> 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.
As 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.
"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?
I 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.
Check 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://www.dermotcole.com/reportingfromalaska/2023/8/24/wit...
https://fm.kuac.org/transportation/2023-06-15/kinross-to-lau...
I 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
414 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.
Trucking 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.
History 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.
Eva zu Beck has some interesting YouTube videos about driving the Dalton in a Land Rover Defender: https://youtu.be/rBXh4cnTYhg?feature=shared
Truckers: the spine that connects the world and makes all our commerce possible.
Somewhat related - my kids and I have enjoyed a few of the documentaries in this series: 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.
Beautiful 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
The 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?
Thanks for posting this! I'm someone who's grown up in and around the trucking industry and this was a very interesting read.
Building 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?
Wouldn't building a railroad be a more cost-efficient way in Alaska than trucking?
1. Somehow I always thought Alaska was 100% snow covered 24/7/365
2. Triple trailers? Nice!
Obviously not a good application for an EV.
> 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.
I 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!