Original subtitles

the Arctic is one of the most physically demanding places on Earth.

So freaking cold right now.

Battling sub-zero temperatures.

This climate's harsh, it's extreme, it's mean, it's got teeth.

Get caught out here and I'll wipe out your trouble.

Vicious predators.

Turns out big moving back there.

Me against the wolverine right now.

And isolation.

There's nothing to fill that void.

It's just you left alone with your thoughts.

How long will they endure?

Hey, the hose is on fire.

I'm scared, but I don't want it to happen.

This is the most unforgiving landscape I've ever seen.

The last one standing wins.

This environment will strip away everything and anything you thought you had.

We're all getting dropped off in one of the most cold and unforgiving places on Earth.

It's happening!

I'm alone!

The Arctic is freaking extreme.

Negative 40 wind chill, five hours a day of sunlight.

It's the type of environment where one mistake could be deadly.

Ah, there they go!

This is absolutely nuts.

We're getting this opportunity to go somewhere people haven't been before.

It's a rough, ragged, jagged place.

The landscape's so vast, you can tell there's a

lot of bounty, but a lot of scarcity there, too.

There's lots of resources, but once the snow

hits and the temperatures are starting to dip, that's going to go away real quick.

The predators are a serious concern.

They're just ferocious animals here in the Arctic.

The Arctic is the top of the world.

There's lynx, moose, grizzly bears, wolverines.

It's dangerous!

Ha ha ha ha! Look at that!

Time to grow a pair, boys and girls, and let's get to work.

Just like that, you're alone.

I'll tell you what.

As soon as that helicopter leaves, it gets quiet.

I'm going to have to find me a little place

where I can just set up something for the night.

Okay, what the f***?

Did I forget something?

Hey, dude!

I forgot something! My hat!

They brought it back to me.

Canadians.

I can't guarantee I would have got the same appreciation if I was back home.

That's how you start a fire.

I am a self-defense instructor, and I'm doing this because I'm seizing an

opportunity that's completely in my wheelhouse.

A lot of people have a load of formal training.

They go to these bushcraft schools.

But for me, it was something that was always just kind of fed to me,

slowly throughout my life, from my great-grandfather, grandfather, father,

all hunted, trapped, fished, and worked with very primitive skill sets.

This is something that resonates in my bloodline.

Always be mindful of where you set your tools.

You lose them, you lose the game.

Why am I doing this? Respect? Absolutely. Money? Absolutely.

And that's because I grew up in an environment

where this sort of living practices were just out of necessity.

As a kid, my family was homeless.

We've lived in a van in a mall parking lot.

My father had stolen potatoes to feed us in the van.

So now that I have my family,

I better be doing those things that are going to dictate

the future of my family's well-being.

My son Tristan's only two and a half years old.

And I'm going to be gone longer than my daughter has been alive.

The biggest thing I'm going to miss is the time.

To my loved ones, when I say goodbye, I'll be telling them I love them.

But it won't be goodbye. It's just going to be for a little while.

And to know that when I come back, I'm bringing home the win.

I'm fortunate to be put atop this large rock formation.

So that gives me a pretty nice field of view to kind of scout from.

Getting food right away is extremely important.

So I'm going to hunt the first few days

because the lake's going to freeze, winter's going to roll in,

and as the calories begin to dissipate from your area,

you become less and less enthusiastic about the process.

There's scat right there.

Lots of it.

Looks like I just missed the meat truck.

I believe a fear of predators is a legitimate concern,

but I'm going to be trying to bait them in using gut piles,

and I'm talking bear and wolverine or whatever else it may be.

I'm not necessarily scared of them

until it gets to the point where we're all hungry and looking.

I don't want to die out here, but it's a very real possibility.

Accidents happen.

You can see how steep these rock faces get here.

It's just that easy.

These crevices here,

they're all in these rock formations.

See, that's a mechanical injury waiting to happen.

I'll have to make a mental note

because the longer I'm out here and the snow builds up,

if I plan on using these rocks as any mode of travel

from one spot to another, it can be fairly treacherous.

This is home.

I got to make this work for me.

Time to clock in.

(CLOCK TICKS) (SIGHS) OK.

Here we go.

Here we go.

I don't know what the best way is to deal with this thing, just.

.. (GRUNTS)

You carry it like a big baby or... (GRUNTS)

(GROWLS)

I love a challenge.

I love being pushed to the ultimate limit.

And it's hard in this world to find that in a real pure state,

and nature's the only place that I've ever found

that you can be free to be you no matter what.

Oh! That was a little heavy.

I think my life has been geared towards this moment,

and I'm not here to prove what women can do.

I'm just here to win.

Ready to go fishing, big guy?

I'm a wilderness guide and commercial fisherman.

I've spent over 20 years living primitive survival.

I'm tough. I'm powerful in who I am.

When I was learning primitive survival skills,

all I wanted to do was go live in the woods.

One day, I just decided I was going to go and do it.

My friend and I, we were out a total of a year and

a half near Vancouver Island, living off the land.

I know what it's like to suffer.

We were starving, cold, until we figured out what

the truth of survival was, and then we thrive.

We hunted two bears.

We caught one in the primitive deadfall and snared one and speared it.

I know what it is to face big, huge animals that are trying to kill you.

These kind of skills and things that I've lived through

is what's really going to push me beyond other people.

I want to get to another level, and it's going to take a lot for me to get there.

And I think there's some suffering I haven't felt

that's really going to push me forward, and I'm ready for it.

I'm going to spend a lot of time just walking around

and exploring my area, harvesting as much as I can,

because in a couple weeks, as soon as the weather

changes, everything is going to be gone here.

Oh, but look-see here.

Mushrooms.

Yes!

Ugh.

Most poo.

Mushrooms pooed on by mice.

Like, did you ever think someone would want to eat that?

This is the Arctic, folks.

That is the most grossest thing ever.

Like, some of these are just almost making me throw up looking at them.

There's so much poo on them.

Like, I don't know if that's even healthy.

That's just gross.

Oh, God.

I hear something.

Holy [bleep] There it is.

Oh, my gosh.

It's looking right at me.

I just heard something take a step.

I'm feeling like I hear something out there.

Damn it, damn it, damn it.

I've got a lower leg injury.

Possible break.

Keep watching Alone on History.

I'm excited to eat this thing.

Brought to you by Modelo, a taste that's pure gold.

Modelo, brewed for those with a fighting spirit.

[growling]

I hear something.

Holy [bleep]

Oh, my God, there's a lynx.

There it is.

Oh, my gosh.

It's looking right at me.

I'm just going to pretend I don't see him.

There he goes.

Oh, my gosh.

I just saw a lynx.

He is not on the menu, though, unfortunately.

That must mean I have hares around here.

He wouldn't be here if there wasn't hares.

I want to go follow him.

I'll see if I can find his tracks.

He's so camouflaged.

I know he's right in there.

He's probably hunkered down, looking at me somewhere.

He knows I'm following him.

I'm not going to chase him.

It'd waste more energy.

[growling]

[growling] Damn it.

Okay, so I've run into my first problem of my first day here.

There was a squirrel with the spruce trees here.

I had a clear shot of this and right there is my arrow.

I guess this is the reason I brought my axe with me.

I'm not here to impose myself on the environment.

I'm here to be as interdependent with it as possible.

And there she is.

Still in good shape.

I have a real deep spiritual connection to being in nature,

but I also have a very intellectual, trained perspective as well.

We need zucchini, summer squash.

Yeah.

Let's do some of the venison with rosemary.

Yeah, I think that's a great idea.

I am a permaculture designer, homesteader,

biologist, carpenter, kind of a jack-of-all-trades.

I've spent a lot of time in the wilderness.

Ever since I was 19, I started as a park ranger

and I had a lot of time for weeks on end completely by myself

and those have always been super formative times in my life.

I'm doing this because I'm a homesteader without a homestead.

I have a very strong drive to build my own house

and that's financially out of my reach right

now, but I don't want to fantasize about life.

I want to live it.

I know how to work hard.

I know how to use my body and my hands and my brain all together.

And I'm out here for the long run.

I don't have any loose ends untied at home at all.

I've just got the most supportive girlfriend I could possibly hope for.

Be safe.

And barring medical accidents or something

like that, I think I'm going to do really well.

Okay, so I have a plan for tonight, for sleeping tonight.

I am going to get my fire going

and I'm very confident it's not going to rain tonight,

so I am going to sleep out under the stars tonight.

We're allowed to bring ten items out, and I did not bring a ferro rod out with me.

That could be a spindle right there potentially.

I'm very confident in my fire-building skills.

I worked for a lot of years in a temperate, cold rainforest,

and I can build a friction fire in those conditions anytime I like.

Because of that, I'm going to rely on the wood

materials that are here, which I love what I'm seeing,

and that's going to free up my ability to bring a gill net, for example.

Notch is full of dust.

I can get it hot enough.

And the wind is picking up and blowing my ember apart.

The sun has gone behind the hills.

It just does not keep smoking.

What's the deal?

That is a disappointment.

I might just call it a day and not plan on having a fire tonight.

I'm super disappointed.

I hope I don't regret not bringing a ferro rod.

Day 2

Gained so much weight for this show.

I'm up 225 pounds.

I don't typically wear this when I'm hunting,

but I think I will for this excursion because I'm just scouting right now.

A lot of my plans revolve around big game.

If I can harvest a big game animal, it will

sustain me longer than anybody else out here.

I'm going to knock an arrow for the hike

because that's how I roll, one in the chamber,

and then I'm going to start whispering because if there's something to eat close by,

I don't want to be talking to you when I take it.

Let's come to the woods a little bit and see what we've got.

That's just beautiful.

It's magical woods.

I promised my granddaughter, Lily, I told her I was going to the North Pole

just to make it easier to explain where I was going.

She asked me to give Santa Claus five hugs

for her and to bring back some reindeer here, so I'm going to do my best.

I know that fat bastard lives around here somewhere.

Oh, yeah.

You see that thing go?

My occupation is full-time hunting guide.

Hunting is my thing.

That's what I do.

That's what I'm good at.

I'm 55 now.

I think my age and my life experiences are putting me in the right spot to win.

I will miss my kids.

I'll miss my grandkids.

I want to be a hero to my family because when you get older,

your kids find out as they get older that

Daddy has feet of clay and he's not Superman,

and so now I get a chance to do something a little

superhuman that most people don't get to do.

It's very competitive.

I want to see.

I want to see.

Can I do what I've done in the past but on an extended period of time and film it all?

It's a huge challenge, and the macho man in me is like, "Bring it on.

" I would really like to get the first big game animal on the line.

Oh, golly, do you know how much meat the moose would be?

We got tracks right here, and these aren't that old.

There's probably a bear in this area.

There's a trail right there.

You can tell he walked right through there.

I'm going to set up a temporary camp right here.

I want one that's easily defendable.

I'm just making a tree fence a little bit.

I mean, granted, a big moose can walk right

through that, but it's just a slight deterrent.

I can put an arrow through the thing before it gets to that point.

Just basically want to slow the critters down.

Right there.

There's nothing pretty about it.

It's kill or be killed.

If a bear's aggressive and coming after me, I need to get

more aggressive, and you have to move with bad intent.

You stab until there's nothing moving.

The bears up here are much bigger than in the lower 48, the black bears.

A young one, three-year-old, did 250, 300 pounds just by our base camp.

I just heard something take a step.

Let's just listen for a minute.

I just spooked the heck out of that. I was getting

ready to throw this camera so I could draw my bow.

What I'm going to do is clear out some of this brush.

I'm blocking this off, and if they come back, I'll be able to stand up and shoot.

If I hear something, see something, say something, I'm going to do something.

I'm going to kill some animals and eat them.

That squirrel's got to be the first to die.

That squirrel's warning everything within earshot that I'm here.

He's got to be the first to die.

I think I'm going to make a few squirrel pulls,

so I don't have to hear that all the time.

As part of my gear, I selected 20-gauge wire, which

is more than enough to hang these guys off a noose.

As I make the noose, I want to make it, obviously, for the size of a smaller game.

And by having this snag wire, the animal goes through it, it gets caught in

their fur, and that's how they -- it increases the odds of them getting caught.

It should look like that, so that whenever the animal comes

through, it gets snagged on the wire, and then it just rolls off.

There's my first squirrel pull leaned up against

the tree that they were barking at me from.

Let's head back and make some others.

Oh, man, look at this.

That little dude sitting there enjoying his breakfast in the sunshine.

Let's take a shot at him.

You're not going to [bleep] believe this.

I took this out.

Look at that.

Right through his ears.

Not a bad shot.

Head back down and process this guy out.

This is a pretty good start.

It's just been getting drizzled on a little bit.

It stopped, but I really hope -- The rain holds out.

We're going to head back to the shelter today.

I spent quite a few hours trying to figure out the bow drill scene out here.

I haven't quite done it yet.

Luckily, I trust the water source out here is clean.

Don't boil it.

But we need to have fire.

Fire and shelter, first order of business.

There we go.

Perfect.

Something visited last night.

Probably moose or muskox.

They're not by any means quiet.

What I'm probably most afraid of out here is moose.

They are one of those just blatantly aggressive

animals that will just come and kill you.

I cannot turn off my level of awareness, period.

This is not a place where you're going to get second chances.

Okay.

Sweet.

I have a dry place for tonight for now.

Damn it.

Damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it.

I feel like I hear something out there.

I can't quite tell what it is.

But I feel like I hear rocks.

I'll take this thing off and expose my ears so I can hear a little better.

This is going to be a long night.

Seems like snow is here early.

It's hard to see.

I cannot hear a lot out here in trouble.

Okay.

I just now returned from a several hours long scout around

this ridge behind me and around the far end of the bay.

And I found two new species of tree, a schooler's willow and I think aspen.

Both of these should be really good bojo wood.

I'm starting to get a little bit weary.

I can't get a fire going.

Obviously, if I can't do that, I can't survive out here.

That is really producing dust slowly.

I need to widen up that notch.

I'm not wavering.

I'm still confident in myself.

This is taking forever to make dust.

This opportunity is massive, massive in my life.

I've got a lot to accomplish out here.

So I'm going to take it one step at a time and have faith that if

I just keep working it, keep using my brain, I can stay out here.

I got a fire going.

I'm not sure if I got footage of it yet or not.

I went to move the camera a few minutes after

I got going and saw that the SD card was full.

But this is probably the most difficult fire I've ever gotten in my life.

It did take a whole day.

I need to keep this fire going.

Every time I don't, it's going to be a big expenditure of energy.

I've got to have a long-term strategy that's better than that.

So that's that for now.

I'm going to turn this off until I get another battery in it.

[Music]

There are 10 badass participants this season.

We got some wood nymphs and forest sages in this

group, like LARPing, magic spells or whatever.

But they're really cool people and I like that

they feel things from the heart, just not me.

But in honor of them, I'm going to ask Tree's permission to cut it down

and to honor the life that I'm about to take, even though it's a jackpine.

I got to do this correctly.

Hey, baby, how you doing?

Mind if I cut your kids down?

That's stupid.

See, talking to Trees is dumb.

When you start talking back, you better run the other way.

Four days without food.

So I am going scouting, hunting, whatever you want to call it.

See if I can hone in on where I need to be.

You know, there's old trails all through here, but nothing that looks real recent.

I don't care what you expect.

And I've never been in timber like this.

There's a little bit of water back there.

We're starting to get into a boggy peat area.

That was a deep hole.

Got all this stuff wet.

I didn't want to get wet, but exactly what I've been looking for.

This is nothing but wet and marshy.

Pretty freaking awesome spot.

There's tracks all through here.

We're going to call this Lily's Bog.

I just named it after my granddaughter.

And the route to get here is called Eden's Way.

Named after my grandson.

Definitely going to have to get back on my shelter

and build a fire, but I found my bog that I wanted.

Now I think I got a game plan for tomorrow morning.

Get up bright and early and wax them.

I think it's going to be a prime hunting location.

Look, I got a shovel.

Nice shovel.

I'm a lucky guy.

Carry on.

Yeah, this is the part that makes you feel like

you're walking across a bunch of dinner plates.

Somebody left on the floor.

Man, I need protein.

Berries and this tea stuff, they're good for some people and it's okay.

Yeah, I need the vitamins and everything.

I'm a meat eater. Burn it on the fire.

Crisp it up and chomp it down. That's what I do.

Oh, no.

I think I broke it.

Oh, I think I broke it.

Renee dips heavy.

Oh, God.

Oh, I think I broke something.

I think I broke it.

Oh, no.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

Oh, that hurts.

Damn it.

Fell backwards.

Knee bent the wrong way.

Same way I hurt it in 1987.

Holy crap, that hurts.

I've broken enough stuff in my life.

I know the symptoms of this and that.

You've got to be kidding me.

I can't walk.

I can't.

Ah.

Hello, this is Tim.

I'm tapping out.

The team is heading your way.

Yeah, it's a good thing I don't cry.

Here they come.

Right here, my foot's numb.

Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right there.

All right, dude, all right.

Everybody have a possible break.

I was going up on that ridge, so to fall here is ridiculous.

I'm not an emotional guy.

But you just think about all the other people that wanted to be in my place.

What is it, day four?

This is ridiculous.

This is not how I saw myself leaving.

I saw myself leaving with my daughter coming through

the woods saying, "You did it, Pops, you did it.

" I like being the one to pick broken people up and carry them out.

I don't want to be the one that's broken and being carried out.

I was just now getting into the land enough to make plans to hunt.

I figured two weeks tops, I'd have had my animal down.

And to go out before I even get a chance to build a ground blind

and do it, that hurts immensely to not have that opportunity.

[music]

So I don't know how many hours I've spent in bed,

but it sure is nice a lot more than I do at home.

I think I've got the fire thing figured out.

Man, I feel like I earned it.

Today I'm going to go check on my gill net, which I set yesterday morning.

This runs out into the water.

Here I've got the end of the log anchored securely.

I'm not sure if you can see the net dangling underneath there, but it's perfect.

Okay, so I just got to my gill net and it looks like there's a fish in it.

See that? It looks to be large.

So I'm going to pull it out and I'm going to have

fish for dinner tonight and lunch and brunch.

That's definitely a big old lake trout.

It's still alive. Better get it in the club.

Come on in, you bugger. Don't get out.

Holy smokes. Look at the size of that guy.

That is easily the biggest fish I've ever caught in my life.

That is food for a week. Easily. Look how monstrous it is.

Humility is the number one thing you need to have out here to learn and adapt.

It's just a fact of life.

Without it, you'll keep getting your ass handed to you.

You see it move? That heart is still pumping. Crazy.

Nature is infinite. It's infinitely abundant, as much as it can be infinitely harsh.

That's half of a five-gallon gas can that I found on the

beach about two-thirds of the way filled up with fish meat.

That's pretty freaking sweet.

If you go into nature looking for fight, you will get a fight.

You can't out-fight the infinite.

I'm not prepared for snow.

It's starting to accumulate and it doesn't look like it's slowing at all.

This is going to complicate things.

I'm not sure any of us are truly grasping what a winter in the Arctic is like.

[Music]

The snow is coming down and accumulating.

There's already about a quarter of an inch of it

outside, and it's only been going for 20 or 30 minutes.

Snow is blowing into every corner.

I think it's time to make some walls for this thing.

Seems like snow is here early.

The cold here is going to be severe, and I think it's

going to come down to how heatable is your shelter.

If you are not able to retain your body heat, you will die very quickly.

Even if we get a big animal, we still have to suffer through the cold.

It's just accumulated this much since I started chopping the tree.

So I want to get this done and head back to camp.

[Music]

Oh, it's really snowing.

Come on, fish, come on, fish, come on, fish.

That's my fish song.

Oh, it's blowing it already.

Man, it is so windy.

It's just getting all tangled.

I got to go.

I'm not prepared for snow.

I certainly wasn't expecting it to come so soon.

I think there's a lot of people here that are decent at suffering.

But people don't live here for a reason.

It's unforgiving.

It's dangerous.

And I think the weather is going to make this

harder than any other location ever done on a loan.

It's going to be awful.

[Music]

Temperature has dropped.

It's a vast area that has the ability to change quickly.

I barely keep my hands exposed for longer than 15

minutes before they start to kind of lose that dexterity.

It's hard to see.

If you get caught out here in a whiteout, you're in trouble.

I can tell that it's starting to accumulate,

and it doesn't look like it's slowing at all.

This is going to complicate things.

I was not expecting the Arctic to roll on with the snow as quickly as it has.

It's going to be a very, very long year, and it'll be brutal.

Many of us are truly grasping what a winter in the Arctic is like.

This is the freaking Arctic.

It's going to get real real fast.

Everything about this whole environment says you're not meant to survive out here.

There's a few of us that are going to prove that statement wrong.

You've got predators.

You've got treacherous terrain.

You've got extreme weather patterns.

Holy [bleep]

This is on fire. I can't get it out.

The wolverine. I trashed him.

My arrow jammed into my leg.

It needs stitches.

They don't tell you how to handle missing the things that mean the most to you.

My body needs some food.

I could be filming the way I die.

Oh, what do I do? Oh, [bleep]