We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About Denison's Ice Road
Product Description In savage blizzards, blinding whiteouts and 60-below-zero temperatures, steel axles snap like twigs; brakes and steering wheels seize up; bare hands freeze when they touch metal. The lake ice cracks and sometimes gives way, so the roadbuilders drive with one hand on the door, ready to jump. John Denison and his crew waited for the coldest, darkest days of winter every year to set out to build a 520-kilometre road made of ice and snow, from Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories to a silver mine on Great Bear Lake, above the Arctic Circle - this is their story. Edith Iglauer was the first outsider ever to accompany them as they worked. This book, her chronicle of a gruelling, fascinating journey through Canada's north, has sold over 20,000 copies since its first publication in 1974. About the Author Edith Iglauer was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She married Philip Hamburger and raised two sons in New York. A frequent contributor to the New Yorker, she has written a great deal about Canada. Her first book, The New People (1966, reprinted and updated as Inuit Journey in 1979 and 2000) chronicled the growth of native cooperatives in the eastern Arctic. She profiled Pierre Trudeau in 1969 and internationally known architect Arthur Erickson in 1979. Denison's Ice Road is about the building of a 325-mile winter road above the Arctic Circle. Divorced in 1966, she came to Vancouver in 1973. She married John Heywood Daly, a commercial salmon troller and moved to Garden Bay on the BC coast. Daly died in 1978. After writing Seven Stones: A Portrait of Arthur Erickson, Architect (1981) she began recording her memories of her late husband and his salmon troller the MoreKelp. The result was Fishing with John, a runaway bestseller and nominee for the 1989 Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction. Her second memoir, about her career in journalism, was The Strangers Next Door. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Excerpt: SECOND TRIP OUT: GETTING WET John got up and went off to find the next portage, too ill to eat breakfast, but obsessed to get going. He was driving the Bug with Jimmy sitting beside him, and before he left he showed me on the map where we were, almost halfway between Yellowknife and Great Bear Lake, on Rae Lake, which extends for eighteen miles through an archipelago of tiny islands, with a half-mile of land that separates it from the next lake, Tuche (pronounced Ta-ka). Rae Lake is notorious for uneven ice depths due to narrow rocky passages and uncertain currents between the islands, and previously Denison's road had avoided this lake surface by taking an all-land route around that was extremely rough and hilly. This year he had decided to save three or four miles of rough portage and two or three days of road-making by cutting directly across the lake. The only land construction would be the half-mile connection between Rae and Tuche lakes. John had arranged for the men at the Hislop Indian village to check the depth of the lake ice and mark out a new portage, the half-mile connecting link between the two lakes. What he and Jimmy were looking for now was snowshoe tracks and other markings that the Indians had left in the bush leading from the old road to the new. Their morning search was unsuccessful, and after lunch they set off again. This time they took me along. I sat in the back of the Bug on a plank on the floor, below the escape hatch in the ceiling that had once had a sliding door but was covered now by a flimsy rag of a coat. "I don't trust this old pile of junk but there's no point spending ten or twelve thousand dollars for a new one when I use it only this once a year," said Denison, who was feeling considerably better. We were breezing over the ice but there was an ominous clink in the engine. Denison was driving and Jimmy was holding his foot pressed down on the exposed gearshift, which was half-broken, to keep it from jumping off into neutral. We came to the
