This fascinating series reveals the virtually unknown occupation of ice road trucking, one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. The first of this week’s two episodes is a special edition which looks at the history of the ice roads and the Yellowknife region, from the gold rush to the discovery of diamonds. The programme reveals how an ice road is tested and prepared, and truckers talk about the unique dangers they face.

The remote Canadian town of Yellowknife is home to the extraordinary industry of ice-road trucking.

These rugged truckers brave harsh conditions and constant danger to ply the ice roads and supply the region’s diamond mines. Yet it was not diamonds that originally brought settlers to this distant land. Yellowknife was founded as a fur trading post, long before prospectors began to realise the wealth of its natural resources.

In the 1930s, the area was mined for radium, a radioactive element that was even more valuable than gold at the time. The radium industry was followed by miners digging for uranium – some of which was eventually used in the atomic bomb. But it was the discovery of a rich seam of gold in 1934 that put Yellowknife on the map. Gold mines began to appear across the region, but there remained one enduring problem: transportation.

In the early days of fur trading, dog sleds were the only means of carrying goods from the north. Barges were another option, but they were slow and could only operate in the short summer months. It was a former mountie called John Denison who finally experimented with driving trucks over the ice – and established the ice-road business. Denison began by leading small convoys across the lakes using only snowploughs to clear the way. As the mines began to demand yearly deliveries, Denison established a network of trails. He received a medal of the Order of Canada for his efforts and is still fondly remembered as a true pioneer by today’s truckers.

As the ice-trucking industry has grown, so has the technology behind the creation of the roads. Engineers now use radar to measure the thickness of the ice. “It’ll tell you how many loads you can carry and the weight of those loads, and whether the road is safe to travel on,” explains ice-road profiler Patrick Finlay. Experienced truckers know how to distinguish good ice from bad. “When you get on the ice and it’s nice and black, and you can see through it, looks like glass well, that’s good strong ice,” says veteran driver Alex Debogorski.

Yet the truckers still face the ever-present risk of falling through the ice. “There’s some guys up
here who have actually ridden vehicles to the bottom and had to open the door, come back up to the surface and claw their way out of the ice hole,” says local historian Walt Humphries. More than 20 men have died after falling through the ice – many of them whilst building the roads.

The industry today is now bigger than ever, spurred on by the discovery of diamonds in the 1990s. “When it first started, a lot of people said, ‘Diamonds? What the heck? There’s no diamonds up here!’” Alex recalls. The realisation that the region contains some $40billion in untapped diamonds came at a time when Yellowknife’s gold mines were closing down. In a few short years, this new industry revitalised the region and made Canada the third largest producer of diamonds in the world. The vast scale of these mines means that the ice roads are now bigger and busier than ever. “It blows everybody’s mind up there,” says trucker Hugh Rowland. “They just can’t believe that there’s that many loads going up compared to what there used to be.”

The ice roads may be more sophisticated, but the risks remain; sheer volume of traffic presents dangers of its own. Moreover, no one knows what that future will hold. The supply of diamonds could be exhausted in ten years’ time, and there is the looming threat of climate change. Could the ice road eventually melt away forever?

Wednesday 12th March at 8:30pm on five