Alcan Rally rules require each car to carry two full-size spare tires, and the organizers recommend that each car carry some spare fuel. Any car’s fuel economy drops when the car is fully loaded, and when driving on ice and snow. When you add this to the fact that there may be up to 200 miles between fuel stations in the far north, some extra gas just makes sense.

But where can you put all this stuff? You surely don’t want to spend two weeks in a car that smells like a gas can, or share the back seat with a studded snow tire, so you need a good solution.

We chose a pair of “Mule” roof baskets from BajaRack. These wonderful creations are lightweight, steel roof carriers that will hold virtually anything. They installed in minutes using standard roof rails and are completely powder coated. They look great and are tough as nails. Into each rack, we put both our spare tires, a 5 gallon gas can, and our other “outdoor” tools and supplies. That freed up enough space inside the car to accommodate our luggage, safety gear, and ourselves.

The first challenge is getting the right tires. We didn’t want to run the better part of 5,000 miles on chains or cables, so we had to find good rubber. There’s been a lot of controversy over studded or studless tires, and we heard good arguments for both choices. Studless ice and snow tires use sipes – tiny slices in the tread blocks that allow tires to grip on ice, rather than studs that dig into the frozen surface. But in the end, we decided that as rookies in the Arctic, we’d feel better with studded tires that also feature sipes. So we chose the Hankook iPike series – we put Hankook Dynapro iPike tires on one car, and Hankook Winter iPikes on the other. The Winter iPikes are designed for higher performance, while the Dynapros are a designed SUV tire. We’ll see if one design has an advantage over the other – as well as all our competitors on other brands – when we get out on the road.

The next thing we tackled was winter lighting. It’s dark about 20 hours a day in February in the Arctic, so we wanted some serious illumination in front of our vehicles. The challenge is compounded because the rally rules allow no more than 4 additional lights to be added to each car. Our Mitsubishi Outlanders came equipped with HID headlights, so we decided to stick with the same technology with a set of 8-inch KC Hilites HID rally lights for one of our cars, and a set of Hella H500s for the other. One wide-beam flood and a pencil beam light on each car should be more than enough to light up our lives.

Both Canadian Law and the rally rules require us to ensure that all lights dip to low with a single switch, and we didn’t want to take any chances with the basic vehicle wiring, so we wired up fused relays to isolate our rally lights from the headlights. This is easier to do than most people think, and the instructions on the back of the relay packet are more than sufficient for the amateur in a home garage. Simply connect the relay to the hot lead for the bright beams, and carry the main current for the rally lights straight from the battery through the relay and then to the lights. In this way, you won’t ask your vehicle’s headlight wiring to carry the extra current for the additional lights.