Driving the Ice Road to Tuk
publication date: Feb 1, 2008
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author/source: Polly Evans
Tuktoyaktuk, or Tuk as it’s more commonly known, is an Inuvialuit (part of the Inuit family) community on the shores of the Beaufort Sea. During the summer, its thousand residents can only reach the nearest town, Inuvik in Canada’s Northwest Territories, by air or sea. In winter, though, a 194-kilometre ice road is carved into the surface of the Mackenzie River and out across the frozen ocean itself.
Armed with a driving license and a credit card, anyone can hire a jeep and drive there.
‘Just go slow,’ the manager of the car rental company advises first timers. ‘It’s all white out there, so you can’t see the stuff coming up.’
Edging cautiously out of town, you pass a ship frozen into the side of the road, which is wide, like a dual carriageway, and perfectly smooth. On a clear day, the low Arctic sun reflects primrose yellow from its surface. It’s utterly silent out there, apart from the car radio whose only channel gabbles in a language you can neither understand nor identify. Every half hour or so, a car roars past in the opposite direction and slowly, the spindly trees to the side of the road shrink, then disappear. You see snow-coated pingos – mounds of ground like outsized, white molehills that have been pushed upwards by frozen water trapped under the permafrost. And then the road strikes out across the surface of the Arctic Ocean itself.
Now you realize: the manager of the car rental place was not entirely right. It’s not all white out there. The snow that rises in peaks and troughs on the ocean’s surface is palest cornflower blue, while the snow banked on the side of the road casts shadows in deepest indigo. The sky turns from clear blue to dusky pink when it meets its faraway horizon.
Tiny specks appear in the distance. They grow larger extraordinarily slowly, for out here, all normal perspective is destroyed. Finally, you arrive in Tuk, where you’re greeted by rows of beige, boxy, metal-walled cabins perched above the permafrost. There’s a hotel in Tuk whose people are curious and friendly. At the end of the village, a red-bottomed boat sits grounded – it was once the mission schooner that transported goods between the Arctic camps and, for decades, ferried Inuvialuit children to residential church schools. About halfway along the main street, a cemetery sits at the water’s edge.
‘Eternal rest grant to them o’Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them,’ read the painted words over a white wooden archway, with an Inuvialuit transcription beneath. Behind the white picket fence, beyond the mishmash of wooden crosses, some tall, some small, some lurching forwards like stooping geriatrics on the shifting permafrost, lies the mesmerizing, immeasurable, ice-bound ocean in its myriad, muted colours. If one must die and be buried, there can be few more glorious spots for it than this.
Getting there: Inuvik can be reached by road via the Dempster Highway from Dawson, or Air North flies from Whitehorse and Dawson three times a week. Four-wheel drive vehicles can be rented in Inuvik from Norcan.
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