Anatomy of an Ice Road

By: | September 29, 2021

This week I received an email from an R&D engineer at Canada’s National Research Council. Hossein Babaei and his team in the Ocean, Coastal and River Engineering division have been doing computational modelling of the ways in which the ice in an ice road deforms under the tyres of slow-moving versus speeding trucks. They then compare that modelled behaviour with what they can see from satellite imagery. He says that radar from 400 km away in orbit can sense those waves under the ice, even though on the ground, it is only perceptible through the ice’s groaning and crackling noises.

Hossein had come across the post below from more than a decade ago–I visited the ice road construction project in 2007–and he wanted to follow up on a claim I had made that the truck that follows a speeding vehicle has more risk of going through the ice than the speeder himself. He wanted to investigate it further, but sadly I don’t still have my notes. If you enjoyed the post, too, and want to know more about how things really work, I highly recommend Hossein’s paper on the subject.

In the wake of the smash hit History Channel series Ice Road Truckers, now in its fifth season, my town has become an unlikely celebrity. The reality of the ice road is quite different from the documentary series’ portrayal, and I thought I might break down the mechanics of the thing, having spent quite a bit of time on it.

A private road jointly run by mining giants Rio Tinto, De Beers and BHP Billiton, the Tibbitt-to-Contwoyto winter road is the longest of its kind, at 568 kilometres (353 miles) up into the Canadian tundra. Eighty-seven percent of the ride is on lake ice, and there are 64 portages between lakes. It’s open for only two months every year, but serves as the main conduit for bringing fuel and supplies up to four diamond mines. A land link offers transport at a fraction of the cost of air freight.

It all starts in July, when helicopters survey the route from the air, checking for changes in terrain and currents, and mapping the area in detail. One year’s winter-road route is never quite the same as the last.

In November and December the helicopters are launched again, flying the route using ground-penetrating radar to measure ice thickness. The builders then send out a light tracked vehicle, which gingerly creeps onto the ice to validate thicknesses.

If it’s touch-and-go, they’ll follow up with amphibious Hagglund vehicles that don’t mind getting wet if the ice fails. There’s an escape hatch in the top and a pair of protruding arms designed to stop any falls through the ice. Their first task is to plow the road of snow, allowing the cold to penetrate into the ice. Plowing is only the beginning. This is no pick-up hockey rink: By the height of the season the road has to be more than a metre thick. So December and January sees the 160 construction employees – mostly farmers whose agricultural downtime coincides with the winter-road season – bringing out water trucks to flood the road.

It doesn’t take long for a surface layer of water to freeze, smoothing the road and building up its thickness. By late January the ice should be 70 centimetres (2 feet, 4 inches) at its thinnest, from put—in to take-out. Then, the road is declared open for light truckloads.

Making that call has become a science. If a load is too heavy or a vehicle drives too fast, it causes ice-deflection and water-motion, creating waves under the ice that can break through and crack the road. The feeling of driving on a solid substance belies the reality – ice floats on the water and bends easily under the weight of a truck. Though trucks aren’t allowed to travel the road alone, they must maintain 500 metres distance from each other in order not to compromise the integrity of the ice and cause a blowout. In some places, the speed limit is as low as 10 km/h (6mph).

Continue reading →

Oak Logic

By: | September 27, 2021
  • Our backyard oak.

All weekend I’ve been trying to write an article about oak trees for a rapidly approaching deadline, and not making much headway. I know what the problem is: Oaks aren’t a story, they’re too branched and sprawling, and I still need a path to follow through the woodland, or an acorn for distractable squirrel readers to nibble, or whatever. But I couldn’t find it, or maybe I just didn’t want to. Instead, I stared at a sprig of what I think is a blue or maybe a valley oak on my desk, and snuck outside to visit the trees in person.

Coffee in hand and cat on leash, I walked around the perimeter of our property, trying to better acquaint myself with the oak trees around my house. There are more oaks here than I’d realized: In addition to two massive trees that extend over our driveway, crowns touching, at least four saplings have sprung up nearby. The saplings are so dwarfed by their parents that I’d managed to ignore them. I walked down the road and noticed other oaks I’d overlooked, all different species: Some were small and shrubby, with spiny leaves, while others had lichen-spotted trunks and smooth leaves. I took pictures of all of them, hoping to identify them later, and let Calliope climb and sharpen her claws on their bark.

Continue reading →

Where Have Figs Been All My Life?

By: | September 24, 2021
One red fig on a tree, in front of a fence

On August 17, a magical text arrived. It read, in part: “I have many many ripe figs just a block or so away. They are in the tree ripening as I text. Can’t eat them fast enough. Please come on over whenever and pick yourself some!!”

I don’t know that I’d ever eaten a fresh fig before receiving this text. I’d certainly never really appreciated a fig. So the magical properties of this text were not immediately clear.

My most recent experience with figs was, in fact, with Fig Newtons. Some showed up on my building’s free shelf last winter, and in my desperate, pandemic-fueled search for novelty, I gave them a second chance. I don’t think I’d had one since childhood.

My question about Fig Newtons in 2021 is the same as it was in 1983: Who thought this was a good idea? Who thought “You know what would be great? A cookie that is somehow both mushy and gritty at the same time.”

But my friend was offering free fruit, and just as the pandemic lingers, so does the need for novelty, so I went over and filled a bowl with figs.

I had to fight for them, looking out for rogue ants and wasps. The local mosquitoes didn’t seem interested in the figs, but they were certainly interested in the Helen. Itchy bites on my legs, sticky sap on my fingers, I walked back to my building thinking that these figs better be pretty damn good.

Well, good news. They were extremely damn good. Sweet, fragrant, soft but not mushy. I went back to the tree several times, feeding the mosquitoes, plucking the fruits. I made a tart, and dropped off a slice on the porch of the friend with the tree.

a fig tart

From this experience, I learned that I don’t actually like fig tarts as much as I like raw figs. But a few days later I got a text from the friend. I learned she’d been sick (not COVID) with a fever, and this was the first food she’d felt like eating in days, and it was just what she needed.

The figs were still producing. Now they had proven medicinal value, so I made another tart and dropped off two slices.

Along with all of its destruction, the pandemic has brought many unexpected gifts. Baking is one. Connecting with friends who live nearby is another. Learning about the plants in my immediate neighborhood–that’s on the list. And figs. I thank the pandemic era for introducing me to figs.

Photos: Helen Fields

Touchphone

By: | September 22, 2021

This spring, I listened to an interview with Tiffany Shlain, whose family has spent the last decade-plus observing a tech Shabbat: turning off all their devices for 24 hours, once a week. Back when her book first came out, in 2019, I might not have been as interested. We were those parents who wouldn’t let their kids on screens during the week. We didn’t even have an iPad, much to our kids’ dismay.

All my beloved screen rules went out the window with the pandemic, and now our house has twice as many screens as people. So I heard about the 24-hour tech pause, I was in. I started turning my phone off at dinnertime on Saturday night, and turning it on again 24 hours later.

But even though my phone was still off, I found myself still reaching for it. And not just to check my texts.  One Sunday morning, while I was driving to go surfing—one of the things I decided I was going to do with my screen-free day—I had a memory of some embarrassing moment. (I can’t remember which one. It’s a long list.) What I do remember was shrugging my shoulders and trying to make myself small to avoid the memory. Then I reached over to touch the blank screen of my phone.

When I came to, a moment later, I was horrified. I’d reached for my phone like it was another person, the same way I sometimes put my hand on my children’s heads to reassure both them and me that we’re still here, we’re still all right. With no one else there, was it really my phone that was reassuring me?

Continue reading →

Snapshot: Dog Day

By: | September 20, 2021
A black and green cicada on a window frame

The big cicada event this year began and was over again before we even got to the Fourth of July. But the annual cicadas are back, just like they always are, singing from the trees. While the 17-year cicadas come in extremely large numbers – that’s kind of their whole thing – the annual cicadas are much subtler. Some years, I don’t even see one. This year, one landed on my window frame for a while, and sang, and then it moved on.

Other reading:

I’ve written before about how much I love bugs on my window. I even wrote about a cicada on a window once, and the window was in Nepal. (There are so many cicada species around the world!) It’s not all bug love around here, though – if you’ve ever dealt with those horrible jumping basement crickets, read about the LWON team’s general hate for the little bastards.

Photo: Helen Fields

To Make a Renaissance

By: | September 17, 2021

I‘d been thinking about this forever and wrote it up a while back, on January 17, 2012, back before 2020, before an endless pandemic; an ex-president who can’t give up power and a political reality that amounts to a second Civil War; and the natural disasters of hurricanes, floods, fires, and storms that are the worst in living memory. It’s pretty dark around here and it’s not over yet. This post wasn’t about the present darkness but you get the point.

To the left is a courtyard in the Church of the Ognissanti, All Saints, in Florence, Italy. You can’t see it in this picture, but above the little staircase, near the top of the doorway, about where the arch meets the wall, is a small sign. It’s something like the one above: In 4 November, 1966, the waters of the Arno came to this height.

Florence is full of these signs. Most of them are from 1966, which was the most recent and worst of centuries of regular floods. They happen every 15 years or so, 56 of them since the first historic bad one in 1177. The Arno floods because the local weather swings wildly between dry and rainy and when it rains, it doesn’t stop. I was there in 2010, when it rained for 10 days straight, and while the Arno didn’t flood, for days it was ugly: it was a thick brown and fast, full of waves and whorls, making a frightening low roar. When the Arno does flood, it takes out the bridges, people lose their homes and businesses, ancient art and books are destroyed, people die. The flood in 1333 wasn’t the worst, but its timing was bad and for the next 15 years, Florence was visited by one disaster after another.  And after disaster came the Renaissance.

Continue reading →

Homeward bound

By: | September 15, 2021


A couple of days ago, I wrote “homeward bound” with my index finger across the caked dust on the back window of my truck topper. I packed it with two weeks’ worth of clothes, with backpacking gear, with work supplies and dog food and human food. Then, I whistled my dog into the cab and drove east from my apartment in Washington towards Colorado, to see my family in the town where I grew up, and to see friends like family on the state’s Western Slope, where I chose to live as I made my way through my first decade of adulthood. I looked forward to the time alone en route. I had just put in my first-ever offer on a house after several years of feeling unmoored and placeless in the Northwest, and was preoccupied with the idea of home: My destination—where mine had been for the first 30 years of my life; and the community behind me, where I had set the still-scary intention to build one now.

The drive was beautiful—the dry sage hills along the Columbia River, the cobalt water of Lake Coeur D’Alene, the rolling Bitterroot Mountains on the Idaho-Montana border. It was also long, and several miles into Montana, my stomach growled and my eyes drooped. Billboards claiming “Best. Milkshake. Ever.” beckoned me onto the exit for St. Regis. I thought the most dangerous thing I faced there was coronavirus—Montana’s rates are surging like everyone else’s—so I snugged an n95 mask tightly over my nose and mouth, and retrieved a huckleberry shake and fries and caffeine hit as quickly as possible. Then, I drove slowly towards a nearby dog park.

I was halfway across the parking lot when the front right end of the truck dropped violently. At first, I thought I had hit a pothole and destroyed the tire. When I got out to look, I saw only flat gravel, but the entire wheel jagged crazily out of alignment, almost completely broken off. The lower ball joint had suddenly and catastrophically failed, gleaming beneath like a hipbone ripped from the socket. I stared dumbly for several minutes, imagining the wheel and the truck parting ways on Lookout Pass, 35 minutes behind me, at 60 miles an hour. Or back in Spokane, Washington, where I’d had to swerve suddenly a couple hours earlier, also at 60 miles an hour, to avoid getting sideswiped by a sedan speeding across three lanes of traffic.

Continue reading →