Denison's Ice Road

Nora T. Corley is a librarian in Ottawa.

In the early 1970s Iglauer travelled to the Western Arctic to accompany John Denison and his crew as they carved out a winter road along the lakes and stream joining Great Slave Lake to Great Bear Lake, from Fort Byers near Yellowknife to Port Radium — a trip they had been making annually since 1964. During the summers there is barge traffic along the watery route. During three months of winter the road, built over the ice, and some overland portages, makes freighting heavy or awkward cargoes economical. Building the road each year is a hazardous business, weather and ice conditions working against the machines and men. Iglauer gives a graphic and detailed account of building the road, breaking the new road forward as far as possible each day, clearing and smoothing it for traffic, and then moving on to scout out the next section, marking the way for the plows and Bombardiers to work. Describing the 2,275-mile, three-week trip from Fort Byers to Port Radium, via Yellowknife, Iglauer writes of the men who do the job, retelling their tales and including, bit by bit, a biography of John Denison, the first person to build a road of this type. Iglauer is author of The New People: The Eskimo’s Journey into Our Time and Inuit Journey, as well as articles in The New Yorker, Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly. Here she gives us an overlong account of various types of trucks and copious details on the machinery, all of which becomes tiresome after a while. “Ennaway” (as Denison is quoted saying on numerous occasions), this soporific book should be good for bedtime reading. Originally issued in 1974, it has now been published in paperback.