Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

NNSL (Jan 25/99) - For the uninitiated (i.e. southerners), combine the words "ice" and "road" and it spells disaster.

Though ice roads are a way of winter life in the North, many Northerners have had their share of trouble on them, particularly when the ice turns to water.

For Fred Behrens, mayor of Rae-Edzo, driving on ice roads is usually about as mundane as driving on conventional roads. But there was that time about 10 years ago on Faber Lake, near Gameti.

"I was driving along and fell through a bunch of overflow and dropped about two feet," he recalled. "That was kind of scary."

Behrens, in a four-wheel-drive truck, was able to drive out of the break then plow through the snowbank to get around it.

Behrens relayed the name of one of his neighbours, a man generally recognized as the undisputed master of four-wheeled disasters. But when XXXNews/North caught up with him, the champ had just returned from a gruelling dental session and was in no mood for storytelling.

Overflow is an ongoing problem on the ice road. Just ask Fort Good Hope's Gordon Kelly.

A few years back he was driving his brand new truck down to Norman Wells when he saw the road had dissolved into a slush puddle where a little creek had drained onto it.

"We went to go around it, but then the truck lost traction and it went up onto the snowbank," recalled Kelly.

Though he was going slow and in four-wheel drive, he got hung up enough that two wheels were off the ground.

One of Kelly's passengers, Brian Davidson, walked over to some bush and brought back an armload of sticks. Kelly thought he was going to try to wedge them under the tires, but Davidson dropped them on the ground and lit a fire instead.

It turned out the fire wasn't necessary. The wait for help lasted only about half an hour.

Wrigley's Gaylene Oskenekisses would say that Kelly's problem was he was going too slow.

"You've got to take a run at it," said Gaylene, talking about her strategy for making it through the big puddles in the spring.

But even she admitted that hasn't worked all the time. Gaylene recalled being stuck in a puddle a foot deep and having to be hauled out.

"It was a bad experience, scary."

And don't get her started about the ice road north of Wrigley. Too many curves, hilly enough to make you woof your breakfast, only one lane wide....