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March 29 A month old, but there you go.March 14 More on the Ice Roads.When, during the 1970s my buddies and I drove the 450 mile Ice Road to Great Bear Lake it was very exciting, a 'thrill a minute' so to speak. We were in constant danger of breaking through the ice, breaking down or getting stranded in a blizzard and running out of fuel. A few of us had CB radios, but not many, on our first year we had no radio communications at all. My stress level was always at a maximum and my mouth full of stress related canker sores, so bad sometimes, I could barely swallow. After each trip I usually needed a night in the Gold Range or Hoist Room and not a few drinks, to psych myself up to go again.
That first winter we drove old B series Macks, and old beat up old Autocars...they had slobbering old Cummins Diesels of 180 hp in them. The biggest horsepower we had on the Road was a Western Star with a 290 in it, Lanny was lucky, he was also the only one to have a 'Jake'. We never hooked up our trailer brakes, they would pack with snow and at their first application would freeze in the on position, making it impossible to move again once stopped.
Another trick we soon learned was, never, ever stop for the night at the bottom of a hill. By morning your gear and transmission oil were frozen thick enough to walk on and all your tires had a frozen stiff, flat spot on the bottom. If you had to climb a hill first thing you were hooped, it was impossible. It took hours of backing up, down the lake and running ahead again to get your tires round and the lubricants thin enough to even think about trying to climb that hill.
No matter where you parked, level or flat it didn't matter, the first ten miles of every day began with the shuddering whump, whump, whump of 18 square tires trying to make themselves round again. :-)
I was lucky, for the most part I drove one of the Macks. Of course it didn't have a bunk, it didn't even have a bench seat. If I had to sleep in it, which I did often. I'd fill in the space between the seat with my cardboard lunch box, put my wind pants on top of that for a cushion and stuff my Arctic 3 Star sleeping bag in, up and around the dash to lay my head and shoulders on, finally pulling my parka over top of me as a blanket. The cab of those old trucks was not wide enough to stretch out in, so you had to bend yourself almost into an 'ess' shape to lie down. Pulling the hand throttle out to a high idle of eleven hundred rpm ensured enough heat from the cab heater to keep one reasonably comfortable.
The trucks were old and their exhaust systems no longer as good as the day they left the factory, by that I mean they leaked all over but one never knew quite where. This meant, in the coldest weather you had to sleep with one widow at least halfway open if you didn't want to die in your sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning. As I said, our truck cabs were very cramped, on more than one occasion I woke up with my stockinged sticking out the window at forty below, just so I could stretch out flat.
The stress and anxiety level would start to escalate as soon as you pulled out of the yard to make the trip North. Would the ice be good this trip? Up the ever looming Squirrel Hill, would you be able to make the climb without tire chains. Two hundred miles down the road in the bush, would you spin out, lose control, fly backwards down the hill at great speed and roll your rig at the bottom? How was the ice on Hottah Lake, had the road across it blown in, was it open just far enough to get you to a point where you couldn't back up or turn around, therefore potentially trapping you for days?
How were the portages at Fish Trap and that nasty Conjourer Bay Hill up to Yen Lake? You knew you had to negotiate them, empty and light on the drivers, coming home. What about that nasty little hill between Seguin and Taka? It could give empty southbound trucks big problems late in the season. Would you be able to make it to Malfait Lake, our only rest stop and halfway camp in time for a hot meal and some fresh coffee? In case you needed rescue, where were the other trucks, how far ahead, how far behind would they be? What important piece of metal or rubber was going to break from cold stress? Had snow gotten in the fuel tank, did one have enough spare fuel filters to handle snow plugged engine filters if your truck quit. The more you thought about it, the more you though could go wrong. I'm a big thinker!
Round trip was three or four days...two up, two down, 12 -14 hours a day with only 10 second bathroom breaks. Sometimes you didn't even stop for those, you just selected a low gear, pulled out the hand throttle opened the door, stepped out, holding the steering wheel with your free hand you'd have a whiz right off the running board as the truck kept rolling.
One could get to Echo Bay quite comfortably on a nice bright day on a clear road going North, but by the time you got unloaded and reloaded, if a back haul was handy, the weather could have changed by the time you got back to Hottah Lake. Well out onto Hottah, you'd find it closed, blown in, you're stuck. It was a long wait, sometimes days, before a plow truck would come along and dig you out. Running out of fuel was miserable.
Unlike nowadays when truck speeds are rigorously controlled, seldom being higher than 30 kmh, we had no speed limits! On most of the bigger lakes we drove our trucks as fast as we could and still do it safely. My Black Mack, RTL #15, had a375 hp engine, was geared for 62 mph and that was how fast I drove her. One day, halfway north I was going over a portage so fast, I hit a bump I didn't see and busted the front motor mount. I used a chain and load binder to tie the engine back in place and drove it like that all the way to Echo Bay then back to Yellowknife.
We always made sure we reduced our speed down to below 20 mph about a mile out from shore, this allowed our bow wave to dissipate along the shore line before we got there. Not reducing one's speed could and did cause our bow wave to crash against the shore with us on top of it. This created a water hammer and caused an ice blow-out right under us busting a hole behind us. The truck that caused the ice blow out always got through, but the next guy to come along always got his feet wet.
Most driver liked to travel in twos or threes, I preferred to travel by myself, it was a lot faster. With a three truck convoy, it seemed we were always waiting for someone to get ready or catch up. Our crew was small, less than twenty guys I think. About a dozen regular employees and up to half a dozen leased operators with their own rigs. A 'Band of Brothers' with no clear leader except Dick Robinson, back in the Shop, who terrorized and terrified everyone. Once out on the 'road' we very much did our own thing. Our responsibility was to 'get there', no one really cared how we did it. Our road was un-patrolled and un-supervised, we relied heavily on each other to make sure we 'got there' and reasonably safely. No one was left behind. Jury rigged repairs were made on breakdowns.... fuel, filters, tires, food, drink and parts were shared. No one drank booze on the road, no one smoked dope.
The pressure was always on to get every one of those damned loads hauled before the road melted.
Damaged/broken trucks were limped along or hooked onto and towed to whichever end of the road and a repair shop was closest. These days it seems, at the slightest hint of a problem or a breakdwon, the driver just bails out of his unit, abandoning it in situ and catches a ride with his following buddy. "Let someone else worry about it" seems to be the modern attitude.
The start and end of each winter hauling season were when our stress levels were highest. At the start there were many stretches of the road where the quality, quantity and load bearing abilities of the ice were an unknown factor and it was dark for most of the day. Mid season was usually pretty good. The ice had thickened, the portages smooth and stiffened, the sun would shine but not enough to start melting the snow on the hills and portages making them slippery. A bright March day in the bush, even from inside a truck cab, is a joy to behold. Then April came along, the days got longer and the sun warmer and brighter. The snow on the hills and portages got soft and slippery; the Ice close to shore would start to melt and weaken. We would begin to encounter problems both ways, getting onto and off the lake ice.
The end was in sight, everybody was anxious to get the last load hauled and get the hell outa there. Finally by mid/end April, it was done. It felt like a huge weight had been lifted from ones shoulders. There was a huge, collective but silent, sigh of relief. Full daylight and sunshine had returned, the snow down town had mostly melted, jeans and tee shirts were once again our daily attire. The sudden air of relaxation was palpable. True Spring was just around the corner, by May we could all get back to our nice comfortable jobs of hauling sand and gravel again.
Yellowknife was booming, ever expanding, even through the economic downturn of the late 70s and 80s, Yellowknife never stopped growing. The fifth wheel rigs came off the trucks, the hydraulics and gravel boxes went back on. We hauled fill from the gravel pits around town constantly, from May til the end of November. To a great extent, new Yellowknife is built on and with, the sand and gravel we, The Boys of Robinson's RTL hauled. That tradition continues to this day. There were/are other trucking companies in town but they were only ever bit players.
Like in every family, not everyone got along. During 'The Haul', grudges and hard feelings were usually held in check. No fights ensued until the Ice Road, Season Ending Party, in the shop. That's when the whisky and beer flowed and sometimes fists flew and noses got bloodied. Many drivers swore they would never again drive the Ice Road. Funny thing though, by next fall we'd have guys lined up and straining at the leash to do it again.
Cheers.
Two Photo's.
My Old Red B-60 Mack.
My Black Mack with 105 bbls of gas, on the glare ice at the Great Bear/Conjourer Bay Narrows.
March 06 Prosperous Lake Follies.So this year, they are going to re-open the old ice road from Cassidy Point up the Yellowknife River, past Discovery and over to CamLaren Bay on Gordon Lake. Apparently the plan is for empty trucks coming south, to use this old road as a cut-off/by-pass of most of the Ingraham Trail. It's a great plan if it weren't for Prosperous Lake.
Prosperous Lake is a Bitch! It is notorious for its bad Ice at the North end. Prosperous was the scene of a tragedy a couple of winters ago, in which a young man lost his life when the piece of equipment he was driving broke through the ice and instantly sank in over 200 feet of water.
During my last winter on the ice roads, on Prosperous, I had a very close call myself. Shortly before the Christmas season of '86/'87 either Dick or Marvin called me into the office one morning and told me to round up the boys and equipment and open up the road across Prosperous and into Con Hydro at the north end. Up to that point we had been having a relatively mild winter.
My stomach lurched. Concealing my reservations behind what I hoped was a neutral look, I said, 'OK'. I was doubtful of good ice conditions and frankly the thought of crossing Prosperous so early with heavy equipment made me very nervous. The idea was, to remove the snow - an insulator - so the frost could get at the ice to make it thicker.
I gassed up my 4x4 one ton pickup, made sure the gas ice auger was running well and had lots of fuel. Our little convoy set out next morning as it was getting light. In the convoy were; me leading the way, a big 'Versatile' farm tractor equipped with dual wheels (8 tires) and a Vee plow, bringing up the rear was a tractor unit pulling a lowboy trailer with a small Cat on its deck.
Starting at Cassidy Point we proceeded down the lake. I led in the 4x4, stopping to check the ice thickness every couple of hundred yards. To my relief there seemed to be lots of ice, everywhere I checked, beneath less than a foot of snow cover, there was at least twenty four inches, sometimes more, of nice clear, blue ice.
All went well until we got three quarters of the way to the North end where the ice started to get thinner. I had been expecting this to happen and was no more worried than usual by the occurrence.
The trouble with Prosperous Lake is its situation and orientation. It runs north-south and is located close to the southern end of the Ice Road which make it later than other lakes further north in forming good ice. Exacerbating the poor ice conditions are the fact that because of its north south orientation, in early winter the constant northerly wind keeps the north end ice free longer; plus two rivers, The Yellowknife and the Cameron empty into Prosperous more or less opposite each other. The Yellowknife from the west - the Cameron from the east, resulting in currents, thus ensuring very poor ice from shore to shore across the middle of the lake.
Three quarters of the way down the lake, I could see a line in the snow directly across my intended line of travel, a small pressure ridge. It varied in height from just a crack, to less than two high. Approaching it slowly I got out of the pickup and walked ahead, checking ice thickness every fifty feet and less as I got closer. There was less ice than further back but we still had nineteen inches up to, over and for a hundred feet on the other side of the crack which at that point was still 'dry'.
Thinking we were safe, I called the Versatile up to me and told him, although thinner, the ice was ok and to go ahead and plow the road across the crack. No worries, off he went, crossing the crack slowly and stopping on the other side. I told the truck with the Cat on board to wait on the south side of the crack until we had the road plowed to the north shore which wasn't to far ahead of us. I drove up to and around the Versatile checked the ice directly in front of him, found I still had nineteen inches and told him to follow me slowly up to the north shore portage.
We, Versatile and pickup, went for about two hundred yards and I stopped to check the ice again. To my dismay I found the ice thickness had decreased to only fourteen inches. Taking the auger I checked the ice by the Versatile, again only fourteen inches. In theory way less ice than could support the weight of such a piece of equipment. Both the Versatile and my pickup should have been sitting on the bottom of the lake, the two of us looking around wondering where the sky went.
Inwardly I was horrified and pretty near scared out of my wits. Outwardly, I appeared calm and proceeded to check the ice all around and behind us. In front of us it got thinner, only eleven inches; behind us it stayed at forteen inches for a way, then got thicker again as it approached the crack we had just crossed.
What the heck should we do now? I thought. The crack we had so recently crossed was now 'wet', our weight had deflected the ice, water had seeped up around the edges, meaning the crack was live. We couldn't proceed and certainly didn't want to turn around right there and go back over the way we had just come, the weight of the Versatile had surely weakened the already thin ice. Frantically I began to drill holes with the auger, trying to find a direction we could safely turn and get back to good ice. Eventually after a sweaty half an hour, which seemed much longer, and many, many holes across dodgy ice, I managed to map out a return route to safety. Walking ahead of the Versatile I got him around in a big circle, back across the crack at a dry spot and onto good ice again.
There was no alternate safe route to the north shore, so we abandoned our attempt and headed back to town. Getting back to the shop and explaining why we hadn't finished the job was not a pleasant experience. My explanation of our failure was greeted coolly to say the least. I got the impression that I should not have abandoned the exercise and that the whole sorry affair, and the bad ice were somehow my fault.
Oh well, whatever. In any event it wasn't for another month that the Prosperous road got opened and then by someone else. By that time I'd again assumed my role of 'Cop' and general 'dog's body', patrolling the regular Ice Road to Contwoyto Lake and Lupin Mine.
I'll never forget that trip on Prosperous Lake and how lucky we were that no one drowned. I hate that lake, and I'm not surprised that here we are, six days into March and the by-pass route down Prosperous has yet to be utilized.
Cheers. March 02 Just another day.Life on the Winter Road, 10 hours in the dark, working 12-16 hours a day, freezing our n**s off and all for the princely sum of $500. a month.
Ah yes, The Skidder, my buddy SnowWriter, reminded me of it. Made by Case it was one of Dick Robinson's early attempts to adapt just the right piece of specialized equipment for our use in ice road construction. Skidders are used primarily by the logging industry to haul cut timber out of the bush over rough terrain to a log 'landing'. Skidders have large tires, are all wheel drive - all the time, are articulated and steer by hydraulic rams on either side of a pivot pin amidships. Cab in the front half, engine in the rear. On the front there is a small hydraulic blade for pushing logs around, on the back they have a powerful hydraulic winch with a hundred feet of 7/8" cable spooled onto it.
The idea was, the Skidder with it's large tires, blade and winch would be the machine used to quickly break trail through the deep snow of the portages. With its large wheels, all wheel drive, winch and dozer blade it seemed the ideal machine to speedily do the job. It had a nice enclosed cab and heater and, even in the coldest temperatures could be operated comfortably in lighter clothing. At the time it seemed a soft touch and I considered myself lucky to have been assigned to it after my first two winters, which I'd spent sitting out in the open on a D-4 Cat.
Supposedly the Skidder would go first and make a couple of passes, knocking down and pushing excess snow out of the way while pulling a set of bedframe looking drags to further smooth the snow with each pass, the Cats with more drags would follow, then the grader, finally the truck pulling the camp. That was the theory anyway and it worked very well until we came to the first real and longest portage on the road to Great Bear.
I suppose one could call the Rayrock Road a portage, but it was elevated above the taiga swamps, the bush had been cut well back on either side of it, which let the ever present northern breezes keep the snow depth to a minimum on the road's surface as it wound it's way from the head of Marion Lake 35 miles to Rayrock mine. However we didn't really consider it a 'portage'. Opening the Rayrock Road and making it suitable for the operation of 18 wheel tractor trailer units was a piece of cake, in two or three days we had the job done.
Upon reaching Rayrock Mine the Rayrock Road ended, leaving a long push down a single lane wide cut, through the bush, the "Rayrock Portage". Seven miles it wound through the bush before emerging on Tumi Lake, the first lake of about thirty we had to cross before we reached Echo Bay Mines on Great Bear.
It was on the Rayrock Portage that the Skidder revealed its major shortcoming. It was unable to handle the three foot deep, virgin snow lying undisturbed between the trees. As soon as I got into the deep, tree sheltered snow, I literally came to a grinding halt. There was no way I could push snow, pull the drags and advance all at the same time. The skidder just sat there, not stuck, but not really moving, gracefully spinning all four wheels and belching long white clouds of exhaust into the frozen air. In other words grinding away going nowhere fast.
Johnny Soldat who was behind me, following on the D-6 started to laugh and promptly renamed my machine, 'The Grinder', a name which stuck for the rest of our job. Forever after it was no longer the Skidder, it was The Grinder! Try as I might, full throttle, using all gears and working the steering wheel lock to lock I could not get the Grinder to advance through the deep snow at a faster pace than roughly two hundred yards an hour. This was a serious setback to the plan of a speedy road opening. Tire chains would have made a difference but no one had thought of that, we didn't have any.
As I said I wasn't stuck, all I had to do was lift the dozer blade, jump off the machine and unhook the drags. Once that was done the Grinder would quite happily advance at about 5 miles an hour, over hill and dale through the deepest snow, anywhere on the entire road. An alternate method was for me to disengage the winch brake, stick it in drive, advance and let the cable and drags free spool out behind me for fifty yards, then engage the winch and haul the drags up to me over and over again. A slow and time consuming business.
The problem was, now me and my speedy 'Grinder' could no longer go first, trail breaking now had to be done with the much slower Cats and Grader leaving me and my 'Grinder' far behind, relegated, from Trail Breaker to Tail End Charlie, probably extending our road construction time by at least a week. The Grader it turned out was the best machine for breaking trail. Time was of the essence, with only a seventy five day window to complete our winter hauling, the loss of a week could be disastrous. From hero to an afterthought. All I and my machine could do was groom the portages and bring up the rear. Inevitably I was last one into camp each night. A serious blow to my psyche.
Much later and two weeks further up the road I suffered the only incident of any consequence on that particular road opening. One morning, left far behind doing my thing, grooming a portage in the freezing wilderness. One hundred yards out on a lake as I was about to turn around to make another pass on the portage with the Grinder and drags, the engine just suddenly up and died. 'WTF?" I thought, "Snow in the fuel, my fuel filters must have froze up?" My next thought was, 'the rest of the crew and any help were at least fifteen miles ahead Hughie Arden in the Bombardier was probably thirty miles away.' "I'd better get this thing going again quickly or I'll be sitting here freezing to death til midnight." No two way radios on the equipment in those days, the only radios we had were, one in the bunkhouse and one in the Bombardier. HF, they were used only for communicating with our base in Yellowknife. I was alone and broken down, nobody would miss me for at least ten hours
It was bitterly cold, I think that morning when I started out the camp thermometer had read -44° F. A stiff breeze was blowing and I was sitting exposed out on the lake, basking in the benefits of said breeze. Instantly it seemed, the cold started to creep into the Grinder cab, I was dressed fairly lightly, in fact a few minutes previously I'd been sweating. The only sound, other than my breath was the clicking and clacking of hot engine metal rapidly cooling. "Two hours max" I thought, then the Grinder would be frozen solid and would take two days and a lot of hard, cold work under a protective parachute, to thaw out and get going again.
"Oh well, it's only a frozen filter, I'll have that changed in five minutes." Not! As soon as I climbed out of the cab I could smell fresh diesel, I could see fuel pouring onto the snow from beneath the engine compartment. "Shi-ites! A broken fuel line." "Where is it and how am I going to fix it?" It only took a couple of seconds to discover the main fuel line broken off the bottom of the fuel tank behind the cab. My lifeline to warmth, comfort and security was rapidly draining out the bottom of the machine, onto the frozen lake!
I climbed back into the cab and rummaged around behind my seat for my tool/repair kit which consisted of: one - half inch, and one - nine sixteenth inch, box end wrench, a flat head screwdriver, a pair of slip-joint pliers, a roll of black tape, a new clean fuel filter and filter wrench, and finally half a roll of paper towel. Further investigation, for some unknown but lucky reason, produced a short brass 90° threaded pipe fitting.
At the time I was wearing, and the only clothing I had with me was: Jeans and longjohns, steel toed work boots, tee shirt, flannel shirt and a light - fall type 'winter' jacket, and a toque, finishing off my ensemble were a pair of leather mitts with wool mitt inserts. The cold wind blew right through all of it except the mitts, in jig-time my ears and face were starting to freeze.
After 35 years, I am no longer clear on the exact details of how I did it but somehow with -40° diesel fuel running over my bare hands, wrists and down my arms to my armpits, I managed to plug the bottom of the tank with paper towel, remove the broken fittings and attachments, save the bits I needed and somehow, using the brass plumbing fitting I'd found, put it all back together again and screw it into the bottom of the tank. As my old fuel filter was sucked dry and had fallen into the snow when I removed it, before finishing the repair to the tank, I charged the new filter with fuel and installed it on the engine. Of course the fuel pump and injectors were sucked dry too, so they also had to be recharged. It took me about an hour to make the repairs.
I had started the job with my mitts on, within a minute or two they were soaked with diesel fuel. Although the fuel soaked mitts were surprisingly warm they were too cumbersome to do the fine, fiddly work that was needed and I was forced to discard them in favour of bare hands. Every couple of minutes though, I'd stuff my hands back into my mitts to stop my fingers from completely freezing.
The wind was bitterly cold and by the end of the hour I was chilled to the bone and soaked in diesel fuel. I had no feeling left in my fingers, my face was painfully stiff, my legs were burning from the cold and my ears and toes had lost all feeling too. Now, would the bastard start? Praying that I had a good battery, an unlikely and seldom known event in The Company at that time, I turned the key.
The wind-chill factor was much greater than I had anticipated and the engine had gotten much colder, much quicker. I thought my goose was cooked. Reluctantly, groaning in protest from its cargo of near frozen engine oil the engine began to turn over. The battery was good but I could tell it wouldn't last long, after about six cranks the engine still hadn't fired, so I let go of the key and let it rest a minute or two before trying it again. Half a dozen more tries and the engine caught and roared into life. Yippee!
That day, gravity was my friend. The one thing the Grinder had going for it was the location of its fuel tank. Behind the cab, two feet above the engine, early in the day and still nearly full, the weight of the fuel greatly assisted in priming the fuel pump and injectors. If the fuel tank were located below the engine, I doubt if it would have restarted. So that was my big adventure on The Grinder. Once I'd made my repairs, and got the 'Grinder' started again I went right back to work. Well I had to, in order to get any heat out of the engine, out of the heater and into the cab I couldn't just sit there idling, I had to work it. An hour later I was sweating again, my feet and hands had come back to life, I could smile once more and although they were very painful while thawing out none of my appendages had become seriously frozen.
Back at camp that night I related my story to the others, but none of them were really interested and my tale was greeted with not much more than grunts. Just another day. That was just the way it was on the Ice Road, everyone else had 'been there, done that' and everyday, all had their own tales to tell. Nothing special, the only reason I tell the story is because I remember how my heart sank and stomach churned when I first realized I would have to make the repairs unaided, out in the open at minus 40° with my bare hands in fuel oil of the same temperature..... and how happy and pleased with myself I was when the repairs were finished successfully.
The 'Grinder' was a joke, too small, too light, totally unsuitable for our requirements, a failed experiment. We only used it that one year.
Cheers. |
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