Highways are indispensable in our lives, safe, naturally it should have a feature.
However, there is such a road
It's not just a little bit safe
It has even been dubbed the most dangerous highway
For Canadians, winter is their busiest travel season, with icy roads spanning countless glacial lakes and connecting remote mountain villages in the south with the Arctic Ocean in the far north.
They even go deep into the extremely cold, frozen tundra all the way to the distant Mackenzie River, where people call the road to solitude because they are not even found on a map.
And when spring comes, the ice dissolves, and people can no longer find their existence in their sights.
The old mao who maintains the frozen road
Located in a small town in the Arctic, Lao Mao started his day early, and he and his colleagues shouldered the responsibility of maintaining the normal passage of the frozen road.
In Lao Mao's view, this polar passage through the north and south is very important to many Canadian residents, which is also the motivation for him to stick to this job for a long time. Such a job almost became the life of Lao Mao.
People here have adapted to the life of living with the cold winter day and night. Old Mao, who has spent most of his life dealing with ice cubes, thinks that what he has done is a very meaningful thing, and Old Mao will leave at sunrise every day, and several workers, a forklift, and a semi-trailer will assemble their professional team.
When it was time for them to start, they needed to quickly level the ice along the way, and as the ice thickened, Lao Mao and his men had more and more room to play, and if they had not repeated this work day after day, the frozen road would have been bumpy enough to shake people's brains.
To do this, the Old Mao team also modified their forklifts, adding heavy planers on the front and snow plows on the sides to ensure that the pavement was compacted and flattened, and the old Mao team needed to repeat this work countless times to ensure that the road could accommodate and withstand the pressure of heavy traffic.
Lao Mao explained that if the state of the road is unqualified, once the ice surface cracks or even breaks, the vehicles driving on it will face extinction, and for large vehicles with large self-weight, the best driving time is in mid-February, otherwise the ice layer that is not thick enough is likely to be overwhelmed.
Lao Mao's team will regularly check the various indicators of the ice surface, including thickness, through GPRS, and for safety reasons, they will not forget the field trip, first drilling through the ice, burying the calibrator and then dragging it with a measuring vehicle, so that the thickness of the ice layer can be obtained everywhere along the way.
Such roads have gradually replaced the traditional dog sledding. Driving when there is ice, driving a boat when there is no ice, Lao Mao thinks that this kind of life is also very interesting.
Inuvik is the northernmost stop on Canada's regular roads, meaning People's Square in the Inuit language, where Inuit and Canadians live in harmony, both adapting to and enjoying the extremely cold climate.
Pastor John
John is a pastor here. Work forced him to travel for long periods of time.
And it's winter. Make his car always clean and shiny. To match the local culture, the churches here are also shaped like igloos, and most of them were not built with the help of large engineering equipment.
Adam is a resident who lives here, the husky and its sleds enrich adam's entire life, and dog sledding is the most common way of winter travel before the frozen roads are put into use.
Adam's huskies have their own characteristics, and they are all good at sledding.
The era of sled dogs is gradually coming to an end, and snowmobiling has become the favorite of more and more people, especially young men like James who pursue passion, snowmobile racing is the perfect activity for them to release youth hormones.
Such races abound, and anyone can compete in the race and race through the ice and snow to win the championship if they pay for tickets.
Preparing for such a race also requires a lot of money and energy from the players to ensure that their cars can ride in the dust.
James and his guys showed great enthusiasm and determination about this matter, and in their opinion, as long as they can win the first place in the race, even if they sacrifice more.
At the scene of the game, everyone seemed eager to try the opening order, and the tense and fierce competition began. The frozen road was right next to their track, and there were a few specially set up spectator seats between the two, but before they could fully appreciate the ice race, James had an accident, his shoulders were dislocated, and the game he had carefully prepared for ended without a hitch.
The long cold winter is gradually gone, and it is the annual March carnival of the residents of Inuvik, on this rare warm day of minus 15 degrees, people talk happily with their friends, and the most popular food is the native Eskimo donut.
One of the rare events of the rally is the dog sledding competition that has long been customary, and Adam and his girlfriend will be racing against three other teams from Alaska.
In order to prevent the sled dog's feet from being scratched by the broken ice, Adam also carefully put on leather shoes for each sled dog. In the eager eyes of the audience
Adam's girlfriend won the game and received a thousand dollars in championship prize money.
Canada's road system crosses the middle from the south to the north, and then penetrates deep into the world of ice and snow.
Before the advent of the Frozen Road, people could only cross the polar region by sled dogs in the winter, and the summer here belonged only to an uninhabited swamp.
Cat cart
Decades ago, people used a transport machine called a cat car to slowly and hard through this wasteland.
Goldfield town
Ten years later, the gold-mining towns in the wasteland finally ushered in their first road, but to reach the farther north, people had to resort to the only ferry boat, or an ice road that existed briefly in the cold winter.
Moving further north, you will be greeted by herds of reindeer and wild boar.
Migratory reindeer
And their annual migration activities have become a polar spectacle.
On the only road leading here, Nana, the supervisor, is on duty, carefully dividing the work with her colleagues every day, which is a necessary prerequisite to ensure that the road can run properly.
The Frozen Road in the Night
Even on snowy nights at more than -40 degrees Celsius, they have to go out to do routine maintenance work on the road.
Nana
Nana also often checked the road to see if there were vehicles in need of emergency rescue, because there were always some unlucky people who did not make any preparations for polar accidents before going on the road.
Since taking office, Nana has seen all kinds of people trapped in the polar regions, and for safety reasons, Nana and her colleagues will stop the road when the snow is severe.
The harsh climate here is already the norm, and there is not even a grass on the mountain range, so it is common for people driving between them to lose their way.
In a white world, the highway has been alone for decades, and to this day it remains the only road in canada that connects to the Arctic Circle. There are no intersections, no pedestrians, and some are just white snow.
Crossing a mountain, the road leads to a vast delta.
Before the road was opened, the delta was a mysterious area that had never been explored for the pilot, and in his opinion, flying was the only right choice to travel to and from various communities in the northern region. Especially when there is a cargo that needs to be transported urgently, there may be no other way but air freight.
A guy who can fly a plane
At 81 years old, he is the only pilot who can still fly a plane through dangerous cold areas.
In the 61 years since he has been flying airplanes, xiaofu has witnessed major changes in the way of transportation in the polar regions, and has also witnessed local people planting traps in the polar regions and trapping muskrats to make a living.
Muskrat skin
With the current transformation of muskrat skin, many branches of the road lead to more inaccessible places, including the tribal areas of GWICHIN.
It is only when winter falls that these ice roads allow heavy vehicles to carry supplies to pass, but more often than not, they give local herders and hunters more opportunities to hunt prey or trade.
At the same time, thanks to this ice road, the local people can enjoy the influence of modern culture and use various electrical appliances.
For snowmobiles that are much more advanced than sled dogs, but Bill is clearly not too happy about it. An old-fashioned man, he was reluctant to let go of his shotguns and old customs, nor to allow too many modern elements to infiltrate his life.
In the eyes of others, modernization has left the economy of this traditional society chaotic, and a fox that used to sell for $300 can now only sell 20 pieces in the market.
Even though modernization symbolizes some kind of progress of the times, it is not a good thing for Bill, not even for a small town with a bad economy. The lifestyle of the younger generation of the local people is also increasingly difficult for Bill to understand.
carnival
At this time, at the carnival of the ice road, there are already more and more people coming from afar, and with them are flocks of adult reindeer who will become people's plates.
At the same time, in order to do a good job in logistics for this large-scale event, the government also specially imported a group of beef cattle to benefit people.
Fat brother in charge of the event
Fat Brother is the person in charge of this event, he has no worries about the holding of this event, the only thing that may go wrong is the climate, if the climate is too harsh, then they are likely to face the tragic experience they have experienced in the past, the animals will be out of people's control, resulting in a large number of participants in the event lack of food.
Thankfully, what worried the fat brother this year did not happen, and the preparations for the carnival went smoothly and orderly.
For nearly a month, the fat brother could go crazy with people without any worries, because the cold of Nurvik was far more than one could imagine, and even in April, when it should be warm, the maximum temperature here was only minus 25 degrees Celsius.
And with the help of the cold wind, going out can be a difficult challenge for people, but in fact, for the local residents, the weather is much better than winter, and even for them, it is now the time of year, the time to go out and party.
Putting on their boots and hats and trousers, the inhabitants of Inuvik are about to begin, their happy lives, and the interesting activities imply that the Inuvics have taught their next generation.
In these recreational programs, children can learn to live and accumulate skills and experience to survive in extreme environments.
In addition to survival, life skills are also valuable assets that a new generation of people can learn.
Boiling soup and cooking has almost become a compulsory course for young people, and when night falls, the most anticipated song and dance performance is coming.
People stood or sat, sang and danced, and reveled non-stop for hours, and throughout the process of singing and dancing, from the eighty-year-old to the children who had just learned to walk, everyone had the same smile on their faces.
In the blink of an eye, winter will really pass, this ice road into the Arctic, will also melt and disappear, the last driving on the road is still in progress, it will deliver necessities to the villages and towns along the way, which will become the most basic living security for local residents, a steady stream of foreign materials to support the life of these northern marginal townships, and obviously such a life, for some local residents, is not comfortable enough.
Children often ask Sister Ling, doesn't she want to live in another place? For Lingjie, living here is not a problem, after all, she has long adapted to such a life, but for children, such a lack of water and electricity or even no Internet coverage of life, it is inevitable that it is a little too sad.
In such an extreme environment, children will also encounter a variety of problems, and they will inevitably feel panic and fear when facing the cruel nature.
The construction of the ice road is not easy, although some people have long had such an idea, but before the emergence of this ice road, no one could successfully build a qualified road.
Someone else has already started to build a new ice road. But in the eyes of some people, more and more ice roads will be built, which will mean that this frozen soil will lose more and more traditional atmosphere. Whatever the outcome, Canada's most dangerous road, the Frozen Road, is heralding the end of a traditional era.