Entertainment

BACK ON THE ‘ICE ROAD’

INUVIK, NORTHWEST ERN TERRITORIES, CANADA- The second season of “Ice Road Truckers” is going to get really dangerous.

The crew and drivers behind the hit History Channel documentary show – about a group of truck drivers who haul supplies across frozen lakes, rivers and even the frozen Arctic Sea to the most remote outposts in Canada’s west Arctic – have made it to spring time.

In the next month, the temperature will rise from around 40-below zero to a much balmier 30 degrees. It’s a frightening time of year if you spend your days cruising on a road made out of solid ice.

“In another few weeks, we’re going to be riding through [about six inches] of water across an island of ice,” says “Ice Road” legend Hugh Rowland. “A little while after that, the road is just gone.”

Rowland, a tattooed barrel of man whose nickname is The Polar Bear, was the unlikely star of cable TV’s biggest show last summer.

He has been driving the ice roads of the far north for nearly 30 years.

For the second year in a row, he and returning road vets Alex Debogorski, Rick Yamm and Drew Sherwood allowed camera crews to follow them on their treacherous runs across the ice.

Last year the show was based in Yellowknife, a diamond mine boomtown in Canada’s Northwestern Territories.

This year, “Ice Road Truckers” moved 2,400 miles north to Inuvik, a frontier town inside the Arctic Circle and the starting point of an ice road that runs up MacKenzie River through the north’s frigid oil fields and across the polar sea to the remote village of Tuktoyaktuk.

It debuts in June.

The show has also added a few new faces and follows the occasionally bitter rivalry between the Yellowknife drivers and those from Inuvik.

The cameras, although mostly ignored, also occasionally attract unwanted attention.

Drivers were overheard last week on a two-way radio channel grumbling about how “Hollywood” had faked footage of a truck falling through the ice by using dynamite.

In truth, the scene is simply part of the opening of the show and was a miniature model filmed inside a studio.

Still, the new season suffered a major casualty when Debogorski was forced to leave the ice roads in early March after developing heart problems.

Yamm appeared in Inuvik this year with his hair dyed blue, convinced of his own TV star status. The locals quickly dubbed him The Parrot. He hates that.

Sherwood – who has somehow managed to anger everyone – also sees himself as a star, but has taken himself off the ice road. Now he limits himself to odd jobs driving around Inuvik and wants to sell “Ice Road Trucker” hats to tourists.

He was overheard by a reporter last week mumbling that “Ice Road” producers are wasting footage filming the “wrong truckers.”

Rowland remains unaffected. He has still never watched the show that made him a star in the lower 48, he says. The network gave him DVDs of the series – but he gave them away to family members, he says.