Shell ROTELLA Takes On Canada's Ice Roads
50-ton payloads. 430-hp engines. Four feet of gently shifting ice. Welcome to Canada?s ice roads, 800 miles of frozen ribbons carved across the lakes and tundra of the rugged Northwest Territories, and the latest testing ground for Shell ROTELLA® T.
At 10 mph, your engine strains. At 15 mph, it sinks.
There?s no room for the unprepared here. Not in the face of howling winds and temperatures that warm to minus 40º. The urge is to get off the ice as quickly as possible. The reality is, anything over a crawl can send a rig crashing through the surface and to the bottom of some of the deepest lakes in the world.
For the two months a year that they exist, these brittle roads are lifelines connecting remote Arctic villages with civilization. They begin where the pavement ends in Hay River and head north to where the world ends in towns only the locals can pronounce. The trucks that drive them bring thousands of times the amount of fuel and supplies that seaplanes and dog sleds could ever carry. And it?s only a matter of time before the roads and the ice melt away for another year.