeastern Ontario, some communities are linked to Moosonee, a town that itself has rail access but no road access to the south.

Canada's ice roads were prominently featured in the History Channel show Ice Road Truckers.

To read more on ice roads cilck here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_road