Ice Road Truckers

Inuvik Trivia

  • Vancouver, B.C. is about as far away from Inuvik (1,500 miles) as it is from Mexico.
  • Inuvik’s clocks are set to Mountain Standard Time.
  • Above the Arctic Circle—1,630 miles from the North Pole—the sun never sets on June 21, the longest day of the year. Inuvik is 124 miles north of the Circle, and for 57 days in May, June and July the sun doesn't set at all.
  • For years, a retired highway worker named Harry Waldron sat in a rocking chair at the shoulder of the Dempster Highway on the way to Inuvik, right next to a small sign that marked the edges of the Arctic Circle. Waldron wore a tuxedo, drank champagne and recited snippets of Robert Service poems for tourists as they passed by. he became such a popular attraction that the Yukon's territorial government began to pay him a small stipend to be the official "Keeper of the Arctic Circle."
  • The town of Inuvik has one traffic light, at the corner of Mackenzie Road and Distributor Street. It’s the northernmost traffic light in the world.
  • Inuvik’s Ingamo Hall Friendship Centre is the largest log building north of the Arctic Circle. It’s made from nearly 1,000 logs.
  • The Mounties don’t enforce a speed limit on the ice roads that stretch north from Inuvik to the sea, but drivers—especially drivers in heavy trucks—try to travel slowly, so that the vibrations from their engines don’t damage the ice and create hazards for the vehicles in front of and behind them. Meanwhile, maintenance crews work all winter to flood the ice as frequently as they can—when the floodwater freezes, it makes the ice roads thicker and stronger.
  • Because of the permafrost—the frozen ground under the Earth’s surface that in parts of Inuvik is about 350 meters deep—the engineers who built the town had to put all the buildings on gravel pilings or pads. (To keep the heat from the buildings from thawing the permafrost, most structures’ stilts are at least a meter high.) Ordinary concrete foundations would shift and crack as the temperature of the ground changed with the seasons.
  • Since they can’t be buried in the permafrost, all of Inuvik’s utility lines run above the ground. They’re protected by wooden or aluminum sheds called utilidors. They carry water, sewage and fuel from place to place. (Electric, telephone and cable lines usually run along poles, just as they do in the United States.) Smaller sheds that carry the lines from the main utilidor to each house are known as utilidettes.
  • Many of Inuvik's houses, especially those that the Canadian government built for teachers and other public employees, are famous for their brightly colored exteriors. The colors break up the monotony of the landscape, especially in the winter when snow is everywhere. People in town call these painted rowhouses the "smartie houses," because from a distance they look like a roll of the colored candies by the name.
  • Many of Inuvik’s oldest houses are known as 512s, because they are 512 square feet: 16 feet wide and 32 feet deep. Erecting identical homes with identical dimensions made it much easier for busy construction workers to build the town as quickly as possible.
  • For about 30 days in December and early January, Inuvik doesn’t get any sunlight at all. During that time, people rent a lot of movies, read a lot of books and get a lot of sleep—on average, 11 hours per night. (In the summer, when the sun is out all night, people typically stay up late and sleep for just 5 hours.)
  • During the winter, it can get incredibly cold in Inuvik: The temperature can dip as low as 60 degrees below zero. To stay warm, people wear long underwear; thick sweaters; layers of woolen socks and hats; heavy hooded parkas; and mittens and gloves—all at the same time! It’s hard to start the car in such cold weather, so most people simply leave their engines running while they run errands. Otherwise, they use electric heaters (plugged in at the curb) to keep their engines warm.
  • In the summer, thanks to the constant warm sunlight that evaporates water from all of the region’s rivers and lakes, Inuvik is as damp and muggy as a tropical island! As a result, the town is notorious for its enormous population of flies and mosquitoes. (Every year, the first child to kill a mosquito wins a prize from the local newspaper.)
  • Many of Inuvik’s residents own a boat, a small plane or both. This helps people to get around when weather conditions make it impossible to drive on the Dempster Highway to the south or the ice roads to the north.
  • Inuvik is celebrating its 50th anniversary in July 2008.
  • About 10 years ago, it was safe to drive on the region’s ice roads for almost three months of the year. Today, the ice-road season is only about a month and a half long.

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