Driving the ice road: a journey along a community’s disappearing lifeline
Seen from above, the road could be mistaken for a river or stream. Curving through boreal forest, its palette exists on a spectrum: some parts are white with snow; others dim with muted yellow or glistening blue. When the sun hits, it ceases to hold colour at all and is instead reflective, sending light from above right back to where it came.
The road is an overlapping Venn diagram of synthetic and natural: built from water, manipulated by machine, and at the mercy of weather patterns and temperatures — made increasingly erratic by climate change — even though some humans are utterly dependent upon it.
It’s part of a temporary network of winter roads connecting the James Bay coast to the rest of the country to the south. They’re built up each year once temperatures dip low enough, for long enough – transforming the waters running through rivers, streams and muskeg (a Cree word, meaning grassy bog) into static roadway that remains for as long as temperatures allow.
While the six to eight-week winter road season is a small fraction of the year, it is undoubtedly the most important for the otherwise fly-in communities it connects. It elicits a scramble to transport everything possible: from food to fuel to modular housing units. People squeeze in a year’s worth of travel into less than two months: seeing family, going to doctor's appointments. Outside of the winter road season, goods and people are flown in and out at astronomical prices.
Gordon Etherington has driven the James Bay Winter Road, which was first constructed in the late 1950s, too many times to count. He describes a typical day as “going that way” and “going this way,” pointing his hand forward and back.
“I put the eyes and the ears on it. See what needs to be done … anybody broken down,” he says.
Etherington starts his shift by calling Ricky Nakogee, who manages the stretch of road he is responsible for surveying, which takes two to four hours to drive each direction, depending on the weather. Etherington calls his 15-year-old son Robert next, whose first pair of shoes hangs off his rearview mirror. They tease each other – Robert wants to ensure a chocolate bar will make it home – and each says, “bye, love you,” twice before hanging up.
As a foreman for the winter road company, he is responsible for looking for spots in the road that need attending to, specifically between Moosonee and Fort Albany. In the dead of winter, that often means snow drifts that make sections impassable. As the season inches closer to spring, the need shifts to segments of road that are too soft, prompting closures and prayers that it’ll get cold enough to reopen it again.
During the winter road season, every day matters. People make multiple trips to go shopping further south. Any goods they can bring home will help with their cost of living for the rest of the year. If a road closes and a community is low on gas, it’s instead flown up, which can make it double in price. There might be an event they’ve looked forward to all year, and if the road is closed, they miss out. People call ice roads “lifelines” for a reason – without them, entire communities are cut off from goods and services that those in places connected by permanent roads take for granted.
Warming temperatures are severing them with increased frequency.
Flooding rivers and packing snow
Etherington’s truck whirs along the road as he exchanges waves with anyone heading in the opposite direction. He’s about halfway down the road, where plows were out the night before clearing snow drifts. Etherington says that he’s used to the seasonal dance of road closures, reopenings, repairs, and closures again.
When will the road close this year? He shrugs; it’s not up to him. Each year is different, he explains, and even an early season can turn sour.
Before his time as a foreman, Etherington worked on ice road construction and remembers a time when they were two weeks ahead of schedule, just for it to pour down rain at the end of January. They waited for the cold to set in once more and started all over again: cleared snow with plows, smoothed the ice with graders, drilled and measured ice. All, it goes without saying, in sub-zero temperatures.
Ice Roads in Ontario by the numbers
- 3,200 km of ice roads connect otherwise isolated communities in Ontario to provincial road networks. There are approximately 8,000 km of ice roads in all of Canada.
- 32 communities are serviced across the province of Ontario by winter roads. They include the town of Moosonee and 31 First Nations. Nishnawbe Aski Nation Chiefs declared a winter road state of emergency in 2024.
- 24,000 people rely on the winter road season in Ontario. The winter road season typically lasts from January to March, but the season is getting shorter due to climate – caused largely by the burning of fossil fuels.
While working on a winter road always demands a certain level of nimbleness, Etherington explains he and others have observed a grander change. He describes it as “winter slowly shifting into spring.”
Unquestionably, climate change is threatening the future of ice roads – research has found that half of Canada’s winter roads will be unusable in 30 years. But there isn’t a “before and after” when it comes to climate change: it has already happened and is still happening, squeezing the usability of the roads.
Building the road this year “was kinda late,” Etherington says. Construction used to start in mid-December, but this year, conditions weren’t ripe for road building until mid-January.
A report by the Nishnawbe Aski Nation in 2023 notes that climate change has "reduced the length of winter road season from an average of 77 days to as few as 28 days or less in some areas" — one-third as much time to get people and materials in and out of communities.
“It was warmer than usual,” said Nakogee – who works on the same stretch of road that Etherington oversees – speaking over the phone on Feb. 7, when the road had been open for less than two weeks. It’s not as simple as temperatures dipping below freezing – ice road building requires an accumulation of very cold days, so the ice can thicken enough for construction to start.
With the waiting over, things get very active. Moving along the road, there are remnants of the weeks of work from earlier in the season and the maintenance that continues. Etherington drives over muskeg once completely covered with snow, explaining that crews had to move it all off to “let the frost penetrate.” From there, the ice thickens more, and then, machines are brought in to smooth out grooves and irregularities, which otherwise would make it unsafe to drive.
He then drives over a ramp made of ice, connecting the Pike River crossing to the rest of the road. The day before, workers were out drilling below the ice, dipping hoses down so they could spray river water onto the surface of the crossing to thicken it up. While part of building the road is taking precipitation off, some rivers and creeks are flooded with water from under the ice to make it thick enough for heavy-duty trucks to drive on — 40 inches is the requirement.
“It’s not every creek,” says Nakogee – the road has nearly 60 water crossings, so that would take ages. “Some creeks are not that deep.”
Later in the season, when the road is starting to soften, Nakogee will do the opposite and move snow back onto the road to insulate it, extending its season. They drag big tires over the road to pack the snow down. As March unfolds, road closures on warmer days become more common because driving on the road when it’s softer creates harsh grooves. Drivers are encouraged to travel at night, when it’s colder, and let their families know when they’re heading off.
The crew does what they can to make the road safe to drive. They intermittently check ice thickness, especially during the beginning and end of the season, but it’s up to the individual driver to use caution while using the road, which has reduced traction compared to its paved counterparts. Clicking along the road, Etherington points out “Wayne’s corner.”
“Two Waynes hit the same tree,” he explains. “If you’re a Wayne, don’t drive there.”
A few minutes later, he drives past “Lawrence’s corner,” and later, “Chief’s corner.” Between the two, is where his son was almost killed by a moose.
The lifeline of the community
Kilometre signs sit at the side of the road, and once Etherington hits the 115 mark, he gets out of his truck to check in with Nakogee, who is still waiting for his crew. His truck’s dash reads -11 degrees Celsius, and Etherington is wearing a hoodie. He says he is dropping off lunch for Nakogee, and reaches into the truck bed to pull out a frozen caribou leg.
The two check in about the day, and talk about the snowdrifts up ahead in an area referred to as “the long stretch,” which is made of muskeg and has little tree cover. That part of the road is especially at the mercy of the wind, which blows snow that crews had previously moved off the road back onto it, sometimes making it impassable. “A lot of people get stuck there,” Etherington says.
After a few minutes, Etherington leaves Nakogee behind to drive the remaining chunk of the 165 km between Moosonee and Fort Albany, before turning back south, returning to Moosonee. From there, he will drive even further to take his son to a doctor’s appointment and go shopping in Timmins – an eight-hour journey.
“The cost of living here is crazy,” he says, so making the trip is worth it, especially for household goods. That day, a package of paper towels at the Northern Store (a grocery store chain that operates in northern communities and traces its lineage back two centuries to the Northwest Company) is marked at $43.39. In a matter of weeks, that will be the only price available to anyone who hasn’t travelled south to stock up before the road closes.
The winter road’s website has a small box on the right-hand side, saying if it’s open or closed, but that decision is made by the people on the ground — Etherington and Steve Hookimaw, who tends to the stretch of road north of Etherington’s that leads from Fort Albany to Attawapiskat.
The website may be the official channel, but as in most northern communities, Facebook is where the real action happens. Nakogee posts religiously on a group for the Fort Albany section, letting people know if it’s safe to drive. He uploads pictures of plows clearing snowdrifts: micro-updates to calm impatient travellers.
“Everybody’s just pointing fingers at me … even though things are out of my hands,” says Nakogee. Nakogee is “the one who gets all the shit,” Etherington acknowledges. He’s also the one who gets the thanks — or, at least knows it’s owed to him and his crew.
“Every wintertime, people are looking forward to having that winter road going. So, whenever it’s finished and it’s safe to travel, people go see their families in the outer communities along the coast … We get to travel by the cheapest way, rather than buying an airplane ticket, which is very costly,” Hookimaw says. A barebones ticket for the 30-minute roundtrip flight from Fort Albany to Moosonee is about $500, while the more flexible fare is almost double the cost.
When Hookimaw first started working on the road, late March was when things started getting dicey, but now it’s more common for temperatures to spike as early as February, cutting communities off earlier.
That is especially true for Fort Albany, which marks the end of the section of the road that Etherington drives and checks each day. While the two communities further north – Attawapiskat and Kashechewan – are also fly-in, a barge delivers goods once the ice melts in James Bay. River levels have been too low in recent decades for the barge to service Fort Albany.
It’s part of the reason why the community has decided to build an all-season road – a complex and expensive task. Chief Elizabeth Kataquapit says the community has no other choice as climate change continues to intensify and threaten their cost of living.
This is story one of a four-part series Canada’s National Observer is producing on ice roads in Northern Ontario – in collaboration with I-SEA and The Donner Foundation. The second story will explore Fort Albany First Nation’s plan for an all-season road.
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