Inching Up an Ice Highway in a 70-Ton Truck
Remote Sites in Subarctic Canada Depend on Rigs Plying Hazardous, Heavily Traveled Winter Road

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 27, 2007; Page A10

ON THE ICE ROAD, Northwest Territories -- Elden Pashovitz eased his big truck and 28 tons of aviation fuel onto the ice of Tibbitt Lake and set out in low gear for his destination, dozens of ponds and lakes away.

Ahead, the scene was bleak, white and flat. The temperature was minus 10. The ice crackled under the 30 tires of his tandem rig.

Pashovitz moved his vehicle to its place in a caravan of heavy trucks, one of many processions now crawling across frozen tundra and iced-over lakes in the grip of the Canadian winter. Their mission is to deliver a year's worth of supplies to remote sites -- mines and drilling rigs and small native villages -- that depend on the ice road for all their needs.