I’ve been getting plenty of ‘winter’ lately Mike. I’m in the same boat you were, now it’s winter I get to go to al the places the fair weather drivers are too scared to go when it starts snowing 
It makes me laugh really, they’ve had bad winters their whole life and the boy from SE London has to show em how it’s done 
The last couple of trips have been a bit naughty, coming back from California I was in the middle of a storm that dropped 16" of snow in the mountains of Idaho and Montana, a total white out at times and I still did the trip in the same time I do it in the summer, just with a little bit more puckering of the arse The trip I’ve just finished, from Toronto to Calgary was worse though, I had ice rain and then a foot of snow as I went around Lake Superior, had the diff lock in most of the way as I was spinning the wheels at 90km/h on the level bits 
I spent most of the time on the wrong side of the road, not sliding, but passing the idiots with their hazard lights on in a 20mph convoy, there’s driving slow and being careful and then there’s driving too slow and being dangerous, half of them shouldn’t be allowed to drive anything bigger than a Corgi toy If it was being filmed for IRT they would convince you that I was seconds away from catastrophe, in reality it was easy enough, apart from the bits where I was wheel spinning, I was on the cruise at the speed limit 
The whole IRT thing is totally hyped up, the first season when they were on the lakes was interesting, nowhere near as glamourous as they make it out to be, but driving over a few feet of ice on top of a mile deep lake is a bit different. Different, but boring as hell, doing 20km/h for hours on end as you drive between a line of cones with nothing to see but white is not that exciting.
Since then they’ve been in Alaska, from what I see, that’s no different to driving anywhere else in the mountains in winter time. the same applies to the current season and the winter roads, they make it look so dramatic, yet in reality it’s not at all, it’s hard work and the roads are just tracks through the woods that can only be used when it freezes, but it’s not glamourous at all, in fact most of the blokes up there are farmers or builders the rest of the year, they can’t work the land or dig holes, so they go trucking. The trucks they use are nothing special either, just the old crap that has come off the main fleet, they may put a couple of extra welds here and there to stop things falling off, but other than that they’re just semi retired old junkers.
Of course you’ll hear stories about cutting down trees to make bridges and killing an animal to cook over the campfire, it may have been like that years ago, but nowadays it’s all go go go, there’s a certain amount of stuff to go up there and a certain amount of time to do it in. They do earn a premium for doing it, but not that much, not with all the farmers and builders up there, a couple of mates of mine reckon that if you work it out by the hour, they’re better off doing regular work, they may bring home a bit more, but they work very very long hours to do it 
