CAR Magazine is well known for travelling to the ends of the world on epic road trips – and in the new May 2010 issue of CAR, out on 21 April, we drove along a frozen river in Canada to one of the most remote spots in the motoring world. As part of the build-up, we asked our readers to guess where we’d been and you can read our clues in the story below. Mules and Batty won special spot prizes for guessing correctly where we drove to and for making us laugh, respectively!
And now the subscribers’ copies of CAR have been dispatched, we can confirm the venue for our latest epic road trip: a frozen river in Canada, that for four months a year links Canada’s northernmost town, Tuktoyaktuk, to the outside world. It lies within the Arctic Circle and proved a spectacular proving ground for the Jeep Wrangler in tough-as-old-boots Rubicon spec. Read the full, amazing 10-page adventure in the new May 2010 issue of CAR.
DAY 1 CLUE
When I took this picture, the temperature had plummeted to
-27ºC, cold enough to freeze the oil in the Jeep Wrangler Rubicon’s sump and gearbox solid. I has been driving for five hours without seeing another living soul, driving to a town built on stilts above the permafrost, a town with just a few hundred inhabitants, no beer but plenty of beluga whale blubber.
DAY 2 CLUE
It may be frost-bitingly cold here but the people still believe in the heat of hell – there are four churches in this town that cater for every denomination. Other architectural oddities include a remote-controlled Distant Early Warning outpost. A throwback from the Cold War, it and the others that ringed the Artic Circle kept a close eye on pesky Tu-16 Badger bombers.
DAY 3 CLUE
The hotel for our first night in this Arctic wilderness looks like an oversized trailer home, its stilts giving it a dash of working North Sea oilrig. Like a school dormitory it has a long list of rules – no drink, no drugs, no smoking and a 23:00 curfew top the list. Warm, characterless and functional, with mouse-fur thin carpets, prefab walls, communal ablutions and sandpaper towels, it costs an eye-watering £260 a night…
DAY 4 CLUE
To really get a sense of the scale of this vast and untouched land we took to the skies in a helicopter. Well, I say we, but I mean ballsy photographer John Wycherley who clamped himself into the chopper open side door and leaned out into the -40ºC slipstream to capture this territories dramatic monochrome beauty. The feeling has only just returned to the tips of his fingers now, three weeks after the flight. Seriously… Watch John take off in our hastily grabbed cameraphone video clip in the video player below.