Ice road trucking it isn’t, but I couldn’t help but notice in opening television coverage of the Winter Olympics, ongoing around Vancouver, B.C., an exceptional shot of a tractor pulling a dump trailer loaded with nothing but pure white snow. That’s right, while the U.S. has had no short supply of the white stuff this year, getting the slopes around Vancouver in working order required a wealth of diesel muscle. This story, in Vancouver’s The Province newspaper, detailed the efforts of truckers and others to move snow from Mt. Allison in Manning Park, a few hours east of the Cypress ski and snowboard venue where Olympic events would take place, and to keep their operations, ongoing for more than two weeks, something of a secret. “We all knew you couldn’t have 32 trucks on the road without every trucker in the country knowing about it,” one driver told the story’s writer, Ian Austin, who tagged the driver’s anonymous identifier with “who said he’d been told he’d be fired if he spoke to the media.” Sheesh…
As that driver went on, “I’ve been in the business 30 years and I’ve hauled just about everything — chemicals, military ordinance — but I’ve never hauled snow unless someone wanted it taken away.” Read on for Austin’s full story via this link. Or click on the thumbnail image here, an accompanying photo taken by The Province’s Ian Smith.
