♪ ♪
ALEX: Okay, uh, I went out got a bunch of kindling wood
earlier this morning, and, uh, I've just been breaking it
into little lengths that will fit into my little
stove in here.
It was a pretty cold night.
I'm kind of cold, I haven't really been able to warm up
good this morning.
My feet have been cold all morning.
I'm at a new place called Deadman Lake.
I decided that I wanted to try an off-grid lifestyle and
bought land unseen.
I'm living in a backpacking tent.
It's really small,
it can only accommodate a small stove.
I go to sleep cold, I wake up cold,
I make a little fire that warms me up for ten minutes
and that's as good as it gets.
Living in here like this it's,
it's pretty old, you know?
It's, uh, just kinda cold all night.
Yeah, I don't wanna keep living in this backpacking tent,
so I need to find a spot and get my new
huge canvas wall tent pitched up.
So, I wanna find a place that's kinda got a large opening.
I don't have to cut around and clear a lot of land
in order to put it there.
Yeah, uh, just grab my axe and get right to it.
ALEX: The main purpose of this tent is that you can
have a big wood stove inside of it and heat it up.
I am kind of on a time crunch here.
Deadman Lake, it's a tough place.
Sometimes you can get cold snaps where it's 50 below or more
for weeks at a time, and extreme wind,
so I need a good solid home base.
[wind]
♪ ♪
This is the sunniest spot I've seen yet,
and it's also relatively flat here.
I need a 16-foot circle and I think that'll fit
in here nicely.
The sun is just-just excellent.
I can see the ridgeline on the other side of the
river down there.
So, this is just about the best spot I've seen.
Next step I'm gonna get, uh, branches from a spruce tree
and lay them out for my floor.
Then I'll be able to pitch the tents up,
and then that's it.
So, it only sounds like a few steps but each one of
these is gonna be pretty long and involved.
That's the tree I'm gonna use.
I'm just gonna get straight to work.
A bear has his claws,
the owl has his talons,
the beaver has his giant buck teeth.
You know every animal has its tool that he uses to do
pretty much everything it needs to do.
For me, that tool is the axe.
Almost everywhere I go here, I always got my axe with me.
Okay. Here we go.
It pretty much brings me everything I need.
I'm gonna start from the top since they're all kinda
pointing downwards.
The human bond with the axe, it's so basic.
I couldn't live in Alaska without an axe.
I just couldn't do it.
The axe is the one tool that gives me the power to be free
and survive out here on my own.
More than anything else, it's the axe.
This is a great start so, you know, I just gotta,
just gotta keep working and, uh, you know,
pretty soon in here a couple hours I think it
should be done.
CHRIS: You know, I was born in Alaska,
and I love Alaska no matter what the weather is.
But you know going out here 40 below and
working on things, that's just part of it.
And if you don't love it,
then you're going to hate Alaska.
Get this carburetor back together.
There's so much damn ice in it.
Maybe it's just so cold today.
The weather's super erratic here in Alaska.
Mornings here are just brutally cold,
and then we'll have these nice sunny afternoons where it
starts to warm up.
But then, as the sun sets that cold just sets
right back in.
Well, the hoses are frozen, come on.
Piece of [bleep].
Whew, that gas is cold!
Work in the cold really sucks, my hands are frozen,
I can't feel the nuts and bolts I'm working with.
Everything is so much more tough when it's cold out.
I'm using a damn blow torch to keep my hands warm,
whatever it takes.
Everything is just totally caked in ice.
I mean, from my steering to my carburetor
to my electronics, to my fuel pump.
I don't even know if this thing's gonna run.
Everything I do out here revolves around this
old snow machine.
I've got to get firewood, I've gotta put trap lines in,
I've got supplies to get.
To me, the snow machine is a lifeline.
Can't is not an option.
Failure cannot happen.
I have to get this thawed out.
If we lose the snow machine, that's it.
We're dead.
All right, this...
JESSI: Hey. CHRIS: Hey.
I got it all back together.
Carburetor had a bunch of ice down inside of it so, um,
what's going on is the snow's getting up inside the cowling over here,
into my air-intake,
inside my airbox is full of snow.
Which is then going right into my carburetor.
JESSI: How do you get the snow out of this box?
CHRIS: Well, I took all of this apart, but I can't.
There's no way of getting down inside of there so,
I think I'm just gonna keep ingesting snow unless
I take the time to like thaw this out.
I don't have a shop out here to stick it in,
so what I was thinking is, we gotta figure out how to
get maybe the stove out of the bathhouse,
and we can lift this thing up, you know, two, three,
four feet off the ground, and then we can build a fire
underneath it with a fireplace.
Um, I don't know.
I just gotta thaw this thing out.
I feel like I'm gonna do more damage to it if I
just keep running it.
JESSI: Let's try it out. CHRIS: All right.
KALEB: I viewed this place as a drag as a kid because there
was nobody else here.
As an adult,
I have learned to appreciate this place and I
really hope that my kids can learn to appreciate this place.
Who do you guys think is gonna catch the biggest fish?
ELOVIE: Me! GILBERT: Me! KALEB: You think so, huh?
What if I catch the biggest one?
GILBERT: What if Mom?
KALEB: Mom's a pretty wicked fisherman.
She might catch the biggest one.
You better just watch out for her coming in behind and
just knocking you all senseless in
the fishing department.
BRITTANY: All ready to go?
ELOVIE: Ready to go.
KALEB: Fishing, here we come. BRITTANY: Alrighty.
KALEB: Last winter, Brittany and I went out and caught
a lot of fish at Long Lake,
there's the spawning grounds there.
The salmon, run to that spawning grounds.
They lay their eggs and Dolly Varden's main food
supply is salmon eggs.
So, it's a great place to go fishing.
We can get twice as many now.
We've got twice as many, uh, anglers.
BRITTANY: Nice.
KALEB: We can catch 40 this time if we wanted.
KALEB: My goal on this fishing trip is to have a
positive experience for my kids in regards to fishing.
I want them to keep fishing as they grow up.
Long Lake! Long Lake!
ELOVIE: Long Lake! Long Lake!
KALEB: We've got some old holes here from where we
successfully fished last time, and I'm thinking we just put
holes in the same spots, and we'll catch fish again.
BRITTANY: Awesome.
All right kids, it's great to watch but just,
he's gonna throw water up so watch out for the water.
KALEB: There, now we can fish this hole.
Who wants to fish it?
ELOVIE: Me! GILBERT: Me!
KALEB: You guys both wanna fish it?
ELOVIE: Yeah.
KALEB: All right, let's get my fishing poles out.
JOHNNY: You know, if it's negative 30, 40, 50
even 60 below zero,
I face danger at finding resources out here.
JOHNNY: That's a huge danger to me.
Just try to expose the surface of the ice.
And that way I can start chipping down to the ice to
access the water.
Out here I don't have running water,
I have what I call walking water, which is:
grab a bucket, walk down to the lake about a
half-mile away,
chip a hole in the ice, fill it with water,
and walk back up to the cabin.
A task I gotta do every day out here for a basic necessity
which is water.
This process gets a little warm.
The last thing I wanna do is start working up a sweat.
You know one of the big motivations for coming out, uh,
to the Brooks Range is to be completely self-reliant,
and honestly there's no other option out here.
I have to get it myself if I want water,
if I don't,
then I don't get water and I'm not gonna make it.
You can feel that cold anytime you breathe in.
It's like frosting over my lungs.
It was about negative 50 when I woke up this morning so
anytime you take a breath it just kinda crystalizes
on your lungs.
To chip the hole completely down to the surface of the water,
it takes about 25 minutes,
and doing physical work in these extreme cold
temperatures is definitely tolling on the body.
I can feel the onset of frostbite,
and you gotta keep going.
You gotta keep pushing.
[ice chipping]
[thud]
I hit the ground.
[bleep].
JOHNNY: [bleep]. That's as far as it goes.
I can't go any further.
It's frozen all the way to the bottom of the lake.
No water's coming up.
[bleep].
I needed to go further out. I needed to go much further.
You can't look at things as failures.
You've gotta look at them as growth.
It takes a lot of mental stamina to live this lifestyle.
Onward I go.
It looks good.
Living in Alaska I've learned patience the most.
Nothing comes fast, nothing comes easy.
All right, round two.
[ice chipping]
I've got a lotta chipping to do.
Just gotta work a little bit harder for it.
Nature provides the best source of water.
I could watch the snow melt off the mountains of this
spring and goes right into this lake.
Pure, natural, water straight from the source.
There it is.
Water's coming up.
That's awesome.
Once you break through the bottom of the ice,
there's a suction and it kinda pulls everything up
from the bottom of the lake.
Clean, healthy water.
That's incredible, and now that I've got this hole opened
up it's a matter of hours before it starts freezing up,
and I'd like to start working on an insulation, uh,
plan for this.
I think I'm gonna start using spruce boughs and grab it from
the trees all around here, kind of bundle them up,
lay 'em across the top, put some of that snow on and I
think that'll be enough to insulate this hole.
The purpose for insulating the ice hole is to prevent it from
freezing up all the way, so I don't have to come back out,
chip the hole all the way down to the bottom again.
JOHNNY: Use what nature uses to, uh,
insulate herself and see if I can do that.
Okay. Huh.
It's already frozen over.
That's how cold it is out here,
and this is a perfect example of why I would
like to insulate this.
Yeah, every hour I'm gone is at least another inch
that this freezes up.
I like to problem solve.
I like to try new things.
I'm hoping that the spruce boughs work because they're
easy to get around here, so renewable resource.
And I think that the snow is also gonna help a lot,
'cause I know that snow does have insulating properties.
The sorta hope is to come back tomorrow, remove this,
and chip through the ice, and if it only takes about a
minute to get through then success, and, uh,
I don't have to worry about, uh,
chipping all the way down to the bottom of the ice anymore.
Come back first thing in the morning and assess it.
JESSI: Mother nature can be a really crazy lady.
The weather is constantly changing.
It's constantly shifting.
Strange things happen especially out at the Cosna.
CHRIS: Cool. Got one on there.
JESSI: Chris and I are gonna have to thaw out the Snow-Go.
CHRIS: Do another one.
JESSI: Right now, we can't steer and everything's
kind of encased in ice.
So, we need to be able to hoist the entire Snow-Go up in
the air and put a small camp stove underneath the Snow-Go.
CHRIS: Okay, so I'm gonna go loop the rope up
through the pulleys and then down to the machine.
JESSI: This Snow-Go is really precious to us.
We use the Snow-Go for everything.
So, we really need it working.
CHRIS: This is a funky old rope.
Okay. I'm going to take down the ladder.
I'm just gonna try this pulley out real quick.
Ooh, that tree huh?
JESSI: It's a rot tree.
CHRIS: It's definitely rotten in the middle.
I hope it holds.
I guess we're gonna find out.
All right so Jess, I'm gonna lift it up.
You're gonna help.
Then I'm gonna pause for just a second while
you're holding that.
I'm gonna reach underneath, grab ahold of the track and
I'm gonna heave it up again,
and I want you to just try to hook that on there, okay?
JESSI: Okay. CHRIS: Ready? JESSI: Oh my gosh.
CHRIS: Ready?
JESSI: Yup. We need a little bit more.
CHRIS: And... JESSI: Almost!
CHRIS: Hang on. Okay! Oh!
CHRIS: Okay! Oh!
[thud]
JESSI: Oh gosh. We were so close.
CHRIS: Let's try it again, and up, and up, all right pull.
JESSI: That's it.
CHRIS: So far so good.
Okay. Now, let's work on the front one, huh?
JESSI: Chris, we have made some janky stuff in our life,
but this is at the top of that list, I think.
CHRIS: We'll just try.
JESSI: I think we should get some stumps.
CHRIS: Just hang out in case it falls on me or something.
It's lifting. I'm stoked.
Okay. That's as high as we can get it,
but let's just go get the wood stove and try and
put it in place.
JESSI: Let's do it.
CHRIS: Hold that for me.
Piece one.
JESSI: Piece one. CHRIS: Piece two. JESSI: Piece two. Piece three.
CHRIS: Maybe I can stick the butt-end out that side.
Okay. So, let's get a tarp, huh?
JESSI: I would call our contraption that we
got going on here like a tarp shanty.
I think it's pretty janky.
But, I trust Chris. I think it's gonna work.
We'll just see how it goes.
CHRIS: This looks pretty good.
JESSI: Hasn't fallen yet.
CHRIS: I'm about ready to start a small fire and see
what we can get going.
ALEX: In a fight against the Alaskan winter,
it's, it's not a fight I can ever win.
It's just kind of like being surrounded by an enemy on all
sides and the enemy's just always coming in, crushing you.
It's an Alaska winter, it's, it sucks.
What else can you say?
It's time to set up my tent.
This is the same kinda tent gold miners and prospectors
would live in.
When they came up here and defiled the land in
search for gold.
This part's pretty exciting.
I'm starting to get a sense that like wow,
pretty soon I'm not gonna have to be fighting the
cold as much anymore.
I'll be living more, uh, comfortably.
You know if I just lay this thing on the ground as is,
and walk inside, each time I step the whole thing will,
you know, scootch in.
So, it's gotta be pulled out and held tight.
Uh, a sensible approach would just be to use some heavy logs
to get the floor staked out.
So, I think it's time to cut more logs with the axe then.
I came out here to my property at Deadman Lake,
in one of the colder parts of winter.
I knew it'd be pretty rough.
I survived a few days in just a really basic camp
in the backpacking tent.
Got some real big heavy logs here.
Oh, yeah.
I like a challenge and I like a little bit of misery
but being cold nonstop, it just gets old.
Now that won't move.
Yeah, I think it's time for the pole.
It's just a matter of survival.
I just wanna get that thing up so I can get warm.
That's all I care about, is just getting warm.
The, uh, the roof is pitched.
Now I just gotta tie off all these guidelines and that's
what's gonna make it expand,
and also give me my space indoors.
My main goal is just to get into this thing tonight.
It's gonna be cooling down soon.
Whoever said haste makes waste,
I don't think they ever dealt with conditions like this.
I'm out here battling these elements,
you know, it's just, you gotta be scrappy you know?
This is good enough.
It's pitched.
It's all sideways and everything but, um,
I'll be able to get my stove in there.
So that's the most important thing.
That's what's gonna keep me warm tonight.
It's about to be getting cold.
I just gotta grab the wood stove from my old camp.
Bring it on down in my sled, get it inside the tent.
This is where it's gonna live.
And the final thing I gotta do is cut the hole
for the chimney pipe to go through.
Fingers crossed it doesn't get crazy windy tonight.
Just bring in the bare minimum stuff,
just to keep me warm.
I'll get a fire going in here.
Put my pot right next to the stove.
Tonight's just about getting through the night, staying warm.
BRITTANY: When living out here you definitely learn to
prioritize schooling, such as survival,
and how to do things outdoors safely.
When you live rurally, you have to teach them.
It is not a choice.
KALEB: You've been so excited to do this.
ELOVIE: I don't have.
KALEB: That it's time we actually get to do it.
A little less aggressive or you'll never catch a fish.
Okay, watch.
You let it soak down,
and you let it kinda hang for a little bit.
Then you jerk it, but you gotta be able to let the fish
come to the lure, and then get caught.
BRITTANY: Our trip has two points to it:
one is hopefully we bring some fish back
for our freezer,
but the biggest point is we get to teach our kids about
fishing and about getting this sort of resource.
KALEB: Fishing like this is an exercise in patience,
and if you're not patient,
you're probably not gonna have any luck.
You don't always get what you want when you want it.
BRITTANY: We should.
KALEB: Drill another hole?
BRITTANY: Get another one going.
That way you two don't hook each other.
KALEB: Yeah, let's do that.
All right, it's time to make some more holes, guys.
We need to fish more area.
BRITTANY: There goes Daddy with the chainsaw.
Who's gonna go to the new hole?
ELOVIE: Me!
BRITTANY: Okay.
GILBERT: I'm staying over here. BRITTANY: Sounds like a plan.
BRITTANY: Fishing is kind of like hunting.
You're not guaranteed anything.
That's super exciting, but you have to have lots
of patience until then.
Ellie, you wanna go see how Daddy's doing?
ELOVIE: Yeah.
BRITTANY: All right, reel it in first.
GILBERT: Oh, I just saw a giant one!
BRITTANY: You saw a giant one?
GILBERT: Yeah. I need to catch that one.
Whoa.
GILBERT: Whoa. What!
BRITTANY: Kaleb!
GILBERT: I actually got one!
KALEB: Wow, that one's nice sized!
BRITTANY: Good job, Gilbert.
KALEB: Wow, that's a beautiful fish.
This is a trout of some sort.
BRITTANY: I think that's a, yeah, I was going to say,
it's a lake trout like what I caught last time.
KALEB: Yeah.
BRITTANY: All right, Gilbert. Go at it again.
KALEB: Good job, Gilbert. Proud of you, boy.
You got another one!
Yeah buddy!
Fish number two!
I'm gonna call you the slayer.
You got it now, boy.
GILBERT: Yup.
KALEB: Man, Gilbert's kicking our butts.
Ha!
BRITTANY: You got one? KALEB: Yup.
BRITTANY: Nice.
I'm always excited when the kids and I,
and Kaleb get to do something as a family that
we don't always get to do.
Yes! I got one!
KALEB: Nice!
ELOVIE: Aw, it's so cute.
BRITTANY: We try to hunt most of the meat that we eat.
We don't often go fishing so whenever we get the
chance to do it.
It's exciting because that's changing up our diet.
KALEB: Ha! I got one.
ELOVIE: Mom! Dad caught one!
JOHNNY: To me, the challenges are relative.
Anywhere you live you'll face challenges.
It's how you adapt to those challenges.
I have to learn from nature out here because there's no
other source of information.
JOHNNY: So, today's the day to see if my little
insulation plan worked.
Which was spruce boughs covered with snow.
It's a little messier than I hoped for.
You can see the spruce boughs, they crack, they break.
Everything's so brittle out here.
And the hope was, when the ice grows it'll only grow a thinner layer,
so I don't have to chip down as far.
That's water.
I hit water. Awesome.
I'm gonna fill the bucket while I'm down here and I got
the hole opened up.
The spruce boughs insulated it to a degree,
there's no doubt about that.
But it has quite a bit of spruce chunks in here.
They're super fragile with these temperatures.
So, if I remove these every single day,
it's just gonna be a pile of, of broken twigs.
I'm looking for efficiency down here.
So, I think I'm gonna try to come up with another solution.
You know the last time I was walking around on the big lake
I saw a lot of circles where the caribou laid down.
If a caribou hide keeps a caribou warm laying on a lake,
I think it would insulate this.
So I think that option might work.
Got the bucket full of water,
I'm gonna take it up to the cabin,
and grab that caribou hide and see if that'll work for
insulating this water hole.
I have to figure stuff out on my own out here.
I don't have the internet.
I don't have something I can just look up.
So I'm gonna drape this over the hole,
and I'm gonna put a little bit of snow on top 'cause I do
know that snow does help insulate.
It's an interesting way of life to just look at nature.
What is nature doing?
And I can apply these principles of what nature's
doing to my own life, and that's how I survive out here.
I think it's gonna work great.
I'm excited to come back tomorrow and check it out.
CHRIS: It's almost like the weather around here has like
that attitude of its own.
It'll go from 40 below to ten above and drop right back
down to 40 below.
If you're not willing to adapt and change your ways of living,
you won't survive.
Awesome. It's looking good.
It's starting to warm up already,
you can see it steaming in there.
JESSI: This tarp is already too warm.
You can feel how warm it is.
CHRIS: That's fine.
It's just a junk old tarp.
JESSI: Yeah, I just don't want it to be a junk old
tarp on fire.
CHRIS: Yeah, hopefully everything goes and we don't
light it on fire I guess.
We've got five hours of wait-time to see how this thing works out.
JESSI: Yeah.
CHRIS: We'll come back in about a half an hour and check on it.
JESSI: Great.
CHRIS: This isn't the first time I've had to thaw a
Snow-Go out, but this is gonna be the first time
that I sit inside and watch.
In the past,
I've tried to build these shanty towns where
you wrap a tarp around a snow machine and you get
a fire going, and I actually lit the snow machine on fire,
and so I've learned from those lessons.
This sure beats sitting out on a cold stump watching it.
JESSI: Yeah, this is going great.
Kind of, kind of surprising.
CHRIS: As long as it doesn't catch fire,
I feel like I'm winning.
JESSI: Okay, you see what I'm looking at?
Come here.
You see where the stack is and the smoke's coming out,
but you see to the right of that?
CHRIS: I'm sure it's just steam.
That's a big puff of smoke.
Go make sure it's not on fire.
JESSI: Do you see that? CHRIS: Oh, yeah.
JESSI: I just got worried, you know?
CHRIS: Well, let me check on it.
It's pretty warm.
Everything's dripping.
This is looking good.
Turns out the Snow-Go is just melting and it's
steam coming out.
Uh, but it was close call.
Had that been a fire, we could have put it out.
Wow.
JESSI: That's good. Really safe, you know?
CHRIS: Close call. JESSI: Better safe than sorry.
Thaw baby, thaw.
ALEX: Here in Alaska, when the going gets rough,
I just think "Okay, just be scrappy."
Anywhere you can get a little advantage,
just take it.
Get your punches in any way you can and,
and just make it to the next round.
I finally got a really good night's rest.
I've been up since pretty early this morning,
been chopping a lot more firewood.
I'm just trying to get myself set up for success
for the future.
And my quality of life is majorly improved just by,
you know, moving into this tent and being able
to put this stove to good use,
but the idea that I had to put the spruce branches underneath,
it just wasn't a good one, um, it's just not working.
The floor is not even close to level.
But the, the real issue is that it's kinda making this a
fire hazard because the stove was leaning on it too heavily,
uh, it's, it's kinda causing it to burn.
It's melted onto the pipe and it makes a bad smell.
It's really just gonna endanger the tent, uh,
and not to mention just make living here
a lot more difficult.
So, what I wanna do is address this issue.
I think the best thing to do will be actually just to move
where the tent is.
Basically, we gotta kind make a new footprint for it.
Try to get it hard, try to get it level.
Dig down to the bare ground.
So this is where I'm gonna put the, the tent.
I'll leave it up where it is for now just in case
this ends up taking more time than I expect.
I've still got a place I can go back to.
Kind of a create a new footprint right here.
Uh, it's gonna involve a lot of shoveling.
Uh, you know, it's always work.
A few days ago, doing this work,
I would have been like really kinda hyper aware of,
"Okay, don't work too hard,
don't get sweaty at all 'cause it's a real danger."
Now, with my tent sitting there,
and the stove, you know, just trickling away,
staying, you know, nice and warm in there.
Uh, I'm not worried about it, you know.
Uh, so this is good.
Uh, I think I can just start breaking my tent down.
Moving it over here.
Yeah, I think I've lived in Alaska and lived off the bush
long enough that it doesn't upset me if my best laid plan
totally gets destroyed.
All right, back to square one.
I just get scrappy and keep going.
And, and that's gonna make me so much tougher,
and when I take on the next bigger challenge, you know,
I'll be ready for it.
Yeah, that looks good.
Cool.
I'm not out here doing this because I'm afraid of failure.
I'm doing it because there's something worthwhile
that I wanna gain.
Yeah, so now that I've, I've got my tent kind
of rebuilt here.
I do have a nice, flat, even floor.
So, I'm gonna get my sled and start moving things in.
KALEB: Bush education is about more than just reading,
writing, and arithmetic.
It's about learning how to catch fish, build a fire,
shoot a moose.
It's the school of the wilderness.
KALEB: So far this has been a great day.
We've been fishing here for several hours now,
between Gilbert and I we've caught ten fish or so.
BRITTANY: I've gotten one.
KALEB: And Brittany's gotten one.
Ellie, she hasn't caught anything.
KALEB: I'm starting to think we should shift our attention
from fishing to building a fire and roasting
some of these fish.
Maybe it's time to enjoy the fruits of our labors.
It's really easy to lose track of time when you're
having a blast, but it's getting late in the day,
it's gonna be dark soon and I need to get a fire going.
Cook some fish.
Gilbert, I got some little small pieces,
do you wanna try and chop 'em?
GILBERT: Yeah!
KALEB: Whack this thing down right like this.
GILBERT: Okay.
KALEB: Remember to keep your legs spread wide.
Then whack that sucker.
GILBERT: Ready? KALEB: Yup.
All right, now what we're gonna do,
is we're gonna turn it over,
and we're gonna whack it hard on the ice, okay?
Watch, like this.
Good job you split one!
Today has been a great bush education for the kids.
Their little brains are soaking up so much knowledge.
Learning about gathering resource through the ice.
They're getting to learn a little bit
about chopping firewood.
BRITTANY: Yeah, buddy! KALEB: Good pitch. Good job.
KALEB: It's not important for them to learn all the lessons
right now, immediately.
It's important to just slowly learn them,
time after time after time as they grow up until in
three or four years this stuff's should be second nature.
BRITTANY: Yeah!
KALEB: They will be very smart children when it
comes to rural Alaskan living.
The patience and perseverance to stick it out.
The payoff to a lot of hard work.
I think I was about your age when I started splitting wood,
you know that?
Yeah!
BRITTANY: Yeah! KALEB: Nice job. ELOVIE: Mom! I got one!
BRITTANY: What? Look at that. Get it out, get it out!
Look at that, Ellie! Oh no.
ELOVIE: Oh no!
BRITTANY: Look at that, Ellie!
Oh no.
ELOVIE: Oh no!
BRITTANY: Elovie what, pull it out.
Elovie, who has not gotten to get any fish yet,
she pulls up a fish.
You got a Dolly Varden!
ELOVIE: Dolly Varden.
BRITTANY: It was amazing and so exciting for her,
she was our little cheerleader all day and
finally she's also seeing success.
KALEB: Good job, Ellie. You caught one.
Don't leave me hanging!
Good job.
ELOVIE: Yeah, baby.
BRITTANY: Now we can walk away and know that all four
of us had such a huge part in collecting these fish.
KALEB: Let's see if I can roast a fish.
JOHNNY: Java.
You wanna help me dig this up? Huh?
Get it!
All right, get out of here.
This is the coldest it's been in a while.
We're in a pretty deep cold spell.
With the windchill, it's around negative 70.
So if this caribou hide works in these temperatures,
it's definitely gonna work in,
in any other temperature I see out here.
Cool.
Just like that, there's water.
It's clean.
It didn't take long to get through,
so I would definitely say this was a success.
Every season has its difficulties when it comes to
getting water, whether it's the middle of winter or the
middle of summer.
You just adapt to those changes.
Some for you Java.
Some for me.
You work with nature.
You figure out how to do it, and once you figure it out,
you learn how to be more efficient,
and that's what I'm doing here.
That is a damn good cup of coffee.
Thanks nature.
ALEX: Just getting the last stuff from my, uh,
from my old camp here.
It was just a couple days ago that I lived here,
but it seems like ages ago.
Every tool I brought has its purpose so,
and this one served its, its purpose well.
So, after several long nights of negative 20 and
negative 30-degree weather in a backpacking tent,
I'm kind of excited to move into this new home.
Although it's kinda humbled by modern American standards to live in a tent,
for me it's gonna be like moving into a
five star hotel with all the amenities.
It's a warm place, a place where I can cook.
A place I can dry off my wet clothes.
A place I can organize my gear.
I'm set, you know?
With just a few days of work, and a little bit of grit,
you know, the whole world can change.
That's what this lifestyle's all about, it's, um,
you come out here with nothing and just do it all from scratch,
kind of bring in the wonder back in life, you know?
This is the first step on a really exciting,
unpredictable journey, you know?
BRITTANY: 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
ELOVIE: 16! BRITTANY: 16!
We have 16 fish guys!
KALEB: Oh, yeah. We're getting some heat now.
Just doing it hotdog style with a stick and a fire.
BRITTANY: Having an activity with the family,
where it's educational and it's fun and it's entertaining,
you can't really get much better than that.
It makes a really good life.
Well kids, there's this saying,
"you can either give a man a fish,
and they will eat for a day,
or you can teach them how to fish,
and they will eat for a lifetime."
And that's what we're trying to teach you guys.
KALEB: It's just incredible seeing the transformation when
you get kids out and teach them these fundamentals of
life in the woods.
For me as a parent,
it is so exciting seeing this progression from just a
bumbling kid to a capable, young, adventure-minded person.
BRITTANY: He doesn't want to end this,
and I think that's the best.
And he caught another fish!
KALEB: And he just, last second, twelfth hour,
caught another fish.
Nice job, Gilbert.
BRITTANY: Good job, Gil.
CHRIS: I think it's time to get this thing outta here.
JESSI: Sure, let's check it out.
CHRIS: Oh, no ice at all actually.
JESSI: There's not any, like, water.
There's no ice. There's no snow.
CHRIS: Worked like a charm.
Let's drop this thing down to the ground and try it out.
See if it'll start right up.
This little shanty town of a shed worked pretty well.
I mean it might have looked kinda janky hanging in the
tree with the tarp over it, but this snow machine's
completely thawed out, now it's gonna be the, uh,
the real test though.
Let's see if she starts.
[engine starts]
Awesome.
JESSI: The Snow-Go works.
We're now in the clear.
I can exhale that breath that I've been holding.
CHRIS: Climbing a mountain is only fun because of the hard
work you have to put in,
and if it was just easy every day out here,
I don't think we would enjoy it as much,
but the fact that there's a challenge at every corner,
it's always a surprise and it's always an
adventure out here.
Alaska is the ultimate like no other place on Earth.
JESSI: Great.
CHRIS: Awesome, it works great.
The steering is so easy to turn, man.
JESSI: Awesome.
CHRIS: Go get some chores done with it?
JESSI: We'll, uh, plant some snares.
Check the trapline.
Start doing stuff with the Snow-Go since we haven't had it.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.