Behind the Scenes at VW’s Under Ice Tiguan Shoot

Every single instruction you’re given before driving out onto a frozen-over lake is terrifying. For real, though. Ignorance is bliss.

Before creeping up to the banks of Fiddlers Lake, on the outskirts of Canada’s Northwest Territorial capitol, Yellowknife, I wasn’t scared at all from the comfort of a new Tiguan. I’ve been on ice and snow before and I’ve seen enough TV to have an unearned confidence when it comes to driving on ice.

Then the experts started talking. Don’t wear your seatbelt (because you don’t want to be trapped if the car goes under), leave your window open (so that the pressure doesn’t block the doors on you), don’t worry if you hear cracking (it’s when the cracking stops that you have start worrying), and if you do go under, look for the dark patch, not the bright.

Oh, good. Because I was worried that all of my life’s experiences would help protect me against a worst-case scenario. But the deep north is an upside down kind of place.

Fiddlers Lake is a tiny body of water that’s hardly suitable for more than one or two cabins. It’s a puddle, really, but it’s where VW decided to film a new ad campaign–whose pictures you might have seen starting to pop up–because it had good ice and some well-connected people lived on its bank.

The idea, I think, was to help earn the Tiguan some SUV bona fides by driving it in some seriously off-road places and they invited me along to help. Which is ironic, because a number of the ice roads are actually real roads run by the Territorial government.

The Dettah ice road, for instance, links the town of Dettah to Yellowknife—cutting travel times in half, as compared to the asphalt road that’s open all year round—and has speed limits and everything. The ice-roads that we always think about when we think about shows like ice-road truckers, though, aren’t government-run. They’re built every winter by the diamond mines to get trucks with hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel and supplies to their outposts every winter.

There are three big diamond mining concerns up in Canada’s territories, and the only time they ever work together is during the construction of the ice road. The reason that the winter is the trucking season for the northern mines is that ice roads save so much money. Flying costs a fortune, and all of your road building materials are already there. All you have to wait for is for a few inches of ice to form naturally, and then you can start pumping water on top of that to build more ice.

Weirdly, you have to plow it, too. Because snow is such a good insulator, it’ll keep the ice thin where it hasn’t been removed, so in many cases just plowing is a start. But that’s annoying because anyone who’s driven in really bad conditions knows that snow has a lot of traction compared to ice. It’s not such a big issue for the truckers, though, because their weight means they can’t drive more than a few miles an hour for fear of creating a bow wave that will break the ice.

For our purposes, we didn’t need any of the heavy duty equipment that the diamond mines use, just a pump that effectively made up of a lawnmower engine and some piping. Dig a hole in the ice, heave on the pull starter a few times, put it in a warm place for a few minutes because the oil got too cold, then try again and shove it in the hole.

[See image gallery at www.vwvortex.com]

This fires off a surprisingly large fountain of very cold water that settles on the ice and can build a road by about two inches (vertically) per day. On the day we arrived, we had about 17-inches of ice to drive on and as little as 14-inches in some places, which sounds like a lot, but according to the Territorial government is only just enough to drive safely on. Something I really wish I’d known before crawling out onto the ice road in an ironically Habanero Orange Tiguan.

Fortunately for my mental well-being, I later found out that 8-inches is plenty for most cars and the lake was small enough that the surface was completely frozen over. Perhaps not evenly, but there was no open water—something it alarmed and amazed me to find out ice-road builders are alright with. Because everything in the north is scary.

See, I’d always assumed that ice roads only worked when land and lake were indistinguishable, hardness-wise. But no. Ice roads aren’t really roads, they’re bridges. The government of the Northwest Territories only requires its roads to be in the middle of a 50-meter wide patch of recommended-thickness ice. Whatever’s outside of that doesn’t matter. That means that, theoretically, you could have a raging current on either side of the road and cars would still be allowed to run—obviously that wouldn’t happen, because common sense would prevail, but the point is that they don’t have to measure the ice outside of that because ice floats and 17-inches will support a passenger vehicle without breaking.

But northerners are surprisingly cavalier in their attitudes towards ice, thickness- and perforation-wise. Despite being in the middle of a conversation with Garry Snyder, from the department of infrastructure, as he was telling us that the roads on Yellowknife Bay weren’t thick enough to drive on, someone in a lifted Bronco flew past us, driving to a houseboat.

This isn’t just the government being cautious, later that same day someone broke the ice, but don’t worry about it because we met him at a restaurant the next day and had a laugh about it (Yellowknife isn’t a very big city).

Even on our little puddle people had a care-free attitude toward ice integrity. We were drilling holes all over the place for the auger, and in order to let our cameraman get under the ice (I’ll come back to this) we cleared a roughly 15-by-15-by-15 foot triangle of ice (I’ll come back to that, too) and started cutting through it with a chainsaw.

“Didn’t you say that ice floats?” Well remembered, and a chunk of ice that size is very unaccommodating. Especially when you’d really prefer not to fall into the water underneath it. Still, instead of trying to lift it out, we decided to push it in, which required the combined effort of four people, rocking the block with sticks until one side was low enough to push under the rest of the ice. Again, sounds simple, but will get you wet which is less than ideal when the weather is dipping below zero.

[See image gallery at www.vwvortex.com]

The really amazing thing is that we sawed the triangle the day before we tried to push it under (we ran out of light on day one, the North, though beautiful, is not very well lit in the winter) and the next day it had frozen back into place, making the previous days work almost completely useless.

But we knew what we were doing on day two and worked quickly, so that our photographer, the brave and intrepid Bill Coltart could get under the ice before the light died. It was at this point that the Tiguan (remember the Tiguan? We started out talking about it) could drive back and forth over him. This triangle, by the way, wasn’t hundreds of feet away from the Tiguan, it was close enough that you could have reasonably driven into it because we didn’t want Coltart to have to do too much swimming.

But, of course, it all turned out fine. And after being tasked with the role of a Zamboni to make some clear ice, I had the pleasure of seeing Coltart under the water. Where do you find a guy crazy enough to jump under the ice and swim under a car? You ask Ice Road Truckers who they used. Hard to argue that he’s not an expert.

My natural first question was “how long can you stay under the water?” To which Coltart gave me an answer that really sums up his character: “I don’t really know.” Of course not. I can now report that he spent at least 15-20 minutes under the ice thanks to his dry suit that covered heated clothing.

The results, naturally are pretty great. The shots that VW got for its efforts were—they think—the first of their kind. Are they worth the terror of the ice and the days of work? Yeah, actually and Yellowknife, for all the Territorial, edge of the world stuff that I’ve been over-emphasizing is actually a very cosmopolitan place, full of some of the friendliest people in the world. And that’s a really great combination. It’s a lot like driving a Tiguan over ice: surprisingly civilized.

[See image gallery at www.vwvortex.com]

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