Yellowknife Canada

My boss told me and the other 13 people in my department that we have a trip coming up on the 13th of Feb to Yellowknife Canada for cold weather testing. I have a few questions for anybody that has any knowledge about this. I am not going to reley on what people out at the shop say because they are usaully wrong and think they know more about it than the next person.

1. Just how cold is it really going to be between the days of Feb. 13th to March the 8th? How big of a negative sign am I going to see.

2. The roads, what kind of driving should I expect? How slow or should I say how fast will I be able to go under the best conditions up there? How much ice is there going to be on the roadway?

3. I am going to be replacing parts outside in the environment, what kind of time can I saftley go outside in good clothing?

Your answers will help me decide whether or not I go. So thank you for any answer that you could provide me abou this topic.

 

I am a mechnic/driver for Cummins in their research and engineering dept. It means that I get to play around with the new stuff that you all will see in a few years.

Apparently I am the only one anymore that doesn't have cable/satelite. I guess I can look it up on the internet.

Thank You all.

 

Well you asked so here is an ear full. I flew to vancouver canada to get a connector flight to yellowknife on sunday the 2 of march. We landed and had 1.5 hours to get to the next gate to catch the flight. Well I got pulled into customs for futher questioning which made me and a coworker miss the flight. So We stayed at a hotel in Vancouver and we got a flight out the next day. Our plane lands in Yellowknife and I have no luguage. I am wearing a pair of carhart boots, and pair of levi jeans with a big hole near one knee, a tee shirt and a hooded sweatshirt. Thankfully I put a pair of coveralls in one of the trucks before it left. It was only around -20 F when I got there. We had our trucks parked on Robinson Truck Lines lake behind their shop which is an overflow parking lot. So we worked on the trucks and drove them around on a lake for 2 days. My luguage showed up the next day. So I get in cold weather gear for all of 2 hours before I started driving the truck. Yeah. The Fourth day in canada was the coldest that I have ever been -39 F. I went out on the very begining of the ice road in a Chevy Trail Blazer, saw the northen lights, and ate like a king while I was up there. That part was nice. I saw where all of the big trucking companies are in yellowknife that go on the ice road. I saw the staging are for the ice road, and I also noticed that the two most common items shipped up to the diamond mines were diesel fuel and high explosives.

We had some issues with the trucks that could not be solved up there so we headed towards home on the fourth day. After you leave Yellowknife there is nothing out there for about 428 miles. Sure there are a lot of buffalo signs but very little buffalo. I think that I saw two signs for town that whole disatnce and one twon was just a gas station. Had a boost leak on the truck for two days that made it very low on power. I was going down a hill on highway 35 just coming out of valleyview canada when the boost leak happened again. I was actually losing speed as I was going down a hill with my foot to the floor on the throttle. So I yelled back to the engineer to do something, anything was better than at that point right there. He did something to the calibration and I got some power back. There are some decent hills in middle alberta just north of edmonton. I went up one and had the truck all the way in a low range gear to make it up it. The other two trucks that I was with just kept on driving which made me very mad. Now we had to cross a frozen river with the trucks that was about 1-2 miles long. I wasn't really looking at the odometer when we were crossng it. I was paying more attention to the very big cracks in the ice and how they flexed a little when we drove over them. To tell you the truth driving on ice really is not that bad at all.

Day two of driving which would be day 5 of the trip home was getting 8 inches of snow and I was driving a new kenworth T660 in southern alberta canada in 57 degree F weather. I was a 96 degree temp change from the day before. I had the sunroof open crusing down the road. When I got home I was walking around in short sleeve shirts in 30 degree weather because it still felt warm to me. Anyway day two saw me piss off a third border crossing gaurd in less than two weeks. Don't say misc. items when they ask you what you have in your trailer at the X-ray machine. I had a 5 page manifest in the trailer about what I had in there. He told me to be more specific, I said ok, I have nuts, bolts, wrenches, tools, mobile emissions lab, a car. Apparently when I said car he freaked out thinking that a car should have been at the top of the list or something. Anyway this made him mad and he yelled at me to just move it on through which I happly did.

The next day saw me drive volvo through the Roockie moutanins on I-15. Anyway neither truck, kenworth or volvo had engine brakes. The frist hill caught me by suprise. Yeah, how do es a hill catch you by suprise? I was expecting a little bit more of a flat spot at the top not just an up and then down. So I went do the first mountain with a fully loaded trailer with a trucj that has no engine brakes a little to fast. I was passing cars and other trucks. The engineer in the passenger seat asked me, "Think we are going a little fast?" My reply was a simple "yup" because I was trying not to let the brakes fade and trying not to wreck. Now at the bottom of this hill was a weight station. This put a scare into me because if I had to stop at the bottom my brakes would be smokin. They were closed thankfully.

The I had learned for the next two mountains. I shoved into the lowest gear possible after I had slamed on the brkaes at the top. That would be 5th gear. So I was bouncing the tach from 1500 rpm to 2300 rpm. I don't think that engine in the truck was suppose to go that high though. Now thing was that the volvo had major electrical issues such as it had melted a 70 amp relay. So we had rigged up a set of relays for it. Now I had my chioce of heat for a little bit or dash for a while because we would have to unplug the relays because they would get hot. Oh yeah it didn't have a radio either. I choose a tach for going down the mountains. The kneworth had gps and satilitte radio. Except the gps couldn't find us until calgary canada and the radio didn't really pull in too many stations.

So we get to Butte Montana, now i am the kind of guy who likes to eat supper at around 6 pm. Didn't happen the whole trip, we were alwalys eating around 10pm - midnight. Well it wasn't any different in Butte. The time change happened too. So if you add all that up I had 4 hours of sleep between that night and when I had to get up for a flight the next morning. The other 8 people went to one room to play poker. I was the only one who got to sleep that night. Everyone else stayed up all night playing poker. Now apparently running this type of shedule will wear me out because I fell asleep in two out of the three flights that day. One was before we took off, I had slept right through take off which suprised me.

Now did I enjoy it. Yes it was an experience and the paycheck was very nice. Would I do it again, Yes. Now check you pulse if you read all of that and make sure that you are still alive, I know it is kinda boring, my writing style that is. There it is, pretty much everything that had happened that I can write about. Starting to look like a snzzy post.