Highway Thru Hell: Mark Miller hits another one out of the park

Season 6 Episode 12 Trapped

Free for one week on the Discovery Channel

Chip truck goes over the edge. Reality television at it's best because it is actually real. Thinking of becoming a truck driver? Pop some popcorn and watch this episode with your loved one.

What is a chip truck? I like to imagine they are potato chips but they are actually wood chips.

If you are in the USA or Australia or Estonia or someplace and you are wondering whether anything on Highway Thru Hell is faked for TV, it isn't. Canada is a small town and you can't get away with anything. Lots of truck drivers in Canada know the characters on Highway Thru Hell because we are in trucking and we hire them for recoveries. It's all real.

Highway Thru Hell - Watch Online

 

Yup, Canada is Dog River, Saskatchewan. Everybody is a busybody and everybody knows everybody else's business and if you don't you can easily find out.

 

Indeed the highway contractor on the Coquihalla does a pretty good job of keeping it passable in the winter. The problematic section (for those who have not been on the Coquihalla) is the climb from Hope (beyond Hope) to the Coquihalla Summit (photo below):



Westerly winds sometimes bring the drippy coastal weather (the ocean is only 100 miles away) up the mountain and it can snow like madness without warning on the upper elevations of the Coquihalla. You can be driving along la, la, la no problemo and suddenly the snow is accumulating so fast you can see it rising. This invariably happens between chain-up areas so you plow along until you spin out yourself or you get stuck behind a bunch of trucks that have spun out and are blocking the highway. So you are now on a steep slope (the worst place to chain up) and you may not be able to lift off anyway. My usual reaction to this situation is to fall to the ground convulsively sobbing and I sometimes have a tantrum yelling at clouds. Putting on chains in a manly fashion somewhat restores my manliness but I am always overwhelmed by the awesome power of nature on what appears, on the face of it, to be a conventional freeway. I would say a truck driver who has not yet been humiliated by the Coquihalla just hasn't hit the right weather for humiliation on the Coquihalla.

For the record, the Highway Thru Hell episode I posted above is about a crash on Highway 3 near Manning Park and not the Coquihalla Highway.