Ice Road Truckers, one of the best-known reality TV shows to have featured the Northwest Territories, is returning for the first time since 2017.
The History Channel will air a new season of the show – its 12th – starting on October 1.
“Fearless truckers return like never before to the treacherous terrain of icy roads and frozen lakes in northern Canada, delivering crucial supplies and necessities to isolated communities,” The History Channel stated in a press release without specifying the precise locations of filming.
The NWT is not understood to be among locations coming up this season, though that could not be immediately confirmed.
A 40-second trailer for the season mentions Muskie Creek Ltd, a trucking company that serves northern Manitoba and Ontario.
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In the past, the show was reportedly banned from filming on at least one of the territory’s winter roads – the Tibbitt to Contwoyto road, which leads from Yellowknife to the NWT’s diamond mines.
Ice Road Truckers’ first season was filmed on that road, but the mining companies who pay for the road’s annual construction decided producers would not be welcome back.
“It’s a TV series built around this romantic notion of people making a dash for money and doing it at a very high risk,” Tom Hoefer, then a spokesperson for the Diavik mine, told the CBC in early 2008.
“It’s very far, far from the reality of how we operate the road, and so we just didn’t see any value in continuing that message.
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“Quite frankly, we thought that there was a safety risk created by having a number of drivers who were constantly under the scrutiny of a camera – basically on stage all the time as they were driving – and it sort-of diverted their attention from the job at hand.”
That didn’t stop the show from finding other locations. The second season used the winter road between Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk (which was later turned into an all-season highway) and nine other seasons were filmed in various places before Ice Road Truckers went on hiatus in November 2017.
“With a winter window shorter than ever and no time to waste, these drivers risk everything to haul in a lifeline of goods while chasing big paydays before the opportunity melts away under their chained tires,” is how The History Channel bills the show’s comeback – referring in part to the effect of climate change on ice road seasons.
From 2021: Climate change ‘threatens viability’ of winter road to mines
Producers said some veterans of past seasons would return, naming Todd Dewey and Lisa Kelly as drivers who came back for season 12.
There was no mention of Alex Debogorski, the Yellowknifer who was the only driver to star in all 11 seasons of the show’s initial run.
