If you’ve got a child between the ages of one and five at home, odds are you’ve heard the song The Wheels on The Bus ad infinitum, or at least ad nauseum. Here’s a new line for you: the people on the bus go up the side of a mountain, at a 60% gradient, using monster truck tires. Oh, the people on the bus go up the side of the mountain, all day long.
I apologize if that tune is now going to bounce around in your skull all day. Try humming Mahna Mahna and see what happens.
Welcome to the Brewster Ice Explorer, a fifteen-metre-long multi-passenger behemoth that looks like Grave Digger had an illicit affair with a tour bus. It’s a beast, standing just under four metres high, and fitted with six gargantuan Goodyear Terra tires, each one over one and a half metres in diameter.
Ice Explorer Bus
Supplied, Foremost
Taking a ride will cost you a bit more than the pocket change of your downtown commuter transit, but then, this bus goes places your average forty-eight window coupe can’t. Shale, sand, mud bogs, ice, and snow are no problem for the Ice Explorer, which is capable of ferrying fifty-six passengers through the stunning scenery of the Rocky Mountains. The iPhones on the bus go click-click-click.
There are just twenty-three of these machines in the world, including a customized one permanently located at McMurdo base in the Antarctic. That particular beastie is modified to carry more cargo than passengers, and is an integral part of the working research station.
The other twenty-two buses are located in Banff, Alberta, where they are in near-constant use ferrying tourists deep into the Canadian wild, right out onto the Athabasca Glacier. While the historic Red Jammers of Glacier National Park in Montana tour only when the weather allows, the Brewster buses are built to handle almost any kind of conditions. Of course they are – they’re made just down the road in Calgary, by a company that can boast a half-century of excellence in conquering Canada’s toughest terrain.
Early ice fields tour buses were a bit more humble.
Supplied, Bombardier
The snow bus isn’t a new invention at all. In the 1930s when the snows would come to the prairies, even the horse-drawn cutters – sledges made with on-board wood stoves – could sometimes be stranded by marching drifts. As a result, those small farming communities not directly connected by the railway simply burrowed in for the winter and stayed put.
But what about emergencies? As the motorized vehicle became more common, Model Ts were pressed into service with skis for steering and chained twin wheels out back, but from Quebec came an even better solution. After experimenting with stuff like an insanely-hazardous-looking propeller-driven toboggan, Joseph-Armand Bombardier came up with the design for the half-track B-7 of 1939.
The B-7 and the B-12 that followed it were utilitarian people carriers, and they encompassed a number of innovations from solid wheels (less likely to get packed with snow) to a revolutionary sprocket and wheel track system. However, it’s not the snows of Quebec, but the swampy muskeg of Northern Alberta that gave rise to the company that makes today’s modern snow bus.
Guests at Columbia Icefield – enjoying the view.
Supplied, Brewster
The Leduc No. 1 strike in February of 1947 heralded in an age of oil and gas exploration, but the terrain in which many of the deposits were located wasn’t at all suitable for conventional transportation. Boggy, glutinous, marshy ground known as muskeg covered much of the North, and big trucks simply got swallowed up.
Enter one Bruce Nodwell, prairie boy and inventive genius. Born in 1914 on a homestead in Saskatchewan to a father who first ran grain elevators, a hardware store, and then a Dodge dealership in North Battleford, SK, Nodwell grew up around machinery in a time when you had to make do with what was on hand. At the height of the Great Depression, he became a registered electrician, and took odd jobs all through the prairies, finally settling in Calgary. To give some idea of the perseverance required to succeed, the service station he built with his brother had to be made using reclaimed nails from the previous structure, each straightened painstakingly by hand.
Ice Explorer Bus
Brendan McAleer, Driving
Nodwell had a knack for the practical improvement of existing processes, and soon had patents for a number of oil-and-gas innovations, including a machine for wrapping pipes with tar paper. His reputation for problem-solving spurred Imperial Oil to contract him to build two vehicles for crossing the muskeg. These early models weren’t very successful, but Nodwell soon came up with his own design.
This tracked vehicle, called the Nodwell 110, is as much a part of Canadian history as the Bombardier, though it is not as well known. Fitted with extra-wide tracks, it could haul up to 5000kgs and essentially conquered the world’s toughest and most hostile terrain, from frozen Alaska to the Russian steppes to Iran and South America.
Ice Explorer Bus
Supplied, Brewster
For his various efforts in unlocking the Canadian North, Nodwell received the Order of Canada in 1970, and has a mountain in the Antarctic named for him. The 110 was immortalized in 1996 on a commemorative stamp, and there’s also a Nodwell Lake in the Northwest Territories, named after one fell through the ice and sank. Because Nodwell anticipated this sort of incident, he’d built in a rooftop escape hatch, and the entire crew survived.
The Nodwell 110 is still in use today, constructed by the Foremost company in Calgary, AB. Foremost was founded in 1965 by Nodwell Sr. and his son Jack, and now also incorporates several other companies dealing in heavy industry. They are the manufacturers of the Terra Bus, the vehicle used by Brewster as their Ice Explorer.
Each Ice Explorer takes ninety days to assemble, and is custom-built to order. Some are wheelchair accessible, despite their great height, and while most were originally fitted with an 8.5 litre four-cylinder Detroit Diesel Series 50 engine making 250hp (and colossal torque), the fleet is now being converted over to a Mercedes heavy diesel making 330hp@2200rpm and 1000lb/ft of torque from 1300-1600 rpm.
Originally powered by a monster 8.5 litre diesel four-cylinder, these buses can handle a steep 60% grade.
Supplied, Brewster
Transferred through a 6×6 all-wheel-drive, the Ice Explorer’s top speed is only 40km/h, but it can ford streams up to 1.18M in depth. It can handle a 30% side gradient, or crawl straight up a 60% grade, and average fuel consumption seems reasonable despite its 25,000kg curb weight, at 9.67L per hour of operation.
Even though it looks like the sort of machine that’d be happiest crushing subcompacts underfoot while an over-the-top announcer growls something like, “You’ll pay for the whole seat – but you’ll only use the eeedgggge!”, the Ice explorer actually treads quite lightly. It looks like Grave Digger, but those enormous Terra tires are soft and balloonlike, impacting the fragile terrain hardly at all.
Tours run every 15-30 minutes from the Columbia Icefield Glacier Discovery Centre, as a cost of just under $50 for an 80-minute tour. It takes a team of five dedicated mechanics to keep all 22 buses on the road – or rather, off the road – and the rugged terrain occasionally results in some welding repairs being required. Other than that, the Ice Explorers may be driven by anyone with a Class 2 license, just like any other bus.
It’s a quintessentially Canadian vehicle, massive in size, capable of handling everything you can throw at it, tested by hostile terrain, yet careful towards its environment and eager to showcase the best parts of this country to the world. And, should Earth ever be hit by a zombie apocalypse, you know what the number one tourist destination will be: the zombies under the bus go squish-squish-squish, all day long.
