Driving Canada's Tuk ice road...for the last time

Winter isn’t coming. It’s here, and the cold is a thief; it steals your breath, burgles your body of all available heat and robs your sense of humour of any warmth.

Easy targets are fingers and toes, outlying embassies of the warm empire of your core, followed by any flesh not encased in fur or fibre. A hundred tiny, stainless steel claws for every nerve, exposed skin attacked and subdued in short order. You know it’s bad not when it hurts, but when it stops hurting, because at nearly -40°C, the slightest breeze has the anaesthetic effect of a pint of vodka. Pushing the temperature down to about -45°C, wind chill causes nerves to give the whole thing up as a bad job, throw their synaptic hands up and retreat, leaving your epidermis to fight its own battles. Stinging red becomes painful white, painful white becomes numb black, numb black... falls off.

Images: Mark Riccioni

This feature originally appeared in the April 2017 issue of Top Gear magazine

I’d really like it if nothing fell off today.

Guarantees might be hard to come by, however, because we’re currently very far north and the temperature is low enough to slow mercury. North as in five flights and many, many hours of soul-sapping drudgery in airports with all the charm and wit of the herpes virus. North as in the Northwest Territories in the Canadian Arctic, driving a Jeep on the Arctic ocean. This throws up some obvious questions: One, am I now a driver, or a captain? Wheel or rudder? Is this now – technically, at least – more of a boat than a luxury SUV, and, probably most importantly, why?

Well, the explanation sounds more bizarre than it probably should. We’re here to drive an ephemeral road that disappears every summer, and flowers into being for around four months every winter: the Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk winter road. The annually temporary, last and final legof the famous 458-mile Dempster Highway. It’s not exactly undiscovered country, this being the place where they filmed the outrageously over-egged tv show Ice Road Truckers (and I’ve actually been here before over a decade ago), but this time we’re here to both celebrate and mourn; after this season, there will be no more ice road. A new all-weather road from Inuvik to Tuk is due to be completed later this year, meaning that the famous ice road will be redundant, and permanently closed, later this year. In a few short months, the magical ice road is going to pull one last era-ending trick: it’s going to disappear forever.

Of course, there are other places you can drive on frozen lakes or rivers, but none that I can think of that are certified as official highways, policed and signposted, graded and maintained as proper roads, albeit carved from the frozen skein of a sleeping river, and the edge of a mighty ocean. Five-foot-thick ice roads that stretch hundreds of kilometres and provide a vital link between remote communities. The Tuk winter road, therefore, is special. An experience worth savouring one last time.

For our final fling, we’ve gone semi-domestic (at least continentally speaking), and brought a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Except that in deference to the semi-extreme nature of the drive, nabbed a special-edition Trailhawk. The Trailhawk is basically the firm handshake of the Grand Cherokee range, butched up for off-road use. To that end, it gets Jeep’s standard Quadra-Drive II 4x4 system with an electronic, limited-slip differential in the rear axle, a reworked version of the Cherokee’s air suspension system (imaginatively titled Quadra-Lift), which features improved axle articulation and the ability to lift itself higher than the standard car (up to 10.8 inches of ground clearance), as well as helpful electronics like hill ascent and descent control. It also gets proper skidplates – none of those fancy-looking pseudo-armour items that have the structural rigidity of the foil off a Kit-Kat – an anti-glare bonnet decal (not sure of the purpose, but it looks meaningful), red, permanently mounted towhooks front and rear, and tyres reinforced with Kevlar, for extra strength. Tyres which we’ve obviously swapped out for winters. There’s also a smattering of hawkish badges, the seats from the high-performance SRT model and extra 4x4 information options in the cabin’s touchscreen.

What I’m more interested in, at this point, is whether the heater functions as it should. The cameras have frozen solid and stopped working, filmmaker Brooks’s nose has gone an alarming shade of white and photographer Riccioni is sat in the passenger seat trying to reanimate his feet by beating them with his equally unresponsive hands. Our guides, Kylik and Danny, are busily doing tricks on a small snow/skateboard and laughingly telling us that it’s “not really that cold”. At this point, they are not my favourite people. Everything that isn’t us is either the cerulean blue of the sky, or white, and the red Jeep stands out like freshly spilled blood on the snow.

We’ve moved past the wide, bracketed Mackenzie River delta channels that form the first part of the road beside Inuvik – the bit where the summertime ships lie dormant, clamped in the chilly embrace of several feet of ice – and out into the bare tundra proper. Except it isn’t tundra. It’s ocean. It’s breathtaking, and not just because of the extreme temperature. Whipping along at a decent clip – the road is surprisingly smooth, lightly trafficked and well-sighted – the light dusting of snow on the surface sighs away at the bottom of the Jeep like a lovelorn teenager. Corners, of which there are many, are taken in a kind of transcendental drifting state, the Jeep’s four-wheel-drive system slinging torque between axles as fast as it can manage. You know it’s been working hard; every time we stop there is the faint, acrid smell of overworked clutch. And yet, cosseted inside the Jeep, heated seats and steering wheel set to light roast, you can appreciate the brutal beauty without having to actually lose important extremities.

And there is more than meets the eye in the view; at one point we startle an Arctic fox sleeping by the side of the road, and before you know it, we’re racing a small predator at a scarcely believable 20mph. Ginger fur literally flies. There are people commuting on snowbikes, towing toboggans full of well-wrapped bundles, huge trucks hauling mining and exploration gear (there’s a lot of mining goes on up here) too heavy or bulky for summertime air freight. The sky is the frame and the view is the picture. The air is clear, and sharp, and delicious. And then, there is Tuk.

It’s a practical place, is Tuktoyaktuk. A remote, predominantly Inuvialuit community of under 1,000 souls, it perches in Kugmallit Bay on the shore of the Beaufort Sea and features a fuel station, a supermarket, a small school and some radar domes that were supposed to be part of the early-warning system should Russia lob anything annoyingly explosive over the top of the world during the Cold War. Most people here still trap, hunt and fish, though these days most incomes come from tourism and transportation, as well as the oil and gas industries hoping to tap the natural resources of the Beaufort. It’s not pretty, having a solid aesthetic drawn squarely from the “survive the cold” school of architecture, but the best bit about it is the people.

Because the people of this area are, in a word, brilliant. Warm, funny and friendly in that way people from big cities seem to have forgotten how to be. Open and welcoming, and in tune with their surroundings. There’s a sense of stillness to them, of belonging. There’s Merv, who has masterminded the new all-weather road and hopes to bring prosperity to the communities of Tuk and Aklavik. Duggie who lives most of his time on the land, hunting and trapping, whose life would change very little if the world ended, except that he wouldn’t be able to get fuel for his skidoo. Billy, a man with more than enough glint for his single eye, who has lived most of his life in the area, and has more stories than it’s possible to get through in one brief visit. Kylik, whose passion for his heritage makes you want to immediately learn how to fashion a traditional canoe or learn to hunt with a spear, and Danny, a recent import, whose infectious passion for the environment makes you fall in love with a place you’ve only been in for three days.

And then there’s Clara. Wonderful Clara, an elder who feeds us caribou stew and muktuk (whale meat – the Inuvaluit are still allowed to hunt a small amount of Beluga), and tells us stories about living on the land, residential schools and being able to scream all you want to at the wide open wilderness and no one think there was anything wrong. These are special people, in a special place. It’s not necessarily the ice road that holds all the magic here.

They have different views about the loss of the ice road, mind. Some think linking the communities will be advantageous for everyone, lowering prices for housing and consumables, providing work and opportunity. Others worry that such a direct link will bring drugs and alcohol to a previously isolated pocket of social naivety, not to mention a raft of tourists and their ubiquitous enormous RVs. It will probably do both of those things, to a greater or lesser extent. But hopefully it won’t change the underlying spirit of the locals, who come across as some of the nicest people I’ve ever met.

Before long, it’s time to get back out onto the ice, for the trek back to Inuvik. The sky has a dull, grey, light-sapping sheen that heralds the kind of storm it’s worth digging in for, and as the horizon crowds itself ever closer, fat, lazy snowflakes start to fall. It’s like the sky is weeping titanium swarf. We sweep out of Tuk, and as the tyres thrum and patter, and the view unfurls, a Jeep rides the ice road for the final time. It’s a melancholy ride back, in a way. The ice road has been a practical solution made romantic by its uniqueness. There will still be ice roads in the world, but none, I’ll wager, quite like this one. Things will change in Tuk, but, in some ways, I hope they’ll always stay the same. And I reckon, one day, I’ll come back to find out if that’s true. It might be the end of an era. But it’s not the end of the story.