WASILLA, ALASKA — What’s in the water in this town?

Until recently, only a handful of southerners even knew about this tiny place, located about six hours of Fairbanks.

Then, about 18 months ago, its former mayor exploded on to the public scene, to become the most-downloaded Republican in history.

Now this.

Hot on the heels of Sarah Palin comes another Wasilla daughter, who we guarantee will be filling screens large and small across the continent.

This one is Ice Road Trucker Lisa Kelly. Some observers have cautioned she’s pretty enough to melt the ice she drives on. 

Kelly’s also, according to the networks’ PR people, Alaska’s state freestyle motocross champion.

Ice Road Truckers of course is the History-Channel show that makes ice-road drivers into heroes with its breathless descriptions of the danger and excitement lurking behind every curve and precipice on the ice roads that serve Arctic communities in the wintertime. 

(Fact is, driving over the ice is one of the safest trucking businesses out there; with darn few curves and even fewer hills or excitement. The trucks run dead slow. As one veteran described it thusly “The tedium is only relieved by the redundancy.”)

But that wouldn’t make for good TV.

Lisa Kelly makes for good TV.

This year will be the second season for the show in Canada (the third, which just wrapped up, Stateside) but Kelly’s first.

Kelly, 28, drives a W900 Kenworth. In real life, she hauls out of Anchorage for Carlile, a family-owned 200-truck fleet outfit with terminals in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Kenai, Kodiak, Prudhoe Bay, Seward, as well as Seattle, Houston and Edmonton.

In as much as she will be a sure-fire-rate-riser on the TV show, Kelly says she even attracts attention doing her regular day job.

“It’s kind of funny," she told the New York Times. “I’ve had tourists stop and take a picture. I pulled over to tighten some belts on my flatbed and I had an audience. I could feel their eyes. It’s fun. I know they’re watching and I just put on a show."

Click here and you’ll get the picture.