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Ice Road Truckers

US-Canadian reality television series

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 20, 2026
Entity authorityQ702432 ↗
Source-derived summary

Ice Road Truckers (commercially abbreviated IRT) is a reality television series that originally aired on History Channel from 2007 to 2017 until returning from hiatus in 2025. It features the activities of drivers who operate trucks on ice roads crossing frozen lakes and rivers, in remote territories in Canada and the U.S. state of Alaska. Seasons three to six also featured Alaska's improved but still remote Dalton Highway, which is mainly snow-covered solid ground.

History

In 2000, History aired a 46-minute episode titled "Ice Road Truckers" as part of the Suicide Missions (later Dangerous Missions) series. Based on Edith Iglauer's book Denison's Ice Road, the episode details the treacherous job of driving trucks over frozen lakes, also known as ice roads, in Canada's Northwest Territories. After 2000, reruns of the documentary were aired as an episode of the series Modern Marvels, instead. Under this banner, the Ice Road Truckers show garnered very good ratings.

In 2006, the History Channel hired Thom Beers, owner of Original Productions and executive producer of Deadliest Catch, to create a series based on the Ice Road book. Shot in high-definition video (although the season ended before History HD was launched in the US), the show "charts two months in the lives of six extraordinary men who haul vital supplies to diamond mines and other remote locations over frozen lakes that double as roads".

The show ran for 11 seasons until 2017.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ice Road Truckers” as uS-Canadian reality television series. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2007, 2017, 2025, 2000—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Road, Truckers and US-Canadian can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as uS-Canadian reality television series. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q702432. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007, 2017, 2025 and 2000.

Critical limits

Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Ice Road Truckers”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Ice Road Truckers primary sources, Ice Road Truckers archive and Road research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Ice Road Truckers”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Ice Road Truckers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.