To Tuktoyaktuk on Toyo's

by

Words by Wes Kirk @travalanding

Back in 2018, I started dreaming about driving up to Northern Canada after finding out about the new road being built between Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk. In my early 20’s I had made plans to drive all the way there on the ice roads, just camping out of the back of whatever vehicle I might have when I could finally make the trip happen. I eventually saved up the cash but didn’t have a decent vehicle. It was time to pull the pin and buy something new. After months of research, I went out on a limb and purchased what I figured, was a very unconventional overland truck. Down to the local Ford dealer I went and ordered a 2019 Ford Transit T-250 van. In March of 2019, it finally arrived. A base model van, with no options, a naturally aspirated V6, 4.10:1 differential and a completely empty interior. A perfect blank canvas for building a suitable overland vehicle.

One of the first things I noticed about the van was how terrible the tires were. On wet grass, or a little mud, they would lose traction and start to spin, and it felt like you were floating on marbles when driving on gravel. Something a little taller and skinnier should fix the problem! The common trend is for wide aggressive tires, but I’ve noticed in my own experience and adventure style, a narrower tire does better 90% of the time. Even physics suggests that this is true, although wider tires definitely offer advantages in some terrain.

One thing I do when I’m building a vehicle, is I plan performance based on average use. If 90% of my driving is highway and backroads, and 10% is trails, then I’m not going to build it for the 10%. Even though a vehicle looks cool with all the gear hanging from it, sometimes it’s just not practical. The same applies for tires. Big, chunky, knobby tires, look aggressive, and can inflate your ego, but they also deflate your fuel economy and drain your bank account pretty quickly. For this reason, I didn’t mind bypassing the cool factor, and buying something that will serve 90% of my driving needs. When I realized the factory tires on my van didn’t even fulfil 50% of my needs, I gave them the boot.

I was able to narrow down my top choices after a couple months of research and conversations with different people. My own experience as a tire guy and red seal certified mechanic narrowed it down even more to Toyo or Yokohama. Ok Tire in Campbell River has been good to my family and I for multiple generations, and they’ve been run by the same family for multiple generations as well, so I trust their advice. Wanting to see what they would have to say, I went in with a simple question. “I’m driving the Dempster highway this summer and don’t want to have any flats, what would you suggest? They confirmed that the Toyo Open country AT/2 would get the job done, so I purchased them and mounted them on the van the next day.

First impressions. Even though they were mounted on the factory steel wheels, they balanced out evenly and hardly over two ounces. This usually tells me a lot about the build quality of the tire. Bigger tires can often require more weight but as my tires were 225/75R16, I knew what I was seeing was fairly appropriate. I took them out on the highway and gravel roads right away. Not noisy at all on-road, and on the logging road, they gripped better than the stock tires and the van felt more planted. A narrower tire tends to cut through the marbles and down to the hard pack better than a wider tire. This is where physics comes in. The narrower tire has more pounds per square inch of tire in contact with the ground, which has a benefit in loose surface driving. It’s not beneficial for all types of driving but it is what I need for the areas I explore. In the months to follow, I thoroughly tested the tires to find the best tire pressures for different surfaces and got a rough idea of what I might expect from them on the trip up to Tuktoyaktuk.

August 18th finally arrived and early in the morning I picked up a good friend and we began the journey from Campbell River to Port Hardy to catch the ferry to Prince Rupert. We would be taking the Stewart-Cassiar Highway up to the Alaska Highway, then jump on the Klondike Highway in Whitehorse, driving it until we reached the beginning of the Dempster Highway.

The Dempster Highway can be described very simply as, entirely unpredictable. In its entire length we experienced rocks, shale, mud, washboard, hard pack, freshly graded loose gravel, and what felt like an ancient cobble road. The cobbled section was found in an area where the road followed the ridge line of the hills and the high arctic winds blew the gravel off the road, revealing the hard-packed stones below it. Bone rattling. Washboard is easier to drive on as for the most part lower tire pressures and proper speed smooths them out. Not this surface. Multiple times I pulled over to deflate the tires a little more till I reached tire pressures of 25 psi on the front, and 30 on the back. The factory tire pressures being 50 psi front and 70 in the back. This wasn’t the worst section of road yet.

After 10 days on the road, we reached our destination; the cold and now rainy, Tuktoyaktuk. It was a spectacular drive through an other worldly landscape. When you drive far enough north, Canada’s Boreal forest disappears into the expanse of the Tundra. Trees vanish entirely and you’re left with a vast expanse of rolling hills and low-lying shrubs. The end of August is already autumn for those living up north, which means the tundra is a sea of oranges, yellows, and burgundies with every shrub displaying its fall colours.

It was sad to turn around at the end of the road. I wanted to stay longer but with jobs and families to return to, we did a 180 and headed south having visited the farthest north you can drive in Canada. Then it began to rain. When it rains up north everything turns into mud pretty quickly. I ran into the owner of a Pinzgauer at a car show the month before and he told me about what he encountered on his trip to Tuk. Mud that was 60 cm (2 ft) feet deep and motorcycles stuck on the side of the road trying to make some headway but couldn’t.

I wondered if we would run into the same and hoped that the Toyo tires would do the trick to get us through as yes, the Transit is a 2WD vehicle. Two days later, we received our answer. In the section of road between Fort McPherson and Eagle plains, we encountered the worst mud I have ever seen on a road considered to be a highway.

Not quite 60 cm deep, but thick none the less. I found the van operated better with the traction control turned off, which allowed for enough wheel spin to clean the mud out of the tires. The van performed stupendously with the tires, even clawing its way up a steep muddy hill. 4WD would have been more appropriate for those conditions, but we made it through nonetheless with big childish grins on our faces. For me, that’s the fun kind of driving.

Months later, I still find mud leftover from that drive north, caked to another hidden part of the chassis. They say to bring souvenirs home, but that’s not quite what I was expecting. I’ll tell you what I did bring home though. A set of Toyo tires without a chip or mark in them, without a blowout or patch needed. This was due in part to adjusting tire pressures appropriately, another part was keeping my speed down, but mostly it’s down to how good Toyo’s Open Country AT/2’s are made. They are a fantastic all terrain tire that can handle the tough 10% of the driving I do. They are perfect for an overland vehicle and exceeded my expectations. I have over 20,000 kms on the tires and they still look brand new, just waiting for my next adventure, whenever that may happen.

Let’s keep dreaming, planning and saving for that next adventure. It’s a big beautiful world out there just waiting to be explored.