Understanding Ice Roads: An 'elegant' solution to an ongoing accessibility problem.

• Author: Newman, Amy
• Position: CONSTRUCTION

With only a fraction of its roads paved and many parts of the state disconnected from the road system altogether, much of Alaska is only accessible by air or sea--options that are both costly and weather-dependent.

For companies that extract and deliver Alaska's natural resources to market, access to the state's most remote areas is a necessity, and as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. There are continuing statewide efforts to create infrastructure to get people and things where they need to be. Part of that innovation involves using ice roads, which give companies the ability to transport equipment across large swaths of otherwise impassable terrain.

"An ice road is exactly what it sounds like--a road made from ice," says Melissa Head, North Slope team manager with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources (DNR). "It's a very elegant solution to a problem."

At its core, building an ice road isn't much different from packing snow in a driveway or building a backyard ice rink, explains Jeff Miller, vice president of operations for Cruz Construction.

"If you can imagine in your driveway, if you don't plow the snow right at the start you can pack it down," he says. "But once you get a lot of snow that doesn't work, so now that means I can't drive a tire vehicle on it. But if you add some water to that with your hose, it would freeze pretty solid. That's what starts you being able to put extra weight on it."

The logistics of building an ice road are, of course, more complex and time-consuming than hosing down the driveway to create a slick surface. It requires careful calibration of snow and frost depth, ambient temperature, available water sources, and topography of the area where the road will be built. But the result is a system of transportation that provides access to Alaska's most remote regions with minimal impact on the surrounding landscape.

An Elegant Solution

The History Channel's Ice Road Truckers may be responsible for adding ice roads to the lexicon of residents of the Lower 48, but the slick roads have been a mainstay of Alaska transport from long before the popular series hit the airwaves.

"For thousands of years, [Alaskans] have been traveling over snow and ice; it's just a way of life," Head says. "That translated into how the oil companies worked. If you go to the North Slope in the summer, you're going to realize it's hard to go anywhere. There's water and the landscape is really hard to walk across."

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