A weird winter on one of the North’s most isolated highways

Rebecca Blake had been waiting to hear from a road maintenance crew in the Yukon for days.

She and her colleagues at LJ’s, a contracting company in Fort McPherson, maintain roughly half the Dempster Highway in the NWT. A storm had blown in a particularly challenging section of the road just across the Yukon-NWT border, and a crew in the Yukon was working to clear it.

Over a two-way radio, Blake’s colleagues stationed farther up the highway listened to the Yukon team’s progress. Each day, the Yukon crew made it closer to the border. Then, the radio would go silent, meaning they’d had to turn back. 

At 12:30am one night, Blake finally got the call: The road was open. She got out of bed, headed to the highway and turned off the lights that signalled a road closure. A few people who had been waiting in their cars took off into the night.  

This situation was unusual, according to Blake. Although weather in the mountainous section of the Dempster near the Yukon-NWT border has a reputation for being fickle, quickly changing from calm to life-threatening, the road doesn’t typically open in the middle of the night. She suspects the Yukon crew worked extra late because the days-long closure had caused traffic to pile up. 

Blake’s experience was one of many anomalies in a winter of exceptionally long-lasting and frequent road closures. 

“I’ve never seen the road close so much as this year, I don’t think,” said Blake, who is also Fort McPherson’s mayor. “It just seemed like every other day.” 

The winter of 2023-24 has been particularly snowy and stormy in regions along the Dempster Highway. At a monitoring site near Inuvik, the snowpack reached a record high in the site’s 39-year history, according to a recent NWT government report.

In Inuvik and Gwich’in regions along the highway, snow water equivalent (SWE) – the amount of water produced by melted snow – was 157 percent of normal levels. Parts of the Dempster in the Yukon have seen more snow than usual, too. In the Porcupine River basin, which includes the northernmost section of the Dempster in the Yukon, SWE was 174 percent of the historical median as of March 1, according to a Yukon Government report.  

“We usually see storms but not like this,” said Kurt Wainman, chief executive of Northwind Industries, a company that moves fuel, freight, lumber and equipment on the Dempster. Wainman, who grew up in Inuvik, said he’s never seen so much snow and wind as last winter. 

“We got snow in places we’ve never had problems before,” he said. “At 40 below, it’s snowing. It doesn’t make sense.”

Extreme weather caused nearly twice as many closures on the Dempster as usual, said Jon Rudolph, northern superintendent for the Yukon Government’s Department of Highways and Public Works. Between October and March, the highway was closed for 76 days – more than 40 percent of the season. During the previous winter, the highway was closed for 45 days, according to information from the Yukon Government.

For communities along the highway, such as Fort McPherson, Tsiigehtchic and Inuvik, the closures meant delayed deliveries of food and fuel. Some communities ran low on supplies, briefly running out at times. These challenges weren’t exclusive to the Dempster. Farther north, the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway was buried in 10 feet of snow in February, cutting off road access to Tuktoyaktuk for weeks.

Some Beaufort Delta residents wonder whether the future means more winters like this. Others are expecting it.

Climate change is generally projected to increase precipitation across the North by the end of the 21st century. Some research suggests extreme snowfall events might become more intense. According to one 2023 study, although winters are expected to get shorter, stormy days may get snowier and windier along northern highways like the Dempster.

However, there is still a lot of uncertainty about how snowfall may change in a warmer world.

“Is this a one-off? I don’t know,” Wainman said, referring to last winter. 

“If this is climate change,” he added, “we better be way more prepared.”

Supply chains stalled

The Dempster Highway is an unpaved road that runs for 736 km, from Dawson City in the Yukon to Inuvik in the NWT. It travels through boreal forest, mountains and tundra.

Construction on the road began in 1958, driven by a federal policy aimed at opening up resource extraction in northern regions. It took more than 20 years to complete the highway. Still, the Dempster is the only all-season road in Canada to cross the Arctic Circle. It’s also the only all-season road connecting the western Arctic to the rest of the country’s highway network.

In mid-April, I travelled part of the Dempster, speaking to residents in Inuvik, Tsiigehtchic and Fort McPherson about the highway, climate change and their experiences last winter. 

The people I spoke to said that, since its construction, the Dempster has shaped life in myriad ways. As the primary means of getting food, fuel and other supplies into communities, the highway is a lifeline. It has also increased access to alcohol and drugs, and, according to some, reduced self-reliance.

Residents of Fort McPherson and Tsiigehtchic said they use the road to get to Whitehorse, where they can stock up on goods or catch cheaper flights. They also use it to access the land. Increasingly, tourists travel the road too, drawn by the promise of adventure.

Whatever the reason for driving the Dempster, the highway has a reputation for being a place of extremes, offering both awe-inspiring scenery and unforgiving driving conditions.

“I really enjoy driving the Dempster Highway,” said Dennis Wright, a long-time resident of Fort McPherson. He added: “It can be pretty scary sometimes.” Wright said he and his wife once got caught driving through a blizzard. Unable to see the sides of the road, they crept along at 10 km/h. 

Brent Feniuk, trucking manager for Northwind in Inuvik, said the highway is always changing. 

“The highway’s alive,” he said, adding that every season brings its own challenges – from potholes and washouts to dust and sharp rocks that can slice through tires. 

In the winter, a stretch of road near the Yukon-NWT border, where the highway crosses the Richardson Mountains, is particularly problematic. The area is prone to high winds, low visibility and drifting snow, resulting in frequent closures.

In a 15-km section known as Hurricane Alley, winds have been known to blow upward of 130 km/h and even push vehicles right off the road. 

“We always knew we were going to have a problem where they built the highway in the mountains,” said Richard Nerysoo, a resident of Fort McPherson and former premier of the NWT. He added that Elders who travelled the area by dog team were familiar with the high winds and knew of better routes. “But you can’t tell someone with a degree that what they’re doing is not the right thing,” he said.  

Now, whenever the winds reach roughly 80 km/h, the road closes, said Rudolph, from the Yukon’s Department of Highways and Public Works. In the winter, high winds can also create the added challenge of drifting snow. A bare road can be buried within hours, if not minutes, Rudolph said.

The road itself is partly to blame for this phenomenon. The highway sits on a thick gravel pad, intended to prevent degradation of permafrost below. When the wind blows, the embankment impedes air flow, promoting the accumulation of drifts near the road. In some cases, these drifts can be several metres high and as hard as cement. 

Snowdrifts can be so solid that if a plough truck were to hit one, it would spin the truck around, according to Blake, from LJ’s in Fort McPherson. That’s why she and her team often use a grader to break up drifts before ploughing the road.

Despite being accustomed to the difficulties of the Dempster, most residents said last winter was worse than usual.  

“The road used to close one, two days,” Blake said, discussing the length of each closure. “I’ve seen three, four or five days this year.” 

In one particularly bad spell of weather, the area near the Yukon-NWT border was closed for about 10 consecutive days. At that time, Feniuk said there were roughly 50 trucks stuck waiting at Eagle Plains, the last stop in the Yukon before the border. He guesses nine of those trucks were Northwind’s. 

Sitting and waiting for the road to open drives up trucking companies’ costs. 

“We have to burn fuel, we have to idle,” said Wainman, Northwind’s chief executive. He added there are also extra wages to pay. 

Wainman said the trucking side of his business is starting to hurt. The bad part, he added, is that the situation creates a financial burden for everyone. When transportation costs rise, so do the prices of food, fuel and other goods. 

“Everybody suffers,” he said.

Road closures aren’t easy for businesses on the receiving end of deliveries, either. At the Northern Store in Fort McPherson, one of the community’s two grocery stores, a major challenge last winter was getting food while it was still fresh.  

“We have a delivery schedule of Sundays and Thursdays,” said Kevin, the store manager, who asked us not to use his last name. “It’s very rare that we get them on Sundays and Thursdays. This year, the Sunday truck might come the next Friday.”

Although trucks delivering food are refrigerated, fresh produce only lasts so long. 

“Strawberries go bad, blueberries go bad, milk goes bad,” Kevin said.

The flip side of this challenge is that, after days without seeing any trucks, the store might get multiple deliveries in a row. 

“We don’t have a very big back room to handle some of the volumes that have come in,” Kevin said.

Residents of communities along the Dempster said closures were noticeable last winter. In Fort McPherson, the Northern Store briefly ran out of gas. In Inuvik, stores ran low on fresh produce, meat and chips. 

“Those things seem to go first,” said Alice Wilson, a permafrost scientist at the Northwest Territories Geological Survey, who lives in Inuvik. 

In Tsiigehtchic, a community of just under 200 people, residents were without groceries for about a week. They resorted to shopping in Inuvik, about a two-hour drive away. 

“We’re used to this stuff,” said Mavis Clark, president of the Gwichya Gwich’in Council in Tsiigehtchic. 

“It might be crazy for other people, but for us, you go with the flow,” she said, laughing. “If you stressed over it, you’d be going crazy.”

Battling blizzards

Closures on the Dempster are not only a nuisance to communities. They are also a reminder of a growing and increasingly costly struggle: Keeping the North’s roads in drivable shape in a warming world. 

Thawing permafrost causes a variety of problems on northern highways, such as sinkholes, slumps and uneven surfaces. These issues, which typically appear on a scale of years, are projected to cause upward of $50 million in annual damage over the coming decades in each of the Yukon and NWT. 

Climate impacts related to hydrological factors, which often show up on a day-to-day basis, are becoming increasingly expensive, too.

Between 1994 and 2022, costs associated with repairing washouts, clearing snow, removing landslide debris and managing icings – which occur when flowing groundwater freezes into a sheet of ice – rose steadily on Yukon highways, according to research conducted by Astrid Schetselaar as a master’s student at Carleton University.

The Yukon Government’s expenditures on these activities increased by $169,000 per year (in constant 2021 dollars), Schetselaar’s analysis shows.

That may not sound like much, but it adds up, said Chris Burn, a professor at Carleton who oversaw the research. Over 30 years, it amounts to more than $5 million.

From 1994 to 2022, climate-related costs increased from 24 to 43 percent of total maintenance expenditures, excluding camp overheads, the researchers found. Of all the maintenance activities examined, snow removal accounted for the biggest increase in cost. According to Burn, this might be explained in part by an increase in the number of snowy days in the region.

“You have to go out and clear the road more often,” he said.

On the Dempster, snow removal in the Richardson Mountains is one of the main drivers of increasing day-to-day maintenance costs, at least on the Yukon side of the highway. (In the NWT, highway maintenance is contracted out to private companies, making it harder to get a breakdown of costs by maintenance activity, according to Schetselaar and Burn. Cabin Radio reached out to the NWT Department of Infrastructure for this story. In an emailed response, a spokesperson said that climate and economic-related changes have increased operating costs in the region.) 

To manage snow on the highway, contractors and scientists have attempted several different strategies, with varying levels of success. 

For instance, Blake, from LJ’s, said it’s best to avoid creating snowbanks on either side of the road when ploughing, which only promotes the formation of more snowdrifts. Instead, she and her colleagues try to flatten the snow on the sides of the road as much as possible. The technique works fairly well, she said — that is, until hurricane-force winds start to howl.  

Snow fences have also been installed in some locations, although they can only do so much. As a master’s student at Carleton University, Jen Humphries tried setting up snow fences at two spots in Hurricane Alley, with the hope that the fences would help keep snow away from the road. By December of that winter, however, the fences were already buried. 

“In that particular area, the volume of snow is just too high,” said Humphries, who is now a permafrost specialist at the Aurora Research Institute in Inuvik. 

Besides closures, another important side-effect of snow accumulating near the road is that it risks further degrading permafrost, which lies beneath most of the Dempster Highway. Because snow acts as an insulator, a deeper snowpack keeps the ground warmer in winter, making it more susceptible to thaw the following summer. 

Minimizing snow’s insulating effect is therefore appealing. The key is finding an effective way to do it. 

In 2014, researchers tried cutting down shrubs that thrive along the Dempster. These shrubs catch snow, contributing to the formation of drifts. Although removing the shrubs reduced the depth of snow near the road, the treatment had a minimal impact on ground temperatures, they reported in 2023.

“It doesn’t work that well,” said Steve Kokelj, senior permafrost scientist at the Northwest Territories Geological Survey, who was involved in the work. He said the approach might work better farther north, where winters are colder. 

Another approach that has shown some promise involves packing snow down, which makes it more conductive to cold.

In 2020, Land Guardians from the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun compacted snow by driving snowmobiles along a road in the central Yukon. In areas where the snow was compressed, daily ground surface temperatures were 2 to 3C lower on average than in untouched areas. The team’s findings have yet to be published but they were reported in a conference paper shared with Cabin Radio, which will be presented at the International Conference on Permafrost in June.

Reducing ground temperatures by a few degrees might be enough to stabilize permafrost in areas where it would otherwise thaw, according to Burn, who was involved in the work. So far, however, he said there aren’t any plans to use the approach at a larger scale. 

While scientists and maintenance crews work to find better ways to manage snow and stormy weather, costs associated with climate change are expected to keep rising. Last winter’s snow might also bring a fresh set of challenges as the seasons change. 

When I travelled to communities along the Dempster in mid-April, the snow had begun to melt. It ran off roofs in thin streams and filled roadways with puddles and slush. Many residents told me they worried about the possibility of spring flooding and washouts.

With one season’s trials hardly over, they had already begun thinking about the next.