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I rode with an ice road trucker to the Arctic Circle
- tamaharbor 3y agoObviously not a good application for an EV.
- Y_Y 3y ago[flagged]
- trough 3y agoAs much as I love your reply, the story is pretty interesting - far more than I anticipated. I hope people discover this if just for the pictures alone.
- bee_rider 3y ago414 miles is not some incredible distance (I’m sure anyone who’s done a cross country road trip has done longer), but 414 miles at 35 miles an hour sounds miserable. It is interesting how fish-out-of-water the story is, given that the author covers that industry.
- taway_6PplYu5 3y agoNot if you are paid by time instead of distance.
- bell-cot 3y agoBut if the story is correct about it being 3X (or more) the average truck driver wages in the lower 48...
- alephnerd 3y agoCoL is also 3-4x in Alaska because almost everything is flown in or shipped.
- jaystraw 3y agoOff the road system and in villages sure, but in Anchorage where I've lived for over a decade...not really. Maybe 1.5, and some things like avocados are kind of a joke, but I've lived quite a few places in the lower 48 and it's just not that bad (especially since wages are also higher)
- jmclnx 3y agoReally :) Did you see the pics of some of the roads, a mile on dirt roads is slows you down quite a bit.
- bee_rider 3y agoThat it is through necessity rather than choice doesn’t seem to make the prospect any nicer!
- birdman3131 3y ago414 miles on gravel roads with no air ride sounds horrible.
- grecy 3y agoIt’s one of the most beautiful places on earth. It is the opposite of terrible. Going slowly is a joy
- karaterobot 3y ago> It is interesting how fish-out-of-water the story is, given that the author covers that industry. Yeah, though I bet a tech journalist who sat in on a software product being developed would also be surprised by a lot of things. There's just a big difference between writing about something and doing it. (Also, that article would be much more boring than this one.) And I got the sense from that article that truck driving in Alaska is very different than in the lower 48, even to the extent that the driving is different (that bit about shifting into higher gear to go down slopes)
- irrational 3y ago> He barely took photos on his phone before he moved to Alaska; now, he has about 10,000 of them. Most of them are in the same place, just different seasons. The long grasses change colors — red, pink, beige. That makes the mountains look different week to week. And then there’s the sky. Because of the ice crystals that form in the atmosphere during the long winters, “sun dogs” appear where it looks like there are three suns in the sky. Most fantastic might be the aurora borealis, which can make it look like the sky is swirling, shooting fingers down. “It will make your insides feel funny,” Mustang said. I wish he would post his pictures somewhere. I’m sure a lot of them must be fantastic.
- grecy 3y agoI lived in the Yukon for 4 years, it truly is magical and hard to believe. I drove a few hours south to get into Coastal Alaska, and ~8 hours North into the Arctic Circle which I did a dozen or so times, summer and winter. -40 is a magical thing, and it's like being on a different planet. I didn't post all my photos and adventures, but what I do have can be seen here [1]. I've never lived anywhere with more hiking, fishing, camping, biking, hunting, snowboarding, back country snowboarding, winter camping, remote wilderness, white water paddling and all the rest. Unreal. [1] http://theroadchoseme.com/salmon-fishing-with-bears-in-haines-alaska http://theroadchoseme.com/salmon-fishing-with-bears-in-haine... (I didn't tag the posts too well, you'll have to click "Next article" at the bottom of each one to keep seeing more adventures through all the seasons) This might be my most "out of this world" Christmas (and I've had a few!) http://theroadchoseme.com/mendenhall-glacier-juneau-alaska http://theroadchoseme.com/mendenhall-glacier-juneau-alaska
- whalesalad 3y agoTrucking is my dream. I hope to reach a point in my life where I can take an extended sabbatical from software and drive over the road.
- yoyohello13 3y agoYou could do it right now!
- nullwarp 3y agoSame! I've grown up around the industry and while it certainly has it's issues it's one of the few jobs outside of tech I've always wanted to do.
- chasd00 3y agoMy grandfather drove oil trucks all over West Texas and I worshipped the ground he walked on. Once when I was a child I told him I wanted to be a trucker too. He sat me down and made it very clear that I did not want to be a trucker hah. Driving trucks is a hard life which is probably why there’s lots of country songs about it.
- dudul 3y agoI have the same dream, but I try to remind myself that I probably have a very romanticized and idealized view of what it really means to be a trucker. I'm sure it's a grueling job.
- gambiting 3y agoMy dad drove trucks and he also made it very clear - the job can be enjoyable when things are going as planned, you're sitting behind the wheel and there's nothing but empty road in front of you. But things don't always go as planned - something breaks down and you're in a middle of nowhere at 3am lying in mud underneath the axle trying to figure out how the hell you're going to fix it with your employer ringing you every 5 minutes asking for an update.
- rgmerk 3y ago
- matt3210 3y ago1. Somehow I always thought Alaska was 100% snow covered 24/7/365 2. Triple trailers? Nice!
- grecy 3y agoThe sun is up for 20-24 hours a day in the summer - I've had plenty of days getting sunburnt at 1am!
- thumbsup-_- 3y agoit gets quite hot in summers. And also too many mosquitoes
- rconti 3y agoTook a motorcycle roadtrip up to Prudhoe Bay a decade ago. Roads closed in Oregon and California due to snow, hottest day of the trip was 90+F going into Delta Junction, AK.
- thumbsup-_- 3y agoI did this road in an SUV two years back and the experience is surreal. One noticable different is in how trucks drive this road. On a regular highway, they are calm and easy going but on this road, trucks have the right of way and they don't compromise their right any time. Regardless, the beauty is like I have never seen before. Skinny dipping in Arctic was bonus on top.
- fooker 3y ago>they don't compromise their right any time. For good reason. Braking a heavy truck on a ice road could be a death sentence.
- bmer 3y agoIt sounds like it would be very unsafe to drive on a truck-priority road (especially since, as the other comment points out: there's a good reason trucks are given priority)... Then again, in general, the interstate highway system in the US was scary, when my family used it for a road trip. I left the experience thinking: "I wish there were more train tracks than roads..."
- devilbunny 3y ago> the interstate highway system in the US was scary, when my family used it for a road trip. Out of curiosity, why? Because trucks are permitted in the left lane? I won't say that Americans are good drivers, but other than the very busiest routes like I-95 through the Northeast Corridor, I also wouldn't call our interstates "scary", even for someone unaccustomed to driving as much as we do. And in major cities, it's less "scary" than "slow due to traffic". Our speed limits are lower, but ignoring the posted limits and just looking at behavior, the speeds aren't that different.
- jollyllama 3y ago>On a regular highway, they are calm I don't live anywhere near the Arctic circle and this is not the case.
- steelribbon 3y ago
- hirundo 3y ago> An executive at Alaska West Express, another local trucking company, told me in May that such truck drivers can make $150,000 to $170,000 a year, in addition to benefits. That's ~$200k/truck/year of incentive to replace them with auto pilots, when they're good enough. But those drivers do more than drive. Maybe they'll replace one driver per truck with one mechanic per convoy of self-driven trucks. And an automated truck can spend a lot more time on the road, released from a meager human driver's duty cycle.
- iancmceachern 3y agoIt's one thing to get an economy car to drive a person around San Francisco, it's an entirely different thing to drive these trucks in these conditions. It would be more reasonable to build a freight train line than to build self driving tricks that can do what 95% of human drivers can't
- hirundo 3y agoI'd make a long term bet on this. I think that it won't be very many years until auto-pilots are safer than any humans in any conditions, like chess software. Auto pilot senses and reaction times can be far better, and we're watching AI capabilities increase at an accelerated rate. And huge economic investments in the problems. If you're a young person at least, don't plan on a long career driving a truck.
- iancmceachern 3y agoI agree, but I don't think we will remove the human. New jet liners have had the technical ability to fly and land automatically, yet pilots still typically manually land unless there are bad visibility or other conditions. In those conditions they often autoland. Why would this be any different? I'd expect we see some kind of hybrid approach.
- ghaff 3y agoHowever much some people will resent it, I strongly suspect being able to drive a car is going to be a pretty essential life skill for people who aren't willing/able to restrict their travel to mostly urban cores for at least a few decades.
- karaterobot 3y agoI liked this article. I still think my favorite article about riding along with a long haul truck driver is A Fleet of One (2003) by John McPhee. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/02/17/a-fleet-of-one https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/02/17/a-fleet-of-one
- kraussvonespy 3y agoMcPhee is truly a national treasure. If you're interested, that article was one of several published in his book Uncommon Carriers which includes a train and river barge voyage. Looking for a Ship is also great as it follows a merchant marine through various stages of that job. The Curve of Binding Energy is a fascinating study of Theodore Taylor, the engineer behind the smallest nuke warhead in the world, and his concerns that terrorists may be able to build warheads themselves. Pretty much any McPhee book or article is fascinating. His book Oranges is all about farming oranges, processing orange juice so it can sit in refrigerated vats for months (and how it is reconstituted through "flavor packs" that give it back the OJ flavors after long storage) and all kind of other orange stories. No matter what rabbit hole McPhee jumps down, his research and writing are nothing short of engrossing.
- karaterobot 3y agoI just finished Looking for a Ship a few weeks ago. I have read Oranges as well, and Annals of the Former World, and some of his shorter pieces in a Best Of collection. I am hit and miss on his writing, but when it hits, it hits hard for me.
- civilitty 3y agoThe photos in the article really made me want to watch a documentary about the Alaskan wilderness, especially the tundra during summertime. Does anyone have any recommendations?
- cfeduke 3y agoNot exactly what you're looking for, but for anyone interested in Alaska I would recommend checking Peter Santenello's Alaska series on YouTube. It's people and culture focused on everyday life. You'll get a little bit of nature, not much, still very interesting.
- js2 3y agoLook up Dick Proenneke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke I found out about him from HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=Proenneke&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... It’s worth tracking down these videos and watching them: https://www.dickproenneke.com/ https://www.dickproenneke.com/ Sometimes they show up on YouTube or the Internet Archive.
- tobinfekkes 3y agoNice recommendation. My grandpa and uncle built a cabin on Twin Lakes over the summers with Dick Proenneke. I've got pictures of them together felling trees and hauling logs to build the cabins. Now, you can only get to the cabins by float plane. The cabins have been taken over by the State Park now, and they've been restored too. One of their cabins is now the ranger station, and the other is kept as a "stuck in time" snapshot from the 50s and 60s. Pretty neat.
- nullwarp 3y agoThanks for posting this! I'm someone who's grown up in and around the trucking industry and this was a very interesting read.
- mckn1ght 3y agoCheck out the plan to truck gold ore from a mine to a processing facility 240 miles away, passing through Fairbanks, with an 86 ton, 95 foot double trailer truck every 24 minutes, around the clock, for 4 to 5 years. https://manhchoh.com/ore-transportation/ https://manhchoh.com/ore-transportation/ https://www.dermotcole.com/reportingfromalaska/2023/8/24/with-kinross-mining-trucks-here-the-company-should-show-how-it-will-make-the-corners https://www.dermotcole.com/reportingfromalaska/2023/8/24/wit... https://fm.kuac.org/transportation/2023-06-15/kinross-to-launch-trial-runs-of-ore-hauling-trucks-this-summer https://fm.kuac.org/transportation/2023-06-15/kinross-to-lau...
- KennyBlanken 3y agoThe enthusiasm Alaskans have for destroying their land as fast as possible is pretty breathtaking.
- lazide 3y agoThe job market is a tad different there than in SF. Or used to be, anyway. If the choice is drinking yourself to death out of boredom, or having a job… There is also a lot of Alaska. More Alaska than most humans would be able to see in a lifetime of trying.
- alephnerd 3y agoAlaska is massive, and their commodities driven economy is what allows them to provide UBI to all their residents.
- fuzztester 3y agoAny idea or any studies on how that (the UBI) is working out?
- ghaff 3y agoIt's complicated. This is a fairly good read. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/5/20849020/alaska-permanent-fund-universal-basic-income https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/5/20849020/alaska-... Some takeaways: - It's a fairly modest payout - The payout is very dependent on oil revenues in a given year. (Alaska doesn't have income tax or sales tax revenue sources.) - It probably does some good in a state with a large rural population and high unemployment - It influences politics
- nimbius 3y agoAs a diesel engine mechanic by trade some of the stuff these professional drivers endure in these temperatures is just unreal to me. Performing a predrive check in -60f weather is insane to me. We got an old logging peterbilt from yukon in our shop once. Definitely driven, definitely well maintained. Popping the hood there was a big orange sticker near the radiator warning us "DO NOT FILL UNDER 60C." It stumped us for a bit until we found out truckers in the north sometimes never run engine coolant because it may freeze up. Pretty surreal.
- dtgriscom 3y agoSo, if it's cold enough they leave out the coolant, converting it to an air-cooled diesel?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cjbgkagh 3y agoWouldn’t temperature difference be a problem?
- pjc50 3y agoDifference between what?
- cjbgkagh 3y agoThe inner part of the engine and outer parts, running coolant would even out the temperatures but without coolant some parts will become much hotter than others and could warp or create stresses that the engine was not designed for. I assume these people know something that I don't and I guess diesel engines can be quite forgiving.
- Neil44 3y agoI bet they have beefy air to oil coolers as well. Still, I'm surprised that the engine can take any sustained load without water as there would be no cooling around the cylinders.
- edgarvaldes 3y agoHistory Channel's Ice Road Truckers was one of my favorite shows. I know it's edited for the drama, but I think is a nice and interesing view of the job for an outsider.
- prawn 3y agoSomewhat related - my kids and I have enjoyed a few of the documentaries in this series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN_6jfIoYE4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN_6jfIoYE4 Generally, truckers dealing with often hilariously bad roads. Bogged for days. Sleeping under the trucks and hoping animals don't attack them.
- gambiting 3y ago"he had 15 hours of driving in a 20-hour window. His on-duty time was 80 hours, too." As a European, these stats are nuts to me. No wonder she mentions that drivers chug energy drinks - that can't be a reasonable or safe working time in any industry, much less in one where you're operating heavy machinery. Or do people think we are soft with our 8-9h driving time max per long rest regulations?
- _8j50 3y agoYou can't drive more than 8h in any 24h period, and it isn't hard to bust them when they do due to simple physics.
- effingwewt 3y agoNot in the US[1] . And truckers here have been cooking their books since they were actual paper and pen. [1] https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forced-into-debt-worked-past-exhaustion-left-with-nothing/ https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forc...
- _8j50 3y agoI had a CDL-A a long time ago, that was the rule then. Big shops made sure you stuck to it (or so they said) but I also did here that they will indirectly force drivers to drive a lot more than that. When you hear about truckers making six figures, that isn't from 8hr days for sure. They even gave you a tip during training: if you open your truck's door, you're losing money. What happens when they force you is you don't get the trips you want or that are lucrative if you have a reputation of doing bare minimum.
- effingwewt 3y agoI got you, I have tons of family who are truckers and the stories abound of shady company tactics. When GPS first started being used in trucks they would take a bucket or something and cover it, it simply 'lost service'. None of this is new but it's definitely getting markedly worse. Even still, I'd never heard of some of the evil things they are doing these days like closing the yard gates so they have to keep rolling.
- mattbgates 3y agoTruckers: the spine that connects the world and makes all our commerce possible.
- resolutebat 3y agoEva zu Beck has some interesting YouTube videos about driving the Dalton in a Land Rover Defender: https://youtu.be/rBXh4cnTYhg?feature=shared https://youtu.be/rBXh4cnTYhg?feature=shared
- andyjohnson0 3y agoBuilding roads across a wilderness to haul stuff to extract oil to heat the atmosphere to make money seems kind of insane. But the pics were good. I just wish we humans took better care of things. I wonder if airships would be a better solution in terms of lift capacity?
- muti 3y agoVeritasium posted a video summarising the state of airships ~10 days ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjBgEkbnX2I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjBgEkbnX2I
- Maxion 3y agoI don't think the average (or even a minority of HN readers) realize how much they'd have to give up if we'd stop.
- andyjohnson0 3y agoThe difficult question is how much will we have to give up if we don't?
- Maxion 3y agoI think the more salient question is WHO will have to give WHAT up if we don't stop? I assume most HN readers work in IT with decent salaries, putting us in the 90th+ percentile globally. We'll still be drinking wine in our off-grid A/C'd homes when the rest of the world suffers.
- Infernal 3y agoThe more difficult question is who gets to decide.
- pjc50 3y agoEven if no identifiable person gets to decide, the climate may force a whole series of individual decisions. Or a wildfire decides for you.
- scooke 3y agoI once flew to Ft St John from Vancouver then hitched to Liard Hot Springs Park where I camped the night in -36C, then hitched to Whitehorse where I worked for a few months, then realized that if I was going to see the Arctic before I had to leave the Yukon I'd better go NOW (in March). So I hitched from Whitehorse to the start of the Dempster Hwy, then hitched all the way to Inuvik (got a lift from a former mayor) where I visited for about 24 hours. It was that short because the last truck leaving for the ice bridges broke up was leaving the next day. Spent the next 5 days driving back down to the Lower Mainland. But that included crossing those melting ice bridges... Invigorating and terrifying. At one point, past the rivers, I asked the driver what all those slightly round brownish mounds were alongside the Dempster? Some kind of frost push-up? No! They were caribou carcasses! The right-of-way someone mentioned meant that these trucks would just barrel down the Dumpster and if a herd or bunch of caribou or whatever were in the road, the truck would plow through them. I asked why ... and he told me that if a truck tried to brake but lost control and went off the raised berm road that is the Dempster, the truck would sink too far into the permafrost before they could get a tow truck up there, and it would be stuck there forever, slowly sinking deeper into the permafrost. It was a wild few months in my younger days, let me tell ya!
- aksss 3y agoNot sure when your trip was but I was able to drive to Inuvik during the summer months on the Dempster highway back in late eighties or maybe very early nineties. No ice roads/bridges were required, just a spare tire. I remember bad mosquitos. I can’t recall any ferries after the one in Dawson but maybe there were. Road-tripping up there sure is fun though.
- eric_the_read 3y agoI spent a summer working in a hardware store up in Fairbanks, and my host/landlord decided to take me up to the Arctic Circle in his CJsomething Jeep. We were only a few miles up from the Circle when we kicked up a rock that punctured our oil pan. Thankfully, we were less than a mile from the last service station before the Arctic Circle, so we hitched a ride from a passing truck, and bought a bunch of oil and duct tape and just kept feeding the engine oil every few miles until we got back to Fairbanks. Never did make it up to the Arctic Circle, though.
- treprinum 3y agoWouldn't building a railroad be a more cost-efficient way in Alaska than trucking?
- pjc50 3y agoDepends on the terrain, and for such a lightly-trafficked place that would probably be uneconomic.
- treprinum 3y agoChina could do it in Tibet which seems to be similarly populated/trafficked, on top of thawing permafrost. It's only 414 miles as well whereas the Tibet one is 1215 miles.
- projectazorian 3y ago> Tibet which seems to be similarly populated/trafficked Tibet has millions of people. Prudhoe Bay has a couple thousand people and some oilfields.
- nielu 3y agoBeautiful photos but i have to nitpick >Exhausted and hungry, I was happy to get to Coldfoot. It’s allegedly the world’s farthest north truck stop. Coldfoot seems to be on 67*N. This is similar to Kiruna in Sweden and south of Narwik in Norway - town of 15k people. I bet that there are some truck stops there as well :D
- alfyboy 3y agoThere is also Tromsø, Norway with a population of almost 70k. We're at 69 degrees north. I'm pretty sure we have a truck stop close by.
- Andrew018 3y ago[flagged]