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The long and icy road
by Ian Elliot
INUVIK (Feb 06/98) - Wolfgang Helfer is doing something a lot of Northeners have done, but only after their trucks have gone into a hole on the ice road: he's walking to Tuktoyaktuk.
Helfer, 32, is a German carpenter who stockpiles his six weeks of vacation every year and then heads North to spend it. He has spent the last two winters exploring the Yukon. This year after making it to Inuvik he set out to walk to Tuk, plodding the ice road carrying a heavy backpack and towing a handmade wooden sled loaded with his tent, a couple of stoves and enough food for 15 days, at 6,000 calories a day.
"I should be able to walk 20 kilometres a day," he said, stabbing the cleared centre lane of ice with a ski pole. "If it's all like this, it's easy."
Helfer disdains warmer vacation destinations. He likes it cold and says it just doesn't get low enough in his home country to suit him.
"In Germany, the coldest it ever gets is -15 C and then people think their world is breaking apart," Helfer said with a laugh.
"When it gets that cold, people don't let their kids go to school."
Following his trek to Tuk, he will hitch a ride back south and head for the Yukon, where he has arranged to meet up with his Swiss girlfriend later this month. She also likes the North but does not share Helfer's obsession with it, he said, especially for places above the tree line.
"I asked her if she wanted to come with me and she said she wouldn't go to Tuktoyaktuk because there's no wood to build a fire. She likes to have a fire every night. Me, I'd rather save my energy for walking than run around looking for wood at night, but it's nice to know it's there if I need it."
He buys all his winter gear in Canada and stores it with relatives in Vancouver before he leaves so it will be there for him next year, he said.
"It's not bad today," he said of the relatively tropical -23 C day. "I was sleeping outside when it was -43 C."
Which raises the obvious question of any person found walking an ice road in February: is he crazy?
"My friends all think I am," he said with a broad smile. "They like the snow and they like to go skiing, but they like to come home that evening and sit in front of the fire. I tried to talk some of them into coming with me but they wouldn't come." |