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Since 2003 one of the richest diamond strikes served by this road has been the Diavik Diamond Mine owned by Rio Tinto, a multinational mining conglomerate. At Diavik’s headquarters in Yellowknife, manager Tom Hoefer explained that the Diavik mine yields four to five carats of diamonds per ton of ore, one of the highest grades ever found (the world average is one carat per ton). To get at the diamonds, the company spent $400 million just to dike back an overlying lake that was in the way.382 Together with one of its neighbors, this mine currently generates about half of the NWT’s gross domestic product. But despite its high grade, without the Tibbitt-Contwoyto road, this mine would be uneconomic. “If we didn’t have this winter road we wouldn’t have these mines,” Hoefer told me. “It’s as simple as that.”383 Imagine trying to bring in all the heavy equipment, construction materials, and thousands of tons of cement mix by airplane. It just couldn’t be done.

For every Tibbitt-Contwoyto there are thousands of lesser winter roads vital to some economic activity or another. In Siberia I saw many long piles of deep sand running across the taiga. They are dormant winter roads and will lie there, useless and undrivable, until the deep freeze of winter returns so they can be graded again. Giant north-flowing rivers like the Ob’, Yenisei, and Lena in Russia, and Mackenzie River in Canada become ice highways in winter. In High Level, Alberta, I visited Tolko Industries—a major softwood producer for the U.S. building industry—and learned that their wood harvest relies on a fourteen- to sixteen-week winter road season. To the consternation of the company, that season has been gradually shortening over time. “We will lose our shirt” if the roads go away, their forester told me.384

Most resource extraction operations in the North already face tight profit margins from chronic labor shortages, long distances to market, and an environment that is both too harsh and too delicate. For industries where an entire year’s worth of profit must be made in a matter of weeks, even a few days lost is a serious blow. Because northern climate warming is greatest in winter, it uniquely targets this sector. Warm winters mean shorter winter road seasons and/or lighter allowable loads. Deeper snow means more insulation of the ground, further reducing the depth and hardness of its freezing. For all but the most lucrative operations, many industries will become increasingly uneconomic and finally abandoned.

The significance of this goes beyond the major Ice Road Trucker-type ice highways that are rebuilt in the same place each year. It means reduced access everywhere. Take, for example, off-road oil and gas exploration on the North Slope of Alaska. To avoid damaging thin tundra soil and vegetation,385 this can be done only in winter, when its soft, moist surface freezes hard. There’s simply no other way to drive on this environmentally sensitive ecosystem without tearing it apart. But since the 1970s the North Slope’s permissible off-road travel season has declined from over two hundred days per year to just over one hundred days,386 effectively cutting the energy exploration season in half.

Put simply, this is not a good century to be out working the land in remote interiors of the North. In permafrost, permanent structures will become even trickier to build and maintain than they are now. Despite ways of prolonging the life of winter roads,387 there’s no getting around the fact that milder winters and deeper winter snow will shorten their seasons, making many of them pointless to build for all but the most lucrative projects—the NWT diamonds,388 for example, or natural gas pipelines. Already we see delayed openings and earlier closures harming smaller outfits operating on tight margins.

Extraction industries will favor projects nearer the water. Looking ahead, our northern future is one of diminishing access by land, but rising access by sea. For many remote interior