What really happens on the ‘Ice Road Truckers’ frozen highway

February 7, 2009 9:53 AM

“With this road, safety comes first all the time, and Ice Road Truckers just made a mockery of everything we do.”One journalist’s experience on the frozen road in the Northwest Territories. Made famous by a TV show, the road now sees less use in part due to a decline in demand for the NWT’s non-blood diamonds.
posted by joeclark (20 comments total)

Thanks for posting this!

I like the show, but like all "reality" shows you have to accept that it's edited to, let's say, make the most of the reality. Not that I would ever want to drive on those roads.

And the truck crashing through ice? It shouldn't surprise anyone that that was a special effect. Unless there just happened to be an underwater camera when it happened.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 10:08 AM on February 7

Previously.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 10:23 AM on February 7

I have never heard of this show, but I have driven the ice road. My partner and I used to live in Inuvik and we drove the ice road up to Tuktoyuktuk (home of Tuktoyuktuk University, or, Tuk U).

The ice road is amazing. Looking down at the ice, for some sections it looks like you are just driving on a snowy road, but other sections are clear and glossy and you can see the multicoloured ice stretching out underneath you, cracks like ribbons rippling in all directions - stretching out for meters and down for feet. You can just imagine one of them opening up and your whole vehicle being swallowed up by the ice water.

It won't happen though - the thickness of the ice is so carefully monitored that the only people who get in trouble are the people who don't pay attention. Sadly, almost every year an Inuvik family loses a member who took a skidoo out way too early or way too late. By the time cars are allowed out, the ice is over a dozen feet thick - there might not even be water underneath in parts.

Road signs are written on cardboard in duct tape letters. Pingos (Maybe a pingo ate your baby!) and drunken trees dot the shoreline until you pass the treeline and the trees disappear. Then, just tundra, and signs pointing to diamond mines.

Tuktoyuktuk has approximately three houses and a Northmart store, so this is a trip you make for the experience of driving on the ice road - not for the destination. What a trip, though.
posted by arcticwoman at 10:57 AM on February 7 [9 favorites]

Enough joking around already : Where can I download the Ice Trucker Laugh Ringtone?
posted by mannequito at 10:58 AM on February 7

Oops, Tuk U.
posted by arcticwoman at 10:58 AM on February 7

The article introduced me to a term that describes most everything on the discovery channel anymore, "docu-soap".
posted by kiltedtaco at 11:23 AM on February 7

It's a great show. I know the danger is over-dramatized, but it's still fun to watch. Deadliest Catch is similar, following crabbing boats in Alaska, playing up the little incidents into tv-reality crises. These are both Mike Rowe-produced shows, similar in approach (with him narrating to boot). They're entertaining, but they suffer from the realty-tv presumed necessity of drama, even if it has to be invented. But Mike Rowe's other show, Dirty Jobs, is still better, and it's not really overdone. There is less hype and more substance, and it's funnier.
posted by krinklyfig at 11:37 AM on February 7

Wouldn't it be more dramatic if the truck drivers stopped watching DVDs while driving and kept a look out for Sasquatch?
posted by Tube at 12:05 PM on February 7

The strength and weakness of Mike Rowe's shows is the emphasis on, well, it's there in the title, Dirty Jobs. That is, jobs that are really fucking terrible in pretty much every conceivable way, that you'd have to be a beyond masochistic to make a lifelong career out of.

On the one hand, it's actually pretty entertaining (aside from the Discovery Channel's ridiculous ban on any word for poo other than that one), but what is the actual motivation of such programming? Is it to honour the unsung heroes of specialized manual labour, or to mock them? To celebrate a way of life, or its immanent extinction? To portray the exciting world beyond the cubicle, or to elicit gratitude (read: silence agitators) for the relative comfort and safety therein?
posted by Sys Rq at 12:18 PM on February 7 [1 favorite]

On the one hand, it's actually pretty entertaining (aside from the Discovery Channel's ridiculous ban on any word for poo other than that one), but what is the actual motivation of such programming?

Well, for the network it's to sell advertising. For Mike Rowe, I think he really likes doing "guy stuff," like operating a tunnel digging machine and joking around on the jobsite, without having to go through the difficulty of getting hired for and working those jobs. There's definitely a male-oriented fantasy of quitting the office job and doing "real work," such as is the theme in Office Space. This is the escapist window to that reality, without the mess and drudgery. Not sure how educational that really is, but sometimes it approaches that level. Most often it's just entertainment. I'd love to have Mike Rowe's job, honestly. It's like being a kid fantasizing about driving a fire truck, and actually getting to live the fantasy, not the reality.
posted by krinklyfig at 12:31 PM on February 7

what is the actual motivation of such programming? Is it to honour the unsung heroes of specialized manual labour, or to mock them?

Rowe is almost invariably polite, pleasant, respectful, inquisitive, and non-condescending to the people on his show. If he's intending to mock them, he's doing a bad job of it.
posted by Flunkie at 1:12 PM on February 7 [3 favorites]

Rowe is almost invariably polite, pleasant, respectful, inquisitive, and non-condescending to the people on his show.

Indeed. And in addition, he is regularly completely and openly in awe of people who do jobs which most of us would find too scary/dangerous/disgusting/difficult to even consider, and (where possible/applicable) always makes a point of explaining how these jobs benefit the rest of us (like the sewage worker and flood cleanup jobs). Plus, he makes a point of saying "poo" with the right sarcasm for Discovery's stupid language laws, and he often makes far more risque innuendos (a la "I'm a dirty, dirty boy" and the whole extended pole-greasing joke on the old ship) than saying "crap" could ever hope to match. I love Mike Rowe.
posted by biscotti at 2:13 PM on February 7 [3 favorites]

Every week, the same footage is replayed of a transport truck breaking through the ice to a frigid, watery grave.

Christ, what an icehole.
posted by mattdidthat at 2:27 PM on February 7 [5 favorites]

I heard Rowe say 'crap' on his show. It was . . . shocking.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 2:32 PM on February 7

There's definitely a male-oriented fantasy of quitting the office job and doing "real work,"

Which makes the fact that Mike Rowe quit being an opera singer to do all this stuff even funnier.
posted by inigo2 at 3:05 PM on February 7 [1 favorite]

"TV's got to make something out of all these truckers doing 15 mph on the ice."

No shit, I need something to watch until the next "When Paint Dries!" special airs on FOX.
posted by MikeMc at 3:25 PM on February 7

Sys Rq, you should watch this. Mike Rowe talks about why he does the show and what he learned doing it.
posted by nooneyouknow at 4:18 PM on February 7 [2 favorites]

Rowe is also amusingly incompetent at so very many of the things he does. I'm quite surprised he hasn't badly injured himself yet.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:32 PM on February 7

Actually, this article made me feel a bit better about the show. There's an old movie called The Wages of Fear, about truckers moving a load of high-explosive over bad terrain. In the movie you come to despise the truckers almost as much as the company that employs them - the same petty greed driving the reckless disregard for their own lives. So knowing that the real truckers are actually a lot less reckless than the show makes them out to be means there's much less likely to be an argument between me and my sister's boyfriend the next time I'm at a family dinner.
posted by Ritchie at 5:20 PM on February 7

The Wages of Fear is a masterpiece of French cinema (you may have seen the Friedkin remake, Sorcerer). I can't recommend it highly enough and it is probably the single film which will appeal most to fans of the TV show.

the real truckers are actually a lot less reckless than the show makes them out to be

I see them as a bit like train engineers, the job my brother has. It's a job beset on all sides by rules, most of which have a safety rationale at their base.
posted by dhartung at 9:47 PM on February 7