North always North to the Arctic

They fought their way north day by day the temperatures dipped into the minus 70 below range and the engines on the big diesels were left running 24 hours per day, the drivers would have to fuel up and check the oil levels with engines running all this after 15 or more hours of driving, the favorite saying when they were awakened in the AM was (it sure did;nt take long to spend the night here). The axels on the big trailers gave them a lot of trouble with the massive loads they were carrying and the extreme tempertures they were plagued by breaking apart and after this occured several times they had to replace many axels and all of them on the rigs that were carrying the 300,00 lb. plus loads, this was a major setback as they had to fly the axes in and then replace them under very adverse conditions, the men never backed off from whatever challenge confronted them, I found this to be true over many of my ice road trips with problems we faced, such as rigs slideing off the trail and having to be totally unloaded to get them back on track to mechanical problems of all kinds, the word quit was never used and although we were forced to turn around and go back to our starting point on occasion we always gave it another try and in the end we got the job done. Continued