They’re the intangible character traits we have all, at one time or another, used to accentuate a resume: able to work unsupervised or in a team environment; proven ability to follow instructions closely; and of course, excellent communication skills.

But if you’re including these attributes on your application to run one of Allen Scraba’s ice-road tractors up in the Arctic, you’d better be sure you can back up every single word.

“For sure. It’s no joke up there,” says Scraba, president of ARS Trucking and Welding. Based out of Edmonton, the company builds, maintains, and hauls freight along ice roads in the Northwest Territories. “There’s no room for plow jockeys here,” he adds, noting that ice-road hauling is one of the most dangerous and highly regulated industries in the country. “If you say you can do something, you better mean it or it can cost you.” It’s unclear whether “cost” refers to the job or something more than your paycheque.

“I remember one guy who wasn’t paying attention. He made it to high ground and says he bent down to pick up a sandwich,” recalls Scraba. “The driver looked up and the next thing he knows he’s head-first into the bush.”

All ended well, but the anecdote is just one example why the driver recruitment process is perhaps the most important aspect of the ice-road business.

RTL Robinson, the largest ice-road trucking outfit in the country, takes great pains in weeding out the north-bound cowboys who view the job as an opportunity for adventure instead of serious work. RTL, based in Yellowknife, grows from a fleet of a couple of hundred trucks in the spring to almost 800 during ice-road season. Recruiting starts in early summer; the number of drivers RTL hires depends on the company’s projections of the local economy for that upcoming winter. “We have to plan carefully in the sense we don’t give too many contracts we don’t need,” says Mike Suchlandt, the company’s human resources director.

Through a recruitment campaign directed all across Canada, RTL receives interest from all walks of life. Drivers with experience in the oilpatch, logging, and mining tend to get the first look, but when those industries are booming, guys with off-road experience are hard to find.

RTL will sometimes recruit workers from other hazardous season-dependent industries, like fishing. Scraba, on the other hand, says some of the best ice-road operators he’s hired are farmers. He likes their work ethic and ability to react and think clearly in tricky situations. “They know the fundamental law of gravity,” he says. “Field workers who pull cultivators routinely have to be able to handle situations like when the equipment starts spinning and goes down. Knowing what to do in situations like that really helps out on the ice roads.”

Professionalism and a positive attitude are priorities, but with applicants from all over the country, aptitude tests are hard to conduct over the phone. The best way to get a fix on a driver’s disposition is during the orientation and training stages, where new hires spend more than a week going over the equipment, convoy procedures, speed strategies, tactics on hills, emergency procedures, recovery and rescue, and first aid.

“Often, just showing them a video of what they’re up against is enough to scare some of them off,” says Suchlandt. “We’ve had some excellent, top-notch drivers come up here and take one trip on the road and say, ‘Nope, this isn’t for me.'”

Scraba says you don’t know how a driver is going to turn out until he’s taken at least one trip on the ice. “We usually know on their first day out on a trip if it’s going to be their last day,” he says.

So what sort of character makes the best ice-road driver? Those intangible qualities are essential. For safety reasons, trucks travel in convoys, so a driver has to be able to work and communicate with other drivers yet still be at ease with the isolation and monotony of nothing but snow ahead at 10 kilometres an hour.

A driver needs to be constantly aware of the changing operating conditions around him. There is a close relationship between the thickness of ice, proximity to land, the gross vehicle weight, the speed, and distance between vehicles. RTL is large enough to have a dedicated team monitoring the conditions on the roads they maintain. But at a smaller company, Scraba, who himself heads out in the lead truck at the beginning and end of each day, says his drivers have to be able to make the right call about the conditions and their ability to travel safely. A miscalculation or lapse in concentration can spell disaster.

“If you have personal problems, or your head isn’t in it,” Scraba says, “stay home.”

Recruiting the best driver for the job isn’t just a cliché when you’re hauling on ice roads. It doesn’t particularly matter where a driver comes from, says Scraba, as long as his will is strong and he has the fortitude to finish what he starts.

He’s even seen a few cowboys that fit the bill, including one adventurous driver who traded the outback for the arctic.

“We had one guy who came from Australia,” Scraba recalls. “Even with all the wilderness over there, he still said he’s never experienced anything like this. I don’t know if he’d even seen snow before coming here, but I have to say, he adapted pretty well.”

Hmm. Ability to adapt to a changing work environment. Try that one on your next resume.Up in the nether-regions of the continent, where cell phones flash the dreaded words “No Signal,” satellite phones are the way to keep in touch.

The most economical approach is to use one of the two low-earth orbit satellite networks — managed by Iridium and Globalstar, respectively. The main difference between the two is how calls are routed. Iridium hops the call from one satellite to another, and, finally, back to a central earth station which directs the call into the PSTN (Public Switch Telephone Network). Globalstar, on the other hand, sends the call immediately to the nearest earth station (up to 2,800 miles away from the caller) and lets the PSTN carry it from there. Although Globalstar requires many more earth stations, the sound delay is minimized because each “hop” on a satellite causes a 20-millisecond delay.

Either way, the strength of a low-earth orbit network is that you don’t drop many calls because there’s usually more than one satellite above you. Unlike high-orbit satellites — which are geo-synchronous, meaning they always appear in the same place in the sky because they orbit the earth at the same speed, and in the same direction that the earth turns — low-earth orbit satellites appear to cross the sky, 15 minutes from horizon to horizon, offering your phone a better target.

There’s also a greater delay in voice transmission when using high-orbit satellites because the distances are so great (20,000 miles up, compared to roughly 900 for low-earth satellites). And, because they require less power to reach low-earth satellites, the latest phones are reasonably sized — only slightly larger than an ordinary cell phone, as opposed to something resembling a suitcase.

As with all satellite technology, you need a line-of-sight to the satellite in order to communicate with it. Once you’ve connected, you have everything from basic voice transmission to a variety of SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Application) applications, including vehicle location and operation statistics (telematics), e-mail, and Internet.

The hardware will cost you about $2,000, and the air-time can be as low as a dollar a minute.

Satellite phones are by no means a necessity in most trucking applications, as they are in, say, the oil and gas exploration industry. But if your work takes you off the beaten path, it’s good to know there are convenient, economical options to keep you connected to the rest of the world.