Ice Road Truckers: Who is Shaun Harris?
Shaun Harris has been in the haulage game for more than 30 years. Here’s what he brings to the 12th season of Sky HISTORY reality show Ice Road Truckers.
Image: Shaun Harris | Ice Road Truckers
The hit reality show Ice Road Truckers is returning for its 12th season after an eight-year hiatus. Longtime fans of the show will be delighted to see Lisa Kelly and Todd Dewey return from the original run of episodes.
There are quite a few new faces, too. One of them is Shaun Harris – who, despite only now making his bow in Ice Road Truckers, is certainly no stranger to trucking. He even runs his own haulage business with help from his sons Riley and Zach.
Both boys join their dad on the new season of Sky HISTORY’s Ice Road Truckers – and the family dynamic adds a lot of fun to proceedings. Here’s a closer look at Shaun Harris’s background and how he landed his new role on the show.
Major challenges on the ice roads
In November 2025, Shaun Harris guested on The Evan Bray Show to wax lyrical about his trucking experience, which goes back more than 30 years.
Without watching Ice Road Truckers, it’s hard to grasp how many fearsome obstacles hauliers find thrown in their way on ice roads. Ice roads are built on lakes, rivers and oceans after the water freezes, leaving perilously fragile surfaces in its wake.
However, as Shaun explains to the podcast’s host Evan Bray, these roads are sometimes the only drivable routes to isolated communities. The truckers shift vital supplies to these areas – and it’s hard but immensely rewarding work.
Shaun Harris’s early trucking career
Shaun Harris hails from Prince Albert, a small city in Saskatchewan. The new season is itself largely filmed in this Western Canadian province, so Shaun is rarely far (by Canadian standards) from his family’s hometown.
Not all of Shaun’s trucking trips have been on ice roads. Nonetheless, he became accustomed to handling this dangerous type of terrain early in his trucking career.
Shaun told Bray that ‘in the early ‘90s, my ex-father-in-law, who owned a trucking business here in Prince Albert, sent me on the ice road. So I’ve done it basically since day one.’
How Shaun Harris contends with ice roads
Shaun has seen first-hand how important it is to be cautious on ice roads. A member of his own family actually died while working on an ice road – another story he relates to Bray.
‘It’s actually highlighted in the show, my oldest boy lost an uncle in the late ‘80s. He fell through Lake Athabasca and died maintaining and building the ice road into Uranium City.’
Shaun adds that guys he has hauled with have also fallen through the ice – with fatal results. ‘So it’s always there in the back of your mind. You have to respect it. I’ve seen a lot of guys not follow the rules and pay the ultimate price for it.’
How Shaun Harris joined Ice Road Truckers
Long before Shaun found TV fame, he was already thoroughly used to lengthy journeys interrupted by unexpected setbacks and delays. So, his similarly cumbersome path to joining Ice Road Truckers must have given him a big sense of déjà vu.
TV executives offered him the opportunity shortly after previous show regular Darrell Ward’s untimely death in 2016 left a hole in the cast. However, Ice Road Truckers went on hiatus in 2017, leaving Shaun completely out of the running.
Shaun was also asked in 2019, but the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak the following year saw the return of Ice Road Truckers shelved once more.
That was until work started on the long-awaited 12th season now about to air on Sky HISTORY and HISTORY Play from 1st January. Shaun was approached yet again, and jumped at the chance to finally become part of the Ice Road Truckers cast.
What to expect from Shaun Harris on Ice Road Truckers
Obviously, we won’t ruin the fun with any spoilers – but Shaun himself has teased what viewers can anticipate seeing in the upcoming episodes.
‘We hauled vehicles, we hauled construction equipment. You name it, we generally haul it.’ He particularly remembers transporting ‘a lot of stuff’ for SaskPower, an energy company ‘building a new power line up in the Uranium City area’.
Some viewers of reality shows might understandably wonder how much of what they see is, well, actually reality. However, Shaun Harris tells paNOW that his experiences captured by the Ice Road Truckers filming crew are ‘100% authentic’.
Who else can you look forward to seeing on your screen soon? By subscribing to the Sky HISTORY Newsletter, you can find out why Shaun Harris is just the tip of the ice…road.
