Linda doesn’t have many fears. The main fear she has is of her getting into an accident in Alaska’s open roads. She is afraid of dying out there in the cold and not being able to say goodbye to her family, yet she loves to drive trucks up to Alaska and see the wonderful view of the sunsets and sunrises. Linda also enjoys driving down roads that not a whole lot of people get to drive down because of the road conditions. Linda drives up to Alaska once a week all year around. She brings her 16 foot trailer pulled by her LTI semi truck.

Linda does what a whole lot of people think is really scary and yet she loves to do it. She goes up to Alaska to bring them all kinds of food and other products. She enjoys helping the people in Alaska because she has driven a lot of the roads up there and she knows how the roads are and how hard it can be to get around during the winter time. She was driving to Prudhoe Bay last year during the winter time. The temperature was -37 degrees and the roads where covered in ice and snow. Some of the ice that covered the ground was black ice. She didn’t back down to the challenge of driving to Prudhoe bay though.

In Linda 16 foot trailer she had multiple things. She had some fish and other food. Then she had some toothpaste and other cleaning materials so that they could stay clean throughout the winter. Linda was driving down the road when she started to feel really tired. She kept driving for another 20 minutes until she got to a rest stop. When she got there she went to the bed in the back of the semi and went to sleep.

Then next morning when she woke up the temperature was -43 and she was cold. She went to start the truck and it wouldn’t turn over at all. The truck wouldn’t heat up or nothing. She thought it was just going to be a dead battery when she called a tow truck. The guy came out and helped her when he told her that the truck was frozen and it wouldn’t be able to start. She still had over 200 miles to travel and with food in the trailer she couldn’t waste any time. They got it unfrozen in about an hour and Linda headed back down the road.

Linda was driving up the road when she saw this giant hill in front of her. She pulled over at the bottom of the hill to put chains on her truck so that she could make it up. Linda jumped back up into the truck and started it up again and started to crawl up the hill. She was about a fourth of the way up when she started to lose traction. Linda controlled the roll back down the hill. When she got back down to the bottom she was all shaken up. She didn’t like the feeling of losing control and having a chance to flip the truck and be gone forever.

Linda knew that her destination was at the top of this hill so she knew she had to make it. She tried again and this time she went a little faster and got to the top. She unloaded her trailer and headed home. After 3 more days of driving she got home. She got home and called all the family and invited us all over for dinner that night. When we got there she said “give me and Grandma hug.” We all gave her a hug and she started to tear up. My dad asked her what was wrong and she told us she almost died and she told us the story. She said she had never been so happy to see us in her life.

After that trip, when LTI calls her to work and she drives down to the shop and she gets down there and they say “we need you to take this trailer down to Prudhoe Bay.” When they say that she gets the keys and hands them to the person that wants her to drive and says “here’s the keys, I’m not driving there, because I want to see my family again.”