Never did make it up to the Arctic Circle, though.
I wish he would post his pictures somewhere. I’m sure a lot of them must be fantastic.
-40 is a magical thing, and it's like being on a different planet.
I didn't post all my photos and adventures, but what I do have can be seen here [1]. I've never lived anywhere with more hiking, fishing, camping, biking, hunting, snowboarding, back country snowboarding, winter camping, remote wilderness, white water paddling and all the rest. Unreal.
[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/salmon-fishing-with-bears-in-haine...
(I didn't tag the posts too well, you'll have to click "Next article" at the bottom of each one to keep seeing more adventures through all the seasons)
This might be my most "out of this world" Christmas (and I've had a few!)
What was weird is that the bus I took from Changchun had a digital thermometer up front where you could see it fall from around -25 to -35 during the trip.
My mom was born and raised in Alaska, but Ketchikan is closer to Seattle in climate and distance than anchorage.
The enormity and clarity of what are multiple depths to a lens just can't be captured in a still.
Humanity is doomed. :(
We got an old logging peterbilt from yukon in our shop once. Definitely driven, definitely well maintained. Popping the hood there was a big orange sticker near the radiator warning us "DO NOT FILL UNDER 60C." It stumped us for a bit until we found out truckers in the north sometimes never run engine coolant because it may freeze up. Pretty surreal.
As a European, these stats are nuts to me. No wonder she mentions that drivers chug energy drinks - that can't be a reasonable or safe working time in any industry, much less in one where you're operating heavy machinery. Or do people think we are soft with our 8-9h driving time max per long rest regulations?
Tired truckers falling asleep behind the wheel causing accidents tends to be not appreciated in Europe. And it's a reason that they check this very strictly. I remember when these rules started getting tightly enforced. At the time there were lots of incidents with truckers driving way longer than they should literally falling asleep while driving.
Fatal accident rates with trucks in the US are up in recent years: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/large-t...
"Also in 2021, 117,300 large trucks were involved in crashes resulting in an injury, a 12% increase from 2020. Since 2016, the number of trucks involved in injury crashes has increased 15% and the involvement rate per 100 million large truck miles driven has increased 3% to 36."
Not great statistics.
They could run double crews but you don't get that much consolation sitting in a passenger seat vs a drivers seat.
And honestly, from like a human standpoint - I get that. But these rules are there to ensure their safety as well as the safety of everyone else on the road. Tiredness is a massive factor in accidents, and I'm sure we've all driven a little bit more than reasonable "because I'm almost home". Being a trucker is a profession so it has professional standards.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/LSU/?uri=CELEX:32...
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forc...
Regardless, the beauty is like I have never seen before. Skinny dipping in Arctic was bonus on top.
For good reason.
Braking a heavy truck on a ice road could be a death sentence.
Then again, in general, the interstate highway system in the US was scary, when my family used it for a road trip. I left the experience thinking: "I wish there were more train tracks than roads..."
Out of curiosity, why? Because trucks are permitted in the left lane?
I won't say that Americans are good drivers, but other than the very busiest routes like I-95 through the Northeast Corridor, I also wouldn't call our interstates "scary", even for someone unaccustomed to driving as much as we do. And in major cities, it's less "scary" than "slow due to traffic". Our speed limits are lower, but ignoring the posted limits and just looking at behavior, the speeds aren't that different.
Would a trucker swerve to avoid a pedestrian, or run them over? Would they ram a stalled vehicle off the road at speed?
Struggling to understand the implications of their entitlement.
Also not sure there are any pedestrians lol
I don't live anywhere near the Arctic circle and this is not the case.
https://manhchoh.com/ore-transportation/
https://www.dermotcole.com/reportingfromalaska/2023/8/24/wit...
https://fm.kuac.org/transportation/2023-06-15/kinross-to-lau...
https://www.icelandreview.com/nature-travel/proposed-sand-mi...
If the choice is drinking yourself to death out of boredom, or having a job…
There is also a lot of Alaska. More Alaska than most humans would be able to see in a lifetime of trying.
Alaska State Constitution Article 8 Section 1
It is the policy of the State to encourage the settlement of its land and the development of its resources by making them available for maximum use consistent with the public interest.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/02/17/a-fleet-of-one
The Curve of Binding Energy is a fascinating study of Theodore Taylor, the engineer behind the smallest nuke warhead in the world, and his concerns that terrorists may be able to build warheads themselves.
Pretty much any McPhee book or article is fascinating. His book Oranges is all about farming oranges, processing orange juice so it can sit in refrigerated vats for months (and how it is reconstituted through "flavor packs" that give it back the OJ flavors after long storage) and all kind of other orange stories. No matter what rabbit hole McPhee jumps down, his research and writing are nothing short of engrossing.
It is interesting how fish-out-of-water the story is, given that the author covers that industry.
Yeah, though I bet a tech journalist who sat in on a software product being developed would also be surprised by a lot of things. There's just a big difference between writing about something and doing it.
(Also, that article would be much more boring than this one.)
And I got the sense from that article that truck driving in Alaska is very different than in the lower 48, even to the extent that the driving is different (that bit about shifting into higher gear to go down slopes)
Generally, truckers dealing with often hilariously bad roads. Bogged for days. Sleeping under the trucks and hoping animals don't attack them.
>Exhausted and hungry, I was happy to get to Coldfoot. It’s allegedly the world’s farthest north truck stop.
Coldfoot seems to be on 67*N. This is similar to Kiruna in Sweden and south of Narwik in Norway - town of 15k people. I bet that there are some truck stops there as well :D
Does anyone have any recommendations?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke
I found out about him from HN:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It’s worth tracking down these videos and watching them:
https://www.dickproenneke.com/
Sometimes they show up on YouTube or the Internet Archive.
My grandpa and uncle built a cabin on Twin Lakes over the summers with Dick Proenneke. I've got pictures of them together felling trees and hauling logs to build the cabins. Now, you can only get to the cabins by float plane.
The cabins have been taken over by the State Park now, and they've been restored too. One of their cabins is now the ranger station, and the other is kept as a "stuck in time" snapshot from the 50s and 60s. Pretty neat.
I wonder if airships would be a better solution in terms of lift capacity?
2. Triple trailers? Nice!
That's ~$200k/truck/year of incentive to replace them with auto pilots, when they're good enough. But those drivers do more than drive. Maybe they'll replace one driver per truck with one mechanic per convoy of self-driven trucks.
And an automated truck can spend a lot more time on the road, released from a meager human driver's duty cycle.
It would be more reasonable to build a freight train line than to build self driving tricks that can do what 95% of human drivers can't
If you're a young person at least, don't plan on a long career driving a truck.
