Watching ice road truckers and...

Seasons 1-3 were the only ones really worth watching. Even then it was just barely passable. IMO the only guys worth following in season one were Jay, TJ and Alex. Season 2 would have been Eric, Bear, and the Mullen rig moving crew. Don't remember who was in S3.

 

I just dug this up. Gonna give it a read when I get the time.

Rookies, Wannabees, & superheroes. This is a true run about Heavy Haul.

 

TJ was the area bobo honker.

The Mullens guys were awesome. If i were Canadian, i would want to drive for Mullen. The rig move across frozen ocean was awesome.

 

all that yelling and screaming on the axeman show is too much
i noticed on ice road truckers every truck that goes by is laying on the airhorn and when they unhook the glad hands air is always coming out.
they always get out and look at the ice even though their gonna drive on it no matter what

 

Canada can fix the lakes and river crossings easily. Spend a dollar on a National Interstate Highways Program the way we did ours back in the 50's Presto bridges and so on all over the north. No more ice crossings.

Or purchase some surplus LCAC's and aircushion the ones that cannot be bridged adequately.

I know that Canada prides themselves in being good with what little they have, but the lake crossings etc is unnecessary. That simply shows that they will not spend some money to bridge them or build adequate roads to the new communities that are building.

Maybe it is tribal and private in nature and not a Canadian Govt Problem. I don't know.

In the last show, Art actually went into the bunk waiting for night to freeze his crossing some more. For HIM to not go across now as crazy as he seems to be hell hath frozen over.

 

The lakes, rivers, etc., individually are not the problem. Building a bridge isn't terribly difficult. The challenge is really four-fold.

In very simple terms; open up Google Maps, draw a diagonal line from where Alaska meets Yukon at the Beaufort Sea to Toronto. Everything south of that line is more land than water, everything north of that line is more water than land. Zoom in on a few areas and you will see what I mean.

So, the first concern is the sheer magnitude of the number of water crossings. The second part is the vastness of some of those crossings. And the third issue is the muskeg, swamp and other unconsolidated lands in between. That is the reason we do the bulk of northern work in the winter; so everything, including the land, is frozen. It is also the reason that northern all-weather roads weave across the landscape... following the path of least resistance.

I have spent most of my adult life living and working in the north. It is very empty and the cost of doing things--like building all-weather roads--is enormous. Challenge number four. A good example is the soon-to-be-open Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk Highway: 120 km (~75 miles), $300 million. Forty-plus years to plan, four years to build. Yes, you are right that Indigenous issues are a significant part of the process (and ever-increasingly, environmental concerns).

I'll do the math for you, that's a little over $4 million per mile.

And that gets you a narrow, two-lane gravel road with single-lane bridges.

And 80% of the Canadian population lives within 200 km of our southern border with the U.S.

 

Did you see the part were she was hanging on to the winch bar with her arms and legs and fell......ya.

 

If it was on earlier I would watch it but I can't stay up to 2200

 

We can't even access a lot of the wellpads around here in summer. Too swampy. Cut a trail in the bush once the muskeg freezes. Flood it, grade it flat and work until thaw. And we're only really in the middle of the province in terms of latitude. Yellowknife is a couple hundred kilometers further north than we are.