Dettah’s entering the deep freeze this week, but December was warm enough that some residents are wondering how that’ll affect the ice road to Yellowknife.
Most years, a road built across the frozen Yellowknife Bay connects the city with Dettah from roughly late December to mid-April.
This year, we’re into early January and there’s no sign yet of the road opening.
Areas of thin ice and overflow are getting in the way of construction, the NWT’s Department of Infrastructure – which builds the road – told Cabin Radio on Wednesday.
“It is difficult to predict with certainty how long it will take before all factors are met for ice road openings, but the rate of freezing is highly dependent on variable conditions like air temperature, daylight and snowfall,” department spokesperson Conor Holick said by email.
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The cold weather ahead might help but, according to data provided by Holick, the lake ice between Yellowknife and Dettah has some way to go before the annual ice road across it can open.
Holick said ice thickness measurements about two kilometres offshore on Tuesday this week ranged from 18 to 25 cm. After that, he wrote, crews “encountered long, thin sections of ice with considerable amounts of overflow, and could not safely profile any further.”
The minimum ice thickness needed for work to begin on the road is 33 to 34 cm, Holick said.
“Construction of the Dettah ice road will not begin until additional profiling can be completed and ice measurements confirm it is safe to do so,” he wrote.
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Over the past two decades, the average opening date for the ice road is December 24.
Having blown past that date, the next milestone for this season’s road is January 11. That’s the latest the ice road has opened in the 30-year published record available on the GNWT’s website (in 2000, 2019 and 2020). Last year’s opening date was January 10, only just shy of that.
In 2020, about a week passed between the GNWT announcing construction had begun – a stage we haven’t yet reached this year – and the road opening to light traffic.
