Plowing through 'Ice Road Truckers,' and The Coven watch party deets
We have a movie picked out for our watch party, folks. I watched The Odyssey this weekend, stumbled down a Christopher Nolan rabbit hole and discovered his third movie is set in Alaska. It's called Insomnia, and stars Robin Williams and Al Pacino. We'll be doing $5 per person at the door, all proceeds will be donated to Clare House with Catholic Social Services. We will have snacks and drinks (no nuts!) and watch at The Coven, feel free to bring a blanket or pillow if you want to get cozy. It's going to be a good time.
The very first scene you get in Ice Road Truckers is what *I* thought was a 2007 CGI job of an 18-wheeler sinking into the ice. Turns out the visual effects artist was just using miniatures.
The majority of seasons are filmed in Canada, but Alaska is in the mix for seasons 3 through 6. Luckily, I didn't have to binge 150 episodes worth of Ice Road Truckers. The show ran from 2007 to 2017, then came back in 2025 for a new season.
The gauntlet of terror begins with a brutal initiation: 56 miles of icy hills and sharp curves. There's a white-knuckle stretch called The Rollercoaster, and a hairpin curve whose name says it all. 250 miles in, the most feared enemy of the road, 4,700-foot Atigun Pass, where avalanches strike at any moment and bury truckers alive, says Thom Beers, narrator and creator of Ice Road Truckers.
... And if the ice on the Dalton Road doesn't kill you, the final stretch over the Arctic Ocean just might.
Hey! Is that a threat?
Dramatic narrator Thom Beers is also the creator of Ice Road Truckers and the following spin-off, IRT: Deadliest Roads. Other shows in his portfolio include Deadliest Catch and Storage Wars.
Each season follows a fleet of drivers and their journeys up north, while simultaneously keeping a tally of how many loads each trucker takes.
The drivers are all majority men except for Maya in season 5, Steph in season 10 and Lisa Kelly in seasons 3-5 and 7-12 (there are also "support personnel" which are effectively friends-of). I tried to find her on Instagram, but definitely followed a bot account, which resulted in about 10 different Lisa Kelly bots trying to follow me.
Shoutout to the Wayback Machine for unearthing Lisa Kelly's website. There's an old Lisa Kelly ice road trucker forum message board that's a fun little time capsule. A treasure trove if you will. The page says that "the most users ever online" was 653. She even had an online shop with t-shirts and hats. Who has some OG Lisa Kelly merch? Quickly!!
On her website, she shared articles she was interviewed for or featured in. She was asked the strangest fan reaction she's received: she said that one guy wanted her to shave her autograph in his chest hair (gag). There's even a 2010 blog post from Wasilla-based photographer Bill Hess about his run in with Lisa on foot – er, hoof.
What I did not know at the time is that she lives right here, in my own neighborhood, Bill wrote. She gained her fame as one of Alaska's Ice Road Truckers, which has evolved to encompass the Deadliest Roads of all the world. Now here Lisa was, riding her horse down the bike trail that passes by Metro Cafe. Would she turn in? Would she pull her horse right up to the drive through window and order hot chocolate for herself and a biscuit for her horse? Lisa Kelly did pull in! And here she is, waiting in line at the drive-through with her friends and horses while Nola delivers an order to the customer ahead of her. Sure enough, the horse ordered a biscuit. "Do we have any horse biscuits?" Nola shouted, "There's a horse at my window who has just ordered a biscuit!"
Lisa was one of the more popular drivers on the show (arguably the most popular). She was dubbed the second most famous woman to come out of Wasilla, AK. Esquire named her the Sexiest Trucker Alive. She even made an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman. I know, I know, you're probably wondering – Sam, where can I buy Lisa's Getty Images photo from her appearance on the Late Show from October 2010? I bought it, so you don't have to (I'm kidding, mom and dad).
(total watch time: 3 days, 6 hours, 28 minutes)
I finally made a watch party schedule, you guys
If you can't make the in-person watch-party on Aug. 9, we'll miss you! The door is always open to join us at our virtual watch parties. We're starting Drag Race Down Under vs. the World this week, but if there's ever a show you want to watch but don't want to get a subscription for, I'm ready to clock in 🫡