Scott Yuill craves adventure, so he was all in when a fellow trucker floated the idea of moving to Yellowknife to find one. For someone raised on a Nova Scotia dairy farm, the North had a certain mystique and it could not get more different than the Tibbitt-to-Contwoyto ice road.

First built in 1982, the road was 400 kilometres long and spanned a series of frozen lakes tracking northeast of Yellowknife, tethering the four diamond mines strung along its course to civilization, if only seasonally. After some genius made a reality television show about ice road truckers and cast the road in a starring role, a northern legend became a global celebrity.

Yuill didn’t need reality TV to reel him in. Hearing the groan of the ice beneath his wheels, watching the Northern Lights shift and dance and bantering with other truckers on the radio deep into the night felt more like a calling than a job.

His buddy felt otherwise and lasted but one winter, but Yuill stuck around and bought his own rig, then two more trucks and later a bar in Yellowknife. On winter nights off, the place would fill up with big spenders who earned a good living from the ice road and the mines along the way.

“What gets me excited is at the beginning of the season when the ice starts to form,” he said.

That sense of anticipation will be hard to come by in the months ahead since the road Yuill came north to drive on 17 years ago will not get built this winter for the first time in nearly half a century and the super El Nino meteorologists are talking about is not to blame.

Instead, three of the four diamond mines the ice road supplied have closed and the fourth is scheduled to wind down ahead of schedule next year due to a global crash in natural diamond prices and a corresponding rise in popularity of lab-grown stones that have all the properties of mined diamonds, but don’t require expensive mines to get them.

The meltdown of the longest heavy-haul ice road on the planet and the industry it supplied comes at a pivotal moment in the North.

Building permanent roads has gone from being a nice-sounding idea that never went anywhere to a national priority. The Arctic Economic Security Corridor (ASEC), a proposed 400-kilometre all-season road running northeast out of Yellowknife, connecting to a second proposed road and, ultimately, to a proposed deepwater port on the Arctic Ocean, has been identified by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Major Projects Office as a nation-building initiative.

But in the meantime, Northerners who are already feeling the pinch of a dying diamond industry are still caught between an ice road that will not get built and a permanent road that is not ready to get built, leaving them to wonder where the metaphorical road leads to next.

“The impact of the mine closures is massive,” Paul Gruner, chief executive of Tlicho Investment Corp., the business arm of Tlicho Nation, said.

How massive? He said try imagining life in Ontario without the steel and automotive industries. Diamond mining by the mid-1990s accounted for at least and often significantly more than 20 per cent of annual gross domestic product (GDP) in the Northwest Territories.

The mines cumulatively spent more than $18.3 billion on territory businesses between 1996 and 2022 and employed about 1,000 Northerners, directly and indirectly, including 250 members of the Tlicho Nation.

A thousand workers might not sound like a lot, unless, of course, those folks live in a region where the total population is 40,000. Mining-sector jobs typically pay six-figure salaries, a big step up from some of the alternatives, such as jobs related to tourism.

Gruner said he’s somewhat “terrified” by the present stuation, but also “excited” for the future.

Tlicho and Yellowknives Dene First Nation are project leads on ASEC in partnership with the Northwest Territories government. There has been some wrangling over the road routing and some tweaks had to happen to account for caribou herds, but agreement was reached in August on a proposed 30-kilometre-wide road corridor. It is not the final route, but it is a start.

Roads are not the only game in town. The Canadian military is projected to spend as much as $8 billion to build a forward operating base in Yellowknife beginning in 2030, much of it centred around the city’s airport and involving the construction of everything from runway extensions to barracks. A hydro expansion is also in the Major Projects Office works, as is the MacKenzie Valley Highway.

In the interim, Gruner said people need to eat, but where things could get complicated is a scenario where workers can’t find work in N.W.T. today and are not able to access the necessary training for the jobs of tomorrow.

The region would then risk losing its workforce to projects elsewhere in Canada — say, Western pipeline construction — before the real work on the roads, bases and everything else begins.

“We are not going to be winning if three years from now, when all these new opportunities start ramping up, we don’t have the people and the businesses required to support them,” Gruner said.

Complicating matters is that sticking to the plan and a projected timeline have also not been a Canadian strength historically.

For example, the Ingraham Trail, an all-season stretch running 70 kilometres east of Yellowknife and ending at Tibbitt Lake, was seen as a shining example of what Canadians could accomplish when it was built in the 1960s.

But the road wasn’t completed as originally intended, which was to loop around Great Slave Lake and give mining companies an economical means to get at the territory’s riches.

Over time, the terminus of the stalled road project became the start of a world-famous ice road, as well as a visible reminder that building all-season roads in the North is not a new idea and the natural resource riches that excited Canadians back in the day are still in the ground.

“You have all these maps, with all these little hot spot dots on them, showing where you have known huge gold reserves, copper, lithium, zinc — all these different projects — but unless you are actually providing a business case to help make them accessible, they are going to sit there,” Caroline Wawzonek, N.W.T.’s minister for energy, infrastructure and supply chains, said.

Originally from Calgary and a lawyer by training, she took the “road less travelled” and moved to Yellowknife when the geologist who became her husband had an opportunity for work. They bought a canoe in their first year there nearly two decades ago and now have two canoes, three snowmobiles, multiple paddleboards and two children.

Ask around Yellowknife, she said, and plenty of non-indigenous residents tell a similar story: they came for an adventure and stayed. But what feels different today, she said, is the sense of what the future might look like now that the federal government has caught the adventure bug, too, and seems keen on building big things in the region.

It is a sharp contrast to the days not so long ago when a very important government person from Ottawa would arrive in Yellowknife, or someplace nearby, throw on a parka for a photo-op and, Wawzonek said, “notionally plant a flag, just to remind Canada that half their landmass is in the North.”

Now, when she travels south to Ottawa for meetings, the federal government wants to know how fast the territory and its Indigenous partners can get the roads built.

“If you look at a map, it should be painfully obvious that we are desperate to connect the North to the rest of the country,” she said.

If that happens, a viable business case can be made to start turning all the mineral reserve hot spot dots on the map into mines. However any mine that is much more than a stone’s throw from the highway may require an ice road and engineers with the skills required to build it.

Al Fitzgerald could be retired by then, but there are only a handful of people worldwide who know as much about building ice roads as the 57-year-old these days. He got into the industry after getting out of the Canadian Armed Forces. He knew “a guy who knew a guy” who hired him to be the project manager on the Tibbitt-to-Contwoyto ice road, also known as the TCWR.

“So few Canadians can appreciate the scale and magnitude of it,” he said. “We are talking thousands and thousands of truckloads, mobilizing every winter up to these diamond mines.”

Now a freelancer with his own firm, Alietum Ice, Fitzgerald started on the TCWR in 2007. Eventually, his “nerdy” engineering-curiosity streak fully kicked in, and he built an ice track for several winters and would have trucks run across it. He drilled into the ice to determine its “characterization” and to quantify the “maximum” stress the ice could support before it began to crack and break.

One takeaway, broadly speaking, was that one-metre-thick ice can support extremely heavy loads rolling across it. His personal observation, having worked on the TCWR for 19 years, as well as several other ice-related projects across Canada, is that ice roads are not about to become extinct — unless you are trying to build one in downtown Toronto.

An all-season road from Yellowknife to the Arctic Ocean is a great idea, Fitzgerald said, but it is also a massive undertaking and should be conceived as having a 30-to-50-year time horizon, with a price tag that presumably will run into the many billions.

“There is a long, long road ahead,” he said.

The TCWR takes six weeks to build and has an annual construction and operating budget of $25 million. Its yearly existence has helped make Canadians the go-to experts in ice road construction and safety.

A permanent road to the Arctic Ocean, with a bunch of 100-kilometre ice road branches to access the mines of the future, would not require trying something new, but could draw upon know-how Canadians know best.

“Winter roads can be involved in massive, massive projects and they can be done safely, predictably and often less expensive than many other options in the short term,” he said.

Fitzgerald is not quite yet done with the TCWR. Even a closed diamond mine will require an ice road to haul any salvageable equipment and material out of it. He expects, after a year’s hiatus, that the TCWR has a few more winters left to run before it is gone for good.

In short, he is not ready to say goodbye, and neither is Yuill, the ice road trucker, who now finds himself on thin ice financially. In a good season, running his three trucks across the ice can bring in as much as $240,000 after expenses.

Other truckers he knows are selling their rigs and he has been thinking hard about selling his bar. He has some snowplow contract work around Yellowknife, but it is not the same as getting to the end of Ingraham Trail and turning his wheels onto Tibbitt Lake.

“I love the adventure of it,” he said. “It is still the old-school way of trucking: people look after one another on the ice.”

• Email: joconnor@postmedia.com