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ICE ROADS. --- Huh, they were such a big part of my life at the time; you'd think I'd remember more. I scouted, built, maintained, policed and drove them on and off for ten years. My first one was in the winter of 73-74. Shortly before Christmas that year, Dick Robinson called a meeting with his crew and asked us, 'who wants to work on the ice road this winter?' Most of the crew (the Southern boys), exhibited a distinct lack of interest. Not long after, they all buggered-off back south, to do whatever southerners did in the winter anyway. That left just us, the local lads, half a dozen or so. I really didn't know what I was getting into but I had a mortgage and truck payments to make, it sounded like another adventure and a good idea. I put my hand up.
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January 1st rolled around and off we went. Dave (road boss), Gerry (mechanic), Stan (grader), Ronny (D-6), John (drunken cook), two guys I've forgotten (truck driver & Beaver) and myself (D-4). We were a multi talented bunch; any of us was capable of operating any of the equipment.
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First stop, Ft Byers at Edzo to make a start crossing Marion Lake on our way to Echo Bay Mine at Pt Radium, on Great Bear Lake. We had a less than auspicious start. In the first place the weather got (comparatively) warm, secondly; our cook was so drunk he lay on the cook floor quivering for a week, and lastly; the ice on Marion Lake was too thin and inconsistent to work on. After three days of sitting around, we went back to town and waited a week for the cook to sober up and ice conditions to improve. By the time we finally got started, we were already almost two weeks behind schedule. |
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It was Robinson's Trucking, first attempt at building the ice road to Great Bear, consequently everything was hit and miss, trial and error, fly by the seat of our pants. None of our equipment was new and all of it had seen better days. Two small Cats; a D4 & D6. a Champion Grader with a Vee plough and wing blade, a Bombardier, the Beaver, and a winch truck. Later as we worked our way north and the lakes got bigger and ice conditions improved, we also used a six wheel-drive plough truck. |
All this equipment pulled a set of drags behind it. At the temperatures we worked in, disturbed snow settles and re-freezes, once leveled it compacts into a hard smooth surface. A 'drag' is a 'bed frame' looking thing, made of heavy steel beams welded in a square and reinforced with cross beams, a dozen, four foot lengths, of chain were attached to the back of each drag. The chains wiggled through the snow disturbing it even more with each pass, making the trail smoother and smoother.
| The first thing that went wrong and which bugged us the whole trip was the overheating of the Bombardier. Somehow it blew the head gasket and warped the motor heads. It leaked anti-freeze continuously, filling the cab interior with a stinking mist of sticky and irritating coolant, mixed with diesel fumes. Extremely unpleasant for the operator and keeping the windshield constantly fogged up. A day driving it was a day in hell. Dave worked and slept in it for a month. |
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Shallow, with constantly moving water and currents from the several streams running into, and the river running out of it, always thin and criss-crossed by pressure ridges, Marion Lake is twenty miles of treacherous ice. We finally got across it safely and onto the old, abandoned, all weather, tote road to Rayrock Mine. It was a relief to be on land again.
Dave, the road boss and scout, and Gerry the mechanic traveled ahead of everyone. In the Bombardier, they marked trail, checked ice thickness with a yardstick and hand auger, and found the portages on and off the lakes. We followed their tracks, building the road as we went. The grader, two Cats, the Beaver and lastly the winch truck moving our camp and lo-bed trailer.
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My machine was the little D4 Cat. Filling washouts, pushing, pulling, packing and moving snow around and smoothing out the road was my job. By now it had gotten cold, thirty to forty below zero every day. I was warm as toast as long as I kept the Cat 'working'.
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It was all tarped in, completely surround by canvas except for my head and shoulders. The heat blown back off the motor kept me very comfortable. On warmer days it got warm enough in my little enclosure to make me sweat. My only vulnerable spot was my backside. When the wind was behind me it would blow up under the fuel tank and seat, forming icicles on my butt.
Working along the Ray Rock road one day we had a particularly nasty tail wind. My backside was getting cold and uncomfortable from the chilling breeze. Even pink fiberglass insulation stuffed around the tank and under my seat, didn't help. I felt like I was sitting on a block of ice. "There's only one thing that would keep my butt warm today" I thought "and that's a caribou skin to sit on."
Well wouldn't you know it and God's honest truth, I cannot tell a lie, not ten minutes later I came around a corner and there lying in the middle of the trail was a Coleman cook stove, a Coleman lamp, a beautiful pair of embroidered and beaded moose-hide mittens and....................a nicely scraped, dried, and stretched caribou hide!
Perfect, a miracle! Oh ye of little Faith. My prayer was answered. Now where on earth did that stuff come from? It had me baffled for a few minutes until I remembered, an Indian on a snowmobile and pulling a sled had passed me earlier. The bounty must have bounced out of his sled and he hadn't noticed. I stopped the Cat and picked up the loot. I stashed the stove, lamp and mitts on the Cat and promptly put the caribou skin on the seat. Oh boy did that ever feel good!
I thought the Indian would eventually miss his gear and come back looking for it. After all, the stuff he'd lost was pretty essential to mid-winter survival in the northern bush. However, he never returned for it. He must not have noticed the missing items for a long time and was probably close to Rae Lake where he could replace them when he did. I sat on the caribou skin seat cushion for the rest of the job, a month. Wet, dry, soaked in diesel fuel it didn't matter, that skin always kept my backside warm.
By the end of the job the old skin got so stinky, I had to throw it away. I still have and occasionally use, the camp stove and lantern, they're out in the shed. The beautiful mitts, I used for years while snowmobiling, they're now in a box in the crawl space with the rest of my old arctic gear.
"Q" HAS HIS OWN WEB SITE, A BLOG, WITH A MIXTURE OF PHOTOS AND STORIES FROM THE GREAT WHITE NORTH. HE IS RETIRED NOW AND WELCOMES VISITORS TO HIS WEB SITE.
------ William (Diesel Gypsy) Weatherstone.
RETURN TO CANADA'S WINTER ICE ROADS
