Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada from Newfoundland to the Rockies (16 page)

Inuvik is a pretty ramshackle place, and as we left town I saw lines of trailer homes and small wooden houses with pickups
parked outside. Although it gets cold here, they don’t have the extreme conditions experienced in the villages up on the coast,
where a blizzard can last an entire week.

As soon as we pulled into the weigh station, we saw the truck, complete with twin trailers snaking out behind. Aidan had radioed
ahead and told the driver to hang on because he had a couple of passengers arriving. The driver’s name was Mike (another one),
and he waited, engine idling, as we climbed into the cab. I shook his hand and asked him how long he had been doing this job.

‘I’ve been driving trucks for twenty-some years,’ he said. ‘But I’ve been five years up here. I did two winters in Tuk and
a winter in Norman Wells before that as well.’

I commented that it must be a lot easier driving in summer, when there’s no ice on the ground, but he shook his head. ‘Not
really,’ he said. ‘In summertime the road is dusty, dirty; you get soft spots and that plays havoc with the tyres. Yeah, you
got the snow and ice in winter, but when the temperature is forty below zero, it’s not that slippery. I’ve spun out a few
times, I guess, coming back and forth up this highway, but most of it is in the springtime or early fall when the snow’s either
melting or just arriving.’

Mike had seen his share of accidents, and with only one ambulance for 750 kilometres of highway, it is not the place to crash
your vehicle. With the highway being so potentially treacherous, the truckers stay in contact on the radio, letting one another
know where they are, so that if anything happens they’re not quite as isolated. As Mike pointed out, most accidents happen
in the summer – probably because in winter the only people on the road are the truckers, and they know what they’re doing.
When there are a lot of tourists around, anything can happen; apparently they have a habit of stopping right in front of you
if they catch a glimpse of wildlife in the brush.

Mike told me that halfway along the highway is Eagle Plains, where there is a gas station and hotel. The area around it is
known as Hurricane Alley. The road there is gated, and if the wind is blowing hard, they close the gates. The traffic then
backs up and nothing moves until the storm clears. The longest Mike had had to wait there was some six or seven days. He didn’t
mind; it was part of the job: the round trip from oilfield to the plant where the toxic sludge is treated takes five and a
half days even if everything goes well. He stays in the truck all that time, eating and sleeping in the forty-two inches of
living space behind the seats, and taking showers at the truck stops along the way.

Mike has a fifteen-year-old daughter who lives in Grand Prairie, Alberta. One of the reasons he decided to take this job was
that he drives through the town on every trip. The work is also very well paid – Mike reckoned that if he did the same thing
in a place like Edmonton back down in Alberta, he would earn thirty to forty thousand dollars less than he does up here. On
top of that, an ice-road driver only works eight or nine months of the year and the rest of the time is his own. In a good
year, he rakes in over a hundred thousand dollars, and that’s not too shabby.

But the Dempster is not a highway for the ‘average person’, as Mike put it. A truck driver is responsible for his vehicle,
his load; the ‘weak of heart’ don’t belong on the road. He was right: with the varying conditions – the soft patches in summer
and the sheet ice in winter – it can kill you in a heartbeat. Looking through the windscreen, I could see the way the highway
unravelled before us, mile after mile of nothing but mind-numbing, arrow-straight dirt road and stunted-looking trees.

It might sound like a boring job, but no day is the same for Mike. It’s 190 kilometres from Inuvik to Tuk over the ice, and
one job he did out there was on an ice field that extended another 140 kilometres out into the frozen McKinley Bay. He took
some photos of that trip, his truck parked next to a ship that was frozen in the ice, with an offshore rig sitting opposite.
One year when he thought they had finished for the season, his boss told him there was one final job, hauling gravel north
for a road they were building in Tuk. This was two weeks into April, and
by the time they were finished, there was two or three inches of water on the ice road all the way back to Inuvik. When Mike
got back, he and another driver were asked to collect a truck that had broken down in Yellow Knife; as they crossed the last
river, the trailer was in four feet of water. I asked him what he thought of the TV series
Ice Road Truckers
and he just looked at me and smiled. ‘American TV …’ he said. ‘Like everything else, it’s blown way out of proportion.’

‘You mean all the drama and accidents?’

‘It happens now and again, but most of the time this is just like any other job, I suppose.’

I tried to persuade him that driving a truck carrying 56,000 kilos of load, plus the weight of the truck and trailer, on six
feet of ice was anything but ‘just like any other job’. He thought about that, and conceded that maybe I had a point after
all.

W
e spent the night back in Inuvik (where we just about managed to keep the bugs out of the room), and at first light we were
up and making our way to the airport, where a young pilot named Kelly was waiting to fly us to Tuktoyaktuk, or Tuk as everyone
calls it. The plan was to camp out with an Inuit family on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. I was praying the mosquitoes wouldn’t
follow us that far north.

Somehow I had managed to lose the bag containing all of my camping gear – like an idiot, I’d left it at the lodge. Kelly told
us not to worry. This wasn’t the only flight she was making today; she would collect my bag and bring it up for me later.
That sort of kindness was typical of this part of the world. Canada may be the second largest country on the planet, but with
only about twenty-five million people, it feels like one big family. So, knowing I’d have my sleeping bag for later, I was
able to sit back in the small plane without worrying.

Russ wanted to know if I was going to swim in the Arctic
Ocean – he felt we should all do it, have a team experience so to speak, and he asked Nat what he thought.

‘I don’t know about the team experience,’ Nat said. ‘But I’ll take a dip.’

Mungo suggested we go buck naked. Russ thought that might be quite liberating. I wasn’t so sure.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Russ said. ‘It will be so cold there’ll be nothing to see and nothing even vaguely macho about it.
But I think we should do it; after all, this is our third frontier, and how many people can say they’ve swum in the Arctic
Ocean?’

In the summer you can’t drive as far as Tuk, as the ‘road’ is actually a river delta and it needs to be frozen over before
vehicles can travel on it. When the ice has melted you have to go by plane or boat, and as we were flying in, the plan was
to come back down the river the next day with a local Inuit called Chuck, who had promised to show us around. It was his pal
we were camping with tonight.

Kelly had warned us that the flight might be a little bumpy, but thirty minutes after leaving Inuvik we landed with no disasters.
The airport, such as it was, was not far from the tiny town, which straddled a couple of low-lying islands connected by a
dirt road. Most of the buildings were low, wooden structures, more like cabins than houses, dotted along the flat and featureless
peninsula. For many years the town had been known as Port Brabant, but in 1950 it was renamed Tuktoyaktuk – the first place
in Canada to be given a traditional First Nations name.

On the airstrip Russ noticed the drop in temperature and he asked Kelly if that meant we’d finally be free of mosquitoes.
No such luck. Kelly told him there were actually plenty of mosquitoes, especially at this time of year, and if we were
camping, we might want to invest in lots of spray and nets to wear around our heads. What? I couldn’t believe it! The mozzies
had been pretty awful ever since we got here, but never so bad that we needed to wear headgear. This was the Arctic, for God’s
sake; what were mosquitoes doing way up here? Tuk is actually inside the Arctic Circle, and is one of the most northerly settlements
anywhere in the world!

Chuck was waiting to meet us, and he happily ferried our gear over to his place. It really was pretty cold up here, colder
than most of the places we’d been, and it cut through our clothes. Now that we were right beside the Arctic Ocean, nobody
was talking about team experiences … nobody mentioned so much as dipping a toe in.

Chuck suggested we explore the area at once. As the community is spread across a series of islands, the best way to do that
is by boat. We knew they hunted beluga whale up here and we were curious to see the hunting grounds, but the seas around Tuk
can be treacherous and Chuck didn’t seem convinced that we would be able to make it out that far in this wind. While we were
chatting, I asked him about the origin of the name Tuktoyaktuk. He told me it means ‘caribou’, and that the area had always
been known as Tuk to the Inuit, after a legend in which a woman saw a group of caribou wade into the water and turn to stone.
They say that even today, at low tide you can see reefs that look like these petrified animals.

As we made our way down to the boat, Chuck sniffed the wind and screwed up his face. Then he told us he thought we could try
to find the beluga if we took it carefully. I was excited. I’m not keen on whale hunting in principle, but this was a fishing
community, and the whales fed the local people through the winter.

I’ve mentioned how the temperature had dropped, but it wasn’t freezing or anything – this was summer, after all. Chuck, however,
was wearing gloves and a jacket zipped to the neck with a hood over his head. I assumed it was going to be really chilly on
the open water, and I said as much to him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘This isn’t for the cold, Charley. It’s for the mosquitoes.’

The boat was tied up to a wooden pontoon, and with the four of us aboard now, Chuck fired up the engine and backed into the
bay. Sitting there in the bows, I had to pinch myself. This was the Arctic Ocean, the northernmost point on our expedition
and our third frontier.

As he turned the boat, Chuck took a call and told whoever he was speaking to that it was blowing twenty-four knots from the
east and would hit thirty tomorrow, so he doubted we’d be able to make the return trip to Inuvik by boat after all. My heart
sank a little as I heard him suggest we would have to take a flight back instead. I’d been looking forward to the boat trip;
crossing the sea and heading south on the river would’ve been a great way to travel. But he told us that if the wind was hitting
thirty knots, it would be too choppy to make that journey safely.

With the windshield closed and the canopy up to shelter us, we made good headway. We passed a drilling platform, set on a
massive, hexagonal exploration vessel. The drilling had not been that successful, and Chuck told us that the oil company had
used that bit of kit for only a couple of years. Now it was just rusting slowly, like some futuristic fort rising from the
water to dominate the bay. He took us in close, explaining the local children used the vessel as a playground.

A playground? That sounded right up my street. The water was a little choppy but if the local youngsters could do it, then
so could I. With me perched on the bows, Chuck brought the boat in close. I spotted an iron ladder, which led up the side
of the vessel to a gap like a square porthole right at the top. Jumping from the pitching boat to the bottom rung, I began
to climb as Chuck backed away. I felt like a pirate; a modern-day Jack Sparrow storming another ship.

It was pretty eerie up there. Inside, it was hollow, and the central section where I suppose the rig would have been situated
was filled with water. It was weird: Chuck had said the vessel was abandoned twenty years ago, and I would have thought that
after that long it would be rusting away to nothing. In fact it was all pretty much as it would have been when the oil company
left.

Russ climbed up, too. The longer we were there, the more it felt like being on the set of some futuristic movie, like
Waterworld
maybe. All around the deck were these sealed air vents – between us Russ and I worked the lid off a couple but could see nothing
but darkness below. The red-painted helicopter deck was spread with a massive rope net to give the runners some traction when
the choppers were landing and taking off. It was coming apart in a few places, but considering its age it was nowhere near
as rotten as you would have expected. I gazed back across the bay to the clutch of buildings that made up Tuktoyaktuk. It
was the only break in an otherwise desolate horizon. Feeling a little spooked, I headed back to the boat.

Back on the ocean waves, we crossed to one of the smaller islands. Chuck pointed out a building where fishermen hung whales
to drain the blubber of moisture before preparing the meat for boiling.

As Chuck eased the boat to the shore, we jumped on to a beach of hard shingle and driftwood to meet Douglas, our host for
the night. He looked like a bee-keeper, with a full mosquito net over his head. I was beginning to feel anxious about this.
Douglas was busy with a length of twine, his waders folded down to his knees. He had plenty of driftwood piled up, and next
to it a massive black cauldron, which I assumed must be for boiling down the whale blubber. He introduced us to his fellow
fisherman, Sam, who was working on their boat. In the old days, the Inuit would have used canoes, and I tried to imagine paddling
out in one of those, dressed in sealskin with a hand-held harpoon.

Douglas was setting his fishing net, spreading it between a length of driftwood he’d driven into the ground and a buoy about
fifty yards out from the shore. Hopefully we would have fresh fish tonight. He was as concerned about the weather as Chuck,
telling us that it was too windy to hunt beluga today. He said that it was forecast to hit forty knots, ten more than we’d
heard Chuck mention. It really didn’t feel that windy, although it was puffing my hair around a little bit, and the water
seemed pretty flat, but given what the two Inuits were saying, it didn’t look good for a boat trip back tomorrow.

Chuck was going to take us back into town for a while, as a fisherman there had brought in a whale. A couple of women were
working on the kill on the beach, along with a young child. We went ashore, and I wandered over to say hello and see what
I could learn. I’d never seen anything like this before. Although whaling is the staple industry in this part of the world,
this particular catch wasn’t part of a commercial venture. The fishermen slaughter whales purely to feed their families through
the long winter. A fire was burning under a cauldron like the one
we’d seen at Douglas’s camp, and I could smell the sweet scent of the whale meat boiling.

The family had a table set up that was sheltered from the wind by a sheet of tarpaulin. It was laid with square sections of
white-skinned whale meat. The women were preparing enough of the meat to last the winter, boiling off the fat so they could
store it. I asked one of them if it tasted nice and she told me she didn’t know; she hadn’t tried it yet. She was a friend
of ‘Chucky’, as everyone around here seemed to call our guide, and told us she hadn’t eaten whale meat in a while because
she’d been working down in Inuvik and had only just come back. She was so rusty she’d had to ask her uncle how to prepare
it. Chucky said that once the meat was cooked it was stored, and during the cold months they would microwave what they needed.
It tasted best just out of the pot, however, particularly when dipped in HP sauce!

I took a quick look inside the smokehouse, which was very dark. Thick strips of whale meat hung from the ceiling. I have to
say, they looked pretty unappetising. Outside again, I messed about on the sand with the small boy who’d been helping with
the whale.

Back in the boat again, we ventured as far as Chuck was prepared to go in these conditions. It was windier now – clearly the
weather that had been forecast was about to catch up with us. I asked Chuck about the telltale signs that whales were in the
area. He said that seagulls were a good indicator; if you saw them close to the water, that usually meant that whales were
hunting, because the birds flew in to pick up scraps. With that in mind, the four of us kept our eyes peeled for any sign
of seagulls, as Chucky took us scuttling across the bay.

The further out we went, the choppier it became. The hull of
the boat was slapping into the waves so hard I was all but losing my teeth. It was no good – the wind was blowing in the wrong
direction and the waves were too big. Chuck said that any beluga in the area would have headed for the relative calm of deeper
water, and we had to admit defeat. Who wants to see whales anyway … ?! Spending the night in a whale camp would be enough,
and we would have plenty of Arctic mosquitoes for company.

They were everywhere: in your eyes, up your nose, and every time I took a breath I got a great gob-full. Russ had managed
to find a net from somewhere and he had it under his cap, around his head, with his jacket zipped up tight and his cuffs pulled
down. Even in deepest Africa it had been nothing like this. Is there anywhere in Canada where you’re not plagued by mosquitoes?
If so, we hadn’t been there.

Back at Douglas’s camp, we pitched the tent and reinforced the canvas with some plastic tarpaulin. It was a ridge tent and
big enough for all of us; it reminded me of the kind you see in the army. With the fire crackling away, Douglas and Chuck
got a pot of water boiling and threw in a handful of tea bags. I could see the tea brewing in a swirl of mosquitoes. ‘Hey,
Charley,’ Russ said. ‘Remember how the bastards invaded our vodka that time back in Russia?’

I nodded. ‘Yeah, we drank them. Served them right, didn’t it?’

With the tea brewing – and in a way I’d never seen tea brewed before – we all helped to haul in the net that Douglas and Sam
had set earlier. It was hard work, but worth it – it was teeming with fish! And we’re not talking minnows here – there were
fish of all shapes and sizes: flounders, halibut and little bullheads that we would throw back. Separating them from the
net, we cleaned and gutted the keepers and tossed the rest back. Now we really did feel like genuine Inuit fishermen. It was
the easiest fishing I’ve done: string the net, let it soak, and a couple of hours later haul back an impressive catch.

Sam had plenty of tin foil to wrap the fillets in to make sure they wouldn’t burn when we cooked them over the open fire.
When they were done, we ate them with potatoes and bannock, the local bread that’s Scottish in ancestry, sitting at the wooden
table. Our hosts, including all their family members, were fantastic – they could not have been more welcoming or accommodating.

When we turned in at around eleven o’clock, crowding into the big tent, it was still as bright as day outside. At this time
of year it barely gets dark at all. It was hard to sleep, but it was nice to have a moment to myself to reflect on the day’s
adventures. The northernmost frontier of Canada was everything I’d hoped it would be. With that thought in my head, I finally
fell into a contented sleep.