Day six dawns with the black TeamD 325iX swooshing across the ice.
Today we’re doing our Jesus thing. But not just walking on water but driving on water, a lot of it. The first part of the day we drive out a tributary of the Mackenzie River then merge onto the main branch of the Mackenzie. We drive that out onto the ocean and hang a right towards Tuk. The full name of our destination is Tuktoyaktuk, but who wants to say all of that?
These ice roads are the only land route to some of these towns. In the summer when the ice temporarily turns into a liquid state it’s a either boat or plane to get where we’re going with a passenger car.
Eric was still beat from driving from Dawson City to Inuvik yesterday so I started off at the wheel. After Eric smashed my glasses the other day (Grrrrrr!) I’m using my back-up pair. The lenses are a different material and the base curve is different than my old (sniff) pair so I hav more glare and low light problems. So, I was cruising at a relaxed pace. After awhile we came along one of the sweep trucks that had gone wide on a curve and was well stuck. They were waiting for the other sweep truck to come along and extract them.
What does the ‘D’ mean? Yesterday it meant Disaster for the silver WRX. That means today we must be TeamDoubleD. This time disaster struck 26 miles out from the hotel. The ice river was rutted with some big cracks and one was just big enough to suck Rob and Nick’s Mazda 323 in and cut up both tires on one side. After doing a Chinese fire drill of tire rotations and replacements the boys headed back to Inuvik. Having used their two spares the only smart thing was to head back to town to find a tire store. .
It was hard to see them turn around. They had been great sports and did their all to support the team yesterday when the WRX had problems. Now, today there wasn’t anything the team could do for them. We took some extra pictures of them against a white background so we can photoshop them into the Tuk pictures.
Eric took over the driving and we went much faster with him at the wheel. I wasn’t in my comfort zone on the ice and we weren’t making the most brilliant progress. The banks of the ice roads are low but you can easily get stuck if you get into them with good momentum. Pete Soper was having good fun with the ice roads. So much so that he stuffed it twice on the way to Tuk. The second time Rene and Dan pulled him out.
Since Dan and Jim were free agents until they get back to Dawson City. Jim rides in Jerry Hine’s big Ford Excursion and Dan is teamed for the trip to Tuk with Baron Rene von Richtofen. Buy me a beer sometime and ask me about the Baron, better yet, buy Dan a pitcher and ask him. They’ve been having a great time trading off the driving of Rene’s Audi S4. Rene and his son Lionel have driven from West Palm Beach Florida with a small trailer behind their caged S4. The trailer stayed in Whitehourse but they did take it out for a lap around Goldpan Raceway. They turned a lap faster with trailer than we did on our own.
The town past the end of the road and at the end of ice road is Tuk. It’s perched on a receding bit of land on the Beauford Sea. This time of year there isn’t much happening there. But it’s a great chance to quietly reflect while staring at the white hues of the ever changing Sea.
The north isn’t so wired as home but it turns out it does well with wireless. Last night in the hotel we piggybacked wireless Internet from some unknown source. Hopefully I pick-up the same signal in the hotel parking lot and I can post this at midday.
Your faithful in-car reporter,
steve
p.s. Blame the typos, and hell, grammar errors on typing while in a car bouncing down a river.