Todd Dewey’s Heart‑Stopping Backward Slide on Ice Road Truckers Season 12 ❄️🚛

In the bone‑chilling dawn of October 8, 2025, amid the frozen wastelands of Northern Manitoba, Todd Dewey—a seasoned veteran of ice‑road trucking—found himself in a nightmare no driver ever wants to endure.

As the lead driver for the Muskie Creek Ltd.convoy on the newly revived season of Ice Road Truckers, Dewey had grown accustomed to perilous runs.

But nothing in his decade of experience prepared him for the moment his trailer started to roll backwards, hurtling toward a drop‑off on the infamous Asheweig Road.

 

 

Season 12 of the series premiered on October 1, 2025.

The morning began routine: Todd fired up his rig at the Muskie Creek staging camp just east of Hudson Bay and confirmed radio contact with operations manager Bill Danh: “Load secure, engine warm, let’s move at 0500.”

The assigned cargo: heavy drilling equipment bound for a remote mining outpost, loaded to the max.

The weather forecast indicated ‑32 °C and gusting winds.

Dewey drove his first leg without incident.

Then, crewing past kilometer 54 on the thin ice route, his trailer’s rear axle locked momentarily—likely due to hidden slick patches of black ice.

He radioed: “I’m sliding… trailer’s gone loose.”

Crew tracking cameras captured the moment the wheels broke traction, and the rig began drifting backward.

Todd’s voice broke over the comms: “No damn way—she’s sliding.”

He engaged the engine but the trailer pivoted slowly, the cab now pointed dangerously toward the edge of the ice.

The convoy behind radioed in alarm, “Todd, you’re going down!” At that moment, the grouser on the rear wheels began to falter, ice cracked beneath the weight, and the trailer’s rear loaded shoved the entire rig into a near staggering 15‑degree tilt.

The escape cable had been hooked but built for forward pulls—not a runaway reverse slide.

“I froze that moment,” Todd recounted later.

“Everything narrowed down: the load, the edge, the crack in the ice.

I don’t know how fast we were going backwards—maybe ten miles per hour—but it felt like a second forever.”

He hit the emergency air‑brake.

The screech of vanishing tread echoed across the lake surface.

At that exact instant, the winch snagged on the anchor point—the only thing preventing the trailer from plunging into the razor‑thin spillway beneath the ice.

“It stopped,” Todd said, voice low.

“Stopped at the edge.

That’s the closest I’ve ever come.”

The footage aired during Episode 3 (“Ice and Fire”) which aired October 15, 2025.

The production team captured Todd walking away from his truck, knees shaking, breath visible in the air.

Crew members later told producers the filming atmosphere turned “tenser than ever.”

The host caption frame read: “One misstep, one second, and everything changes. ”

Back at the Muskie Creek debrief, around 3 p.m.

that afternoon, Todd addressed his team: “We challenged the load limit, ignored that slick ridge, and I paid for it.

But we didn’t lose the rig.

We didn’t lose a man.

That’s the win today.”

He then turned to Bill Danh and said, “We revise the checks.

We’ll no longer assume boss‑runs are safe just because we’ve done them.”

The operation announced internally that load weights would be reduced by 8% on that route and a new pre‑run ice‑thickness drone scan would be mandatory.

Several industry watchers pointed out this near‑miss marks a turning point for the show itself.

After eight years off the air, the return of Ice Road Truckers hinges on escalating danger and higher risk.

Todd’s crisis plays into that narrative—but for him, this was no stunt.

He later told a longtime trucker friend: “The camera’s on—but the ice doesn’t care.

This one felt too close.”

During a post‑incident interview in Winnipeg on October 10, Todd admitted for the first time: “I was complacent.

I’ve done this long.

I ride with confidence.

That bridge froze my ego.”

When asked how he felt standing there after the slide: “I thought ‘This is it’—and then I didn’t.

When you walk away, you remember the numbers that didn’t add up.

Weight, speed, ice friction—the sum mattered.”

It’s not the first time Todd has faced extreme hazard, but the backwards slide is arguably his most harrowing turn.

Earlier seasons he navigated blizzards, engine failures, and long nights, yet nothing framed by a single event where control inverted completely.

Fellow driver Lisa Kelly said in a side interview: “When I heard about Todd’s backwards slide, I felt that gut punch in my mileage bar.

If that was me, I’d still be unpacking the wreck.”

For the audience, the spectacle played like a mountain‑sized metaphor: even an expert can slip.

Social‑media commentary exploded after Episode 3 aired: “Todd’s near death run is why we tune in,” watched by dedicated fans of the series.

Critics commented the show’s danger‑ramp is now higher and realer than ever.

In the days after the event, Todd’s rig was repaired, and he returned to the route with the next load under the condition: “I get the first leg.

I check the deck.

We go slow.”

The operation manager Bill Danh wrote in the internal log: “Prompted by 10/08 incident—new safety protocol signed off. ”

The risk‑tolerance for Muskie Creek Ltd.

apparently recalibrated.

While entertainment value is high, real consequences linger.

Ice‑road trucking is facing changing climate conditions, thinner ice durations, heavier mining equipment, and tighter schedules.

Todd’s slide is a cautionary tale beyond television—it underscores the evolving peril of the ice‑road industry.

As viewers binge Season 12, they watch the veteran trucker Todd Dewey not just fight the elements—but fight his own assumptions, age‑worn reflexes, and one disastrous downhill reversal.

“I’ve always said the road gives and the road takes,” Todd said in his final interview before filming resumed.

“This slide took something—I’m not sure what yet—but I’m paying attention now.”

The scene of a giant rig teetering on an ice edge, reversing into the void, winch cable screaming into tension—moves from sheer heart‑stopping TV moment into a lived experience for a driver who knows the margin for error is zero.

Episode credit ran with: “No load worth the life you haul. ”

For Todd and his team, it wasn’t just a bad run—it was a wake‑up call.

And for fans of Ice Road Truckers, it was the most vivid reminder yet that on these ice sheets, it’s not just the trucker against the road—it’s gravity, physics, weather and judgment all colliding in real time.

And so when you watch that trailer slow twist on Episode 3, know this: the sled became stationary only because one trucker refused to roll the dice.

For Todd Dewey, the backwards slide wasn’t just footage—it was a moment that changed everything.