Original subtitles

ANDY: So I'm going through my woodpiles here.

I'm trying to find some nice lumber.

I've decided I'm gonna build myself an iceboat,

so I can go sailing out on the frozen lake.

We haven't gotten much snow.

What you see right here,

that's the extent of all of our snow so far this fall.

It's been a crazy year.

I'm having a really hard time trying to get some exercise,

get some miles on my dogs.

It's not easy maintaining a kennel of dogs,

but it's also your lifeline,

and it's the thing that provides me with transportation and food

and access to hundreds of miles of country

that I can collect wood in, I can go trapping in.

And so I'm gonna build an iceboat.

I always wanted to have a little iceboat

so I could go sailing out on this lake.

I'm pretty landlocked in.

The Yukon River's flowing ice goes all the way around me.

So I've basically got four miles of trail I can run.

Unfortunately, the four miles of trail, there's no snow on it.

Getting out with dogs, mushing nearly impossible.

Very dangerous to do.

Nothing to cushion your fall

if you take a bad spill on the sled.

Something happens to me out here, I'm on my own.

Nobody's gonna come looking for me for a month or two.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

Never built an iceboat before.

I've built a kayak, I've built a wooden boat.

Lots of houses and things like that,

but I've never built an iceboat.

♪ ♪

I'm just gonna get a whole bunch of lumber

that looks fairly good, get it into my shop,

and then I'm gonna just start trying

to do some assembly here.

♪ ♪

The most important board

is gonna be this crosspiece right here.

It's eight foot long from there to there.

With all my weight right back in here in the center,

so I have to make sure I have a really high quality board

for that one board.

If that fails, then the whole project just goes to crap.

So I'm gonna go ahead and cut that one first.

[saw whirring]

Hey, there's my eight-footer.

♪ ♪

I'm making the runners right now for the three skis.

They're made out of stainless steel angle iron.

[grinder whirring]

♪ ♪

Ford Lake is about a mile long, about a half-mile wide.

It's a fairly good-sized lake.

It blows really hard there all the time.

That's what kind of got me the idea of building this iceboat.

What research I've learned about these iceboats

is they can go five to seven times the speed of the wind,

so if I get a 10-mile-an-hour wind,

I could potentially go 60, 70 miles an hour.

♪ ♪

I'm making pretty good progress.

I need to get this runner in place.

I mean, if this thing's going 40 or 50 miles an hour,

there's a lot of stress on these skis.

So that's feeling pretty tight that way.

Snug this up nice and tight.

You got skis on.

Okay.

I think that'll be a good start for tonight.

♪ ♪

SUE: These kinds of temperatures are nothing to fool with.

It bites, it hurts, it snaps like a frickin' wolf.

Ay, ay, ay! The weather's coming at me.

♪ ♪

Alright.

I've still got some daylight, although it's getting less,

so it is time to get out into the shop, get the Bobcat,

if it will start in these temperatures,

crank it over, grab the drag,

and see what's the longest stretch

with the least amount of issues for a plane to land in the dark,

with the flare pots in an urgent and non-urgent situation.

Kavik is now a designated airport.

What does that mean?

Nighttime landings year round.

If search and rescue says we're coming in,

I have to be ready for it.

I am just on the cusp of being 24-hour darkness.

That means planes are gonna take off and land in the darkness.

For people to land here safely in the dark,

I need to be able to light a section of the runway up.

I have things called flare pots.

It's sort of like a teapot with a lid.

Once I light it,

you've got 8 to 10 hours of this orange flame.

You can see a yellow flickering light from 50 miles away.

As a designated runway,

I have to get this system up and running

so that when you have an emergency

and your plane's dropping out on you,

a pilot can pick this out and go, boom, safety.

Alright.

Got this little dude here.

This is my flat drag.

This is an old tongue of the trailer,

modified it a little bit.

Took a little bit of the nubs off, and it's a flat drag.

You've got to come up

with tundra engineering out here, man.

This is a Sue fix.

Here we go.

Alright, now for me, what I'm gonna do is just simply pull out

and go up and down the runway,

knocking anything that might be in the way down.

The whole purpose of Kavik is safety and protection.

I've got to have it flat, and I've got to be able

to put my little pots, my little flames, on the sides.

I do see myself as a warden of the area.

I take other people's safety into consideration

with far greater care than my own.

It makes me recognize I'm on the right path for who I want to be,

to make sure that I help people.

To make sure that the job I do

is the best that I could do every day.

And sometimes your best is just being able to put on pants

and brush your hair.

You're not always a rock star every day,

sometimes you get to be the groupie.

The runway is looking pretty good.

But the vegetation is growing taller than it ever has.

That means I'm getting drifts where they never have been.

A plane lands and runs into this,

it's gonna do that and kill everybody on board.

I need to get my axes, quack, quack,

get the ones out that I need out,

go back in, start gathering my flare pots.

If I want to keep people safe,

I just got to get my booty out there to do it.

JESSIE: Dog team is not like a snow machine.

Snow machine, you never take it further

than you can walk back out,

because it's probably gonna break down on you.

♪ ♪

Another beautiful morning here in paradise.

I'm packing up my sled.

I'm getting ready to head out for three days

to a lake in the Alaska Range.

Temperatures are dropping. It's getting cold.

This is a good time to get out there.

I'm gonna try to do some ptarmigan hunting

and some camping with my five best dogs here.

NARRATOR: Jessie Holmes and his sled dogs

have carved out their existence along the Nenana River

with the area's resources.

To survive dark winter,

Jessie and the dogs must constantly scout new territory

and hone their skills in the wild.

JESSIE: It's gonna be cold, so I got to, like, have everything

that I'm gonna need in my sled to survive for a few days.

I won't have the security of a cabin,

so all the things that I take in my sled

are super critical to me being able to care for myself

and my dogs out there.

I don't plan on bringing a lot of food.

I plan on getting my food off the land while I'm there,

and that'll give me something or a good reason

to be out there testing my survival skills

in the cold temperatures.

I feel that surviving in the cold is like a knife.

It gets dull sometimes,

you got to take it out and you got to keep it sharp.

You got to keep your skills polished here.

So when I go out there for three nights,

and I just got me and my dogs and what I got in this sled,

I have to survive out of that.

Checking everything over in my mind right now,

making sure that I got everything

I'm gonna need out there.

I want my gun easily accessible in case I see something.

I'm always a little nervous going into situations like this

because I know what can happen.

You don't think about the best, you think about the worst,

and you prepare for it.

Who's ready to go? Huh? Who's ready to go camping?

Alright.

I'm leaving the comfort of my warm, cozy cabin behind,

heading out into the remote wilderness

to test my survival skills.

This isn't your average camping trip.

Most people don't go out camping when it's 30, 40 below.

When I'm in dog races, I could be out there for up to 10 days,

in extreme temperatures of 50 below zero.

So it's essential that I am able to survive

in those kind of conditions and keep that skill set up.

This just adds to my confidence

that I can always go and push through the storm.

I need to make sure I got a good place to camp,

because it's getting dark.

It's cold out.

I want to be nice and settled in

and know where I'm gonna be sleeping tonight.

Straight, straight.

Straight ahead.

Alright, Flash, straight ahead, straight ahead.

Straight on up in there. Straight on up in there. Good!

Alright, whoa, stay.

Right here under this big spruce tree

looks like a good spot to camp.

My next priority is to get my dogs set up comfortably.

Being a dog man, my number one priority is my dogs.

They're my transportation.

They're how I got in here, they're how I'm gonna get out.

You guys like camping, don't you?

Yeah.

Isn't that nice?

It's gonna be cold tonight, want you guys to be nice and warm.

Well, I already feel warm.

When I got here, I was cold,

but this beautiful scenery and my dogs warms my heart.

I don't feel alone when I'm out here.

Feel like I got my best friends with me,

and tomorrow we can put our focus on doing some hunting.

We don't know what we're gonna see tomorrow,

and we're excited for it.

GLENN: You got to make sure that you choose the right path,

because if you take the wrong path, you can get stuck.

You can get stuck where you can't get out.

♪ ♪

This time of year,

there could be caribou in this area around my camp.

So today, I'm gonna shoot my gun

before I go out and look for some.

It's been a few months since I pulled the trigger.

The last time I shot my .30-ought-6

was the day I killed my moose this fall.

Today I'm gonna set up a target out on the lake,

shoot the gun a few times,

then I'll go out and look for caribou.

I got to make sure this thing's still shooting straight.

In summertime, the sun goes around a big circle up here.

But in the wintertime, it dips below the horizon,

and it doesn't come up over that mountain

for 105 days every year.

It's a long, cold winter.

You need plenty of meat to eat if you want to stay warm.

I'll make a pile of snow.

I'm setting up my target right here.

That's a good spot for it, 200 yards.

This time of year,

there can be caribou in the area around my camp.

I want to go out looking for some.

But first I want to make sure

this gun's still shooting where I aim it.

♪ ♪

[gunshot]

[gunshot]

Okay, I got to go check my target.

Oh, wow. What happened here?

It hit the plywood, but it didn't even hit the paper.

When it's that far off, that's no good.

I can't hunt with a gun like that.

I'd end up missing caribou or wounding them.

That's why I'm testing it out. Things can happen.

It's been a few months since I shot this thing,

could have got bumped.

It's 38 below right now,

just those extreme temperature changes that gun goes through

can have an effect.

It might be as simple as adjusting the scope.

Okay, I adjusted it, four minutes of angle.

♪ ♪

Here it goes.

[gunshot]

I'm an opportunist.

When I'm out in the woods, I'm always hunting,

I'm always looking at tracks,

looking at sign, looking for animals.

Caribou are a very important animal to me.

In a typical year, about half the meat I eat is caribou.

And to get one caribou, I get enough food for a month.

♪ ♪

Oh, nice!

When I started out, my first shot hit way down here.

Didn't even hit paper.

But with some adjustments,

I've got it centered on the target now.

This is good.

I can use this gun to go hunt caribou now.

It's a good day to go out for a walk,

see if I can find some caribou.

Caribou are my favorite animal to eat.

If I could live off just one animal,

there's no doubt it would be caribou.

But even better is when you've got variety,

when you've got caribou and moose meat.

And right now, all I've got's moose.

I don't have any caribou.

I haven't shot a caribou since last winter.

If I get any more meat at this time of year,

it will last longer.

In the spring and even in the summer, I'll still have meat.

♪ ♪

It's always nice to get up high, gain some elevation.

Because once I get up above tree line,

I get a great view of the valley, too.

I can look down and see everything

that I can't see when I'm down here.

It's getting steep.

Even though I'm not out of the woods,

this is a pretty steep mountainside.

♪ ♪

Whoa!

Ah, oh, it's slippery up here.

[grunting]

[grunting]

GLENN: Damn.

Oh, that's slippery.

Good thing it wasn't any steeper.

Last thing I need is to bust my leg out here.

NARRATOR: Glenn is searching for caribou,

an animal that provides half his meat and protein for the year.

But the animals are migrating quickly,

and locating the herd before it leaves the region

is of the utmost importance.

GLENN: It's very exposed up here out of the forest.

The wind's really picking up.

I got to get this face mask on fast.

I'll get frostbite in no time up here.

Oh, that'll protect me.

That'll protect my face.

Without this mask,

I'd get frostbite pretty quickly up here today.

The wind's really blowing.

But caribou love this habitat.

Sometimes hundreds of them cross right across the ridge up here.

There could be some right on the other side, just out of view.

Won't know if I don't go see.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

There.

Yeah.

Get out my binoculars and have a look around.

♪ ♪

This is a great vantage point,

because I can see all kinds of territory

that I can't see from down on the lake.

I can see on the backside of ridges up here.

I can see other lakes down the valley.

It's really important to me to get out,

have a look around, because if I don't go out of camp

and walk around in this country, I have no idea what's going on.

Don't see any caribou around today.

It's getting dark.

I got to get down the mountain.

Time to head back to camp.

Some steep sections on this ridge.

But it's the shortest way back to camp.

♪ ♪

[sniffling]

♪ ♪

Whoa.

Oh.

Just got to get down this one last steep place.

I got to be careful, some of this rock's pretty loose.

Can't quite feel my next step.

There.

Just got this one last steep section, then I'm home free.

[exhales]

Just got to take my time, I don't want to rush.

Almost down.

Almost down.

There! I made it.

Whew.

Okay, now I'm home free.

♪ ♪

ANDY: Experience is knowledge, knowledge is confidence,

confidence is success, and they all go together.

Well, I feel like I'm getting pretty close to completion here.

I'm working on standing up the sail and the boom.

NARRATOR: In dark winter,

Andy uses his sled dogs to access resources for survival.

Training the dogs this time of year is critical.

But with a lack of snowfall, Andy must complete his iceboat

to break in the dogs on the frozen lake.

ANDY: I've always wanted to try the ice sailing

ever since I moved out here.

[drill ratcheting]

It's always been something that I kind of dreamed of doing,

because I've got a big lake that's glare ice

for a good part of the early winter and late winter.

Still got a few minor things to do,

but I want to see how this boom's gonna sit on here,

how these bars will sit on there.

In through here.

That's gonna control where my sail goes out at.

I let my sail out that far, and then it's gonna hit the shrouds.

And when I want to tighten up on it, sail in tight to the wind,

I can just pull around in tight.

I've never iceboated before.

I've, all I've ever done is sail on water,

so I have no idea

what an iceboat's supposed to track like.

As far as I'm concerned for what I'm trying to do,

if the wind will push it down the lake and I can come back,

then it's a success.

I think that looks pretty good.

Time to get it out on the lake.

♪ ♪

Yay, Natty.

[dog whimpering]

Yeah!

Oh, boy!

Yay! You gonna help me?

You gonna help me put this boat together?

[whimpering] You want to?

Okay, we can do it together.

♪ ♪

I got the boat done.

I'm just gonna get it all set up to where all I got to do is,

on a windy day, is come out here and hook it up and go.

Pretty much everything you do out here

is dependent on what the weather

and what Mother Nature's throwing at you,

and so this is, this boat's dependent on wind to go.

I think I can have it pretty much ready

to where whenever I'm ready and the dogs are ready,

we can just put it up and go.

So I'm just gonna put my mast in.

Alright. Getting that stay nice and tight.

We're gonna bring the big dogs out here,

and you're gonna teach them how to run around on ice.

[laughs]

♪ ♪

Alright, Natty, what do you think?

Ready to go home?

The whole purpose of this

is that I can turn all my dogs loose at one time, get out,

have some fun, do some training, and build confidence.

That's all I need.

Come on, Natty!

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

JESSIE: I got my dogs, they'll pull me through any storm.

They rely on me and I rely on them.

♪ ♪

Yeah, hi.

I'm gonna go out on the tundra and look for some ptarmigan.

Alright, guys.

Straight ahead.

And the sun's going down over that mountain soon,

so I got a limited amount of time

to go catch something for dinner.

I've got my eyes peeled wide open for some ptarmigan.

I didn't bring a lot of food out here

in hopes of keeping myself hungry and motivated

to get some fresh food.

Hup, hup. Good, straight up.

Hup, hup, whoa.

That's ptarmigan tracks right there.

This is a good sign.

♪ ♪

Head on down the trail

and see if I can't flush some up somewhere.

We only got a little while before it gets dark, so.

There's ptarmigan tracks all over out here,

so far, I haven't seen any.

They're out here, though.

This place is covered in ptarmigan tracks,

so I just got to make sure I keep going

and act as quick as I possibly can when I run into them.

Alright, boys.

Alright.

Hup, hup.

Haw.

Haw, straight ahead.

Whoa.

Easy.

Whoa.

Oh, man, I got to check this out before I go across that.

I don't want to get soaking wet in these temperatures.

Gonna make sure this stuff's solid before I go across it.

Whoa.

Too deep, I'm gonna reroute a trail around this.

What I got to do is make sure that the dogs go through here,

and not through here.

That'd be some wet dogs.

But I'm determined to get some ptarmigan,

and I'm not gonna let a little water deter me.

Gee, gee.

Hey, gee, straight ahead.

Straight ahead, good.

Straight ahead.

Alright, alright.

Easy, easy.

Easy.

Come on, now, straight up.

There we go.

We're across, we're keeping on moving,

looking for some ptarmigan.

Ain't gonna teach these dogs nothing

by turning around on a little something like that.

Let's go get that dinner.

Let's check this trail out, boys, see what's up here.

There you go, up that, up that, up that.

Pretty steep stuff.

Whoa, boys, stay.

Looks like we're running out of good trail here, guys.

Wow, it's beautiful up here.

Hi, Flash.

Yeah, we run right out of trail, didn't we, buddy?

Boy, we got to figure out how

we're gonna get turned around out here.

I don't want to keep going up that.

It's gonna be a little bit of a tricky turnaround.

You guys just listen to me, okay?

Come on.

Let's go back. Easy, easy.

Oh, easy.

Easy now.

Easy, easy.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!

Easy!

Whoa!

Whoa, whoa.

Whoa!

JESSIE: Easy! Whoa!

Whoa, whoa.

Whoa!

[sigh]

Whoa, whoa.

Well, got the dogs turned around.

That was a little bit more excitement than I was expecting,

but didn't lose the team.

Number one thing we learned when we start mushing

is never let go of the sled, because there goes your team.

Still a little steep negotiating out of here.

Whoa, easy, easy, whoa.

Easy.

Whoa!

Easy, whoa!

Haw, haw, haw.

Easy, whoa.

Alright.

The real thing that I'm doing out here

is putting myself to the test,

and I'm putting my skills to the test.

This is the kind of thing that me and the dogs live for,

getting out, exploring new country,

and spending time together on the trail.

Alright.

Whoa.

Good dogs. Stay.

Gonna head out.

We'll walk about and see if I can't drum something up here.

In one last effort, try to get some ptarmigan.

Doing everything that I can.

Oh.

I got some fresh fox tracks heading up this creek.

This fox is in the business of getting ptarmigan,

and that's how he gets by,

so think I'm gonna head up this creek and check it out.

Oh, [bleep]!

[bleep]

Just broke through the ice there.

I was standing off to the side here

and just kind of giving it a check,

and it was so thin that my boot went right through it,

almost up to my knee.

I was trying to follow these fox tracks.

They're a better hunter than me,

but they're also 10 pounds and I'm 160.

Whoa.

There's the bottom.

Looks like I could've went deeper.

I pulled myself out just in time.

If I got waist-deep wet, all I'd be able to do

is go and look for some dry wood and build a fire

as quick as possible with these subzero temperatures.

These are the kind of things that can happen out here,

when you're out here by yourself,

you have to be careful.

♪ ♪

The sun's going down right now.

It's getting cold out again.

Certain point, you got to call it quits.

I've covered a lot of ground.

I haven't found anything.

Would've liked to got some ptarmigan, but being 30 below,

things don't always go the way you want it to.

You boys ready?

Alright, come alive, Flash.

I need to get back to camp and wrap things up.

It's gonna be a long run tomorrow

to make it all the way back to Nenana.

So tomorrow is gonna be a day

that we're all gonna need our rest for.

SUE: We need to care about each other as a society.

Live your life, not somebody else's,

but take care of your neighbor.

♪ ♪

NARRATOR: Kavik is a designated airport and fueling station

for the Arctic's planes.

Having an unsafe runway could risk the lives of pilots

attempting an emergency landing.

To prevent disaster,

Sue must clear the runway of all potential hazards.

SUE: I got the runway flattened and widened.

What I want to do today is get the axe,

cut down some of that brush that's in my way,

just so I don't have a lot of drifting

on that section I've set aside.

Every time you have brush

that sticks up higher than the snow in the ground,

you're gonna have a drift.

So, if there's a big clump of large willow,

those have to be knocked down.

Willow is a lot like vine maple.

Even in the winter,

it wants to split and wrap around everything.

Chopping down the willows

is a lot like mowing the lawn in the Arctic;

it's regular routine maintenance.

When I'm picking which ones are gonna give me an issue,

which willow, right here it doesn't seem like

these are gonna be a problem,

but look, I've got bigger drifts here.

Why is that an issue?

A plane tries to land, if he tries to land,

here's your runway, here's a big old bush,

and here's a drift that it created.

Dude tries to land--poof--

he's gonna, you're gonna kill some people.

I have no desire to ruin the ecosystem,

I just need to not have it encroach the runway.

We have more bush pilots than we have, you know, anything else

for forms of transportation.

The life of a bush pilot is perhaps thrilling but short.

Alaska loses a lot of pilots every year.

It's just a tricky damn place to fly.

It really ratchets up my desire to make it a little safer.

Safety is always first.

The state of Alaska,

you can do anything you have to do to keep yourself safe,

and certainly they want to keep the pilots safe.

I just finished doing the maintenance on the runway

as far as the willow brush goes.

Now I'll get in Little Red,

start collecting my little flare pots,

and making sure that those are good.

ANDY: I'm kind of hard on everything I use out here,

and I test its limits all the time.

♪ ♪

We got some wind out here, you guys.

Let's try this boat out.

Let's get this thing uncovered

and see what we can do in the wind.

I built this iceboat, and today, I got some wind.

So, I want to see what it does out on the lake.

I've got some pretty gusty winds here,

and so I'm hoping that there'll be enough wind force

to even push it through the snow.

I'm really excited to see what this thing will do.

Never done this before.

So it's all, it's all new to me.

This is just a trial and error, see what happens.

I think I better turn this into the wind

before I raise this up, though.

I can get into real trouble here. Yeah.

As soon as I raise that sail, it's gonna want to go.

Oh, yeah.

We'll have some fun out here.

The most important thing for these dogs is training,

and getting the dogs trained in all conditions is important.

And ice is probably the most difficult condition

to train dogs for.

Every year, you have to

kind of reintroduce everything to the dogs.

There's some insecurity that builds up around ice conditions.

And one of the things about running on ice with the dogs

is they can fall down

and they can get injured really easily on the ice.

They'll hurt a shoulder, they'll hurt their wrists,

they can throw out their hips.

It's important for the dogs to be comfortable

running on the ice, feel secure,

and so hopefully we'll be able to get some confidence built up.

Woo!

Quite a few days of time and effort went into building this.

I'm hoping like hell it's gonna pay off for me right now.

Alright.

Let's go. Come, come, come!

Yeah, buddy, woo-hoo!

Come on, boys!

Yee-haw!

Come on, boys, let's go!

Yeah, buddy.

Woo-hoo!

Come on, boys!

Whoa, the winds are changing.

Oh, [bleep].

ANDY: Woo-hoo!

Whoa.

The winds are changing.

Oh, [bleep].

I think I just bent my mast.

Son of a bitch.

I don't know if it's because there's so much resistance

to the snow, but it was going really good.

And soon as I caught a good gust of wind,

it just bent this mast right, right here at this point.

That's kind of a thin, cheap, aluminum pole,

so I'm gonna have to make a better mast for this.

I just got to run home and do a quick fix, come back,

and I can be back in business

and have some more fun with the dogs.

That's really disappointing, though,

because it was working really good.

Oh, this was a blast, man.

This thing was smoking across the lake, I loved it.

Alright, you guys.

Let's take this home and we'll do round two.

Come on, boys.

Let's go back and we'll get a better mast going here.

♪ ♪

So if that was bigger,

I'd consider putting a wooden pole in there,

but I could probably snap that off in a heavy wind,

so I'm just gonna go with a piece of steel,

and hope like heck it's enough.

♪ ♪

I've got a steel pole now instead of aluminum.

It's quite a bit heavier.

I think what I need to do is just until I get a sense

of how strong this thing is,

I need to take it easy in the wind

and don't sail it too tight to the wind.

If this bends, then I got some serious wind

and some serious problems.

Let's go see if it can take the winds again.

♪ ♪

Here we go.

Come on, pups.

Let's go see if this thing works.

We need some wind, boys.

Come on, wind.

♪ ♪

There we go.

Woo-hoo!

Come on, boys!

Woo-hoo! Let's go, boys.

Woo!

Come on, boys!

This is working really good.

I think the dogs are gonna benefit from this.

I'm gonna benefit from it.

There's more playtime, and it was something new for them,

and they all were just having a ball chasing me around.

So, I think it's time well spent,

getting out on Ford Lake with the dogs out on the ice.

Getting them comfortable, getting them confident,

and then getting them to follow me on the iceboat

was a pretty big accomplishment,

and it's set me up for some really good dog training

early in the season.

Way to run.

You guys ran all the way down the lake.

It's just fun.

It's fun to use what Mother Nature puts out there

for me to use, so it's good.

The Blade Runners is running.

Yay, everybody's having a good time on the lake.

Woo-hoo!

[laughs]

GLENN: When you travel through these mountains

up in the Arctic, you make your own route,

you find your own way,

and there are obstacles every step of the way.

[crackling, popping]

Nice to warm the hands up after a long day on the mountain.

[crackling, popping]

Oh, yeah, that's gonna cook up some backstrap there.

Moose backstrap. Look at that.

This is some of the best meat on an entire moose right here.

I killed this moose that I'm eating right now tonight,

and that's a good feeling.

I know where my food came from.

I'd just rather run around on these mountains

looking for something to eat

than just buying it all the time in a grocery store.

If you're a hunter, you're very tuned into the environment.

And the way you stay tuned into it is by being out in it.

Caribou come and go.

Sometimes they're in the area, sometimes they're not around.

But you won't know if you don't go and look.

That's what hunting's all about.

Right now, there are no caribou around.

Tomorrow there might be.

[sizzling]

Dinner is served.

♪ ♪

Mmm. That's a good-eating moose right there.

There were times when I first came out here,

the first couple years, when I wasn't as experienced,

and I did things a little differently than I do them now.

I didn't have enough meat put away,

I didn't have enough meat put up on the cache.

One year I ran out, and I was living hand-to-mouth.

If I didn't get an animal when I went out hunting,

I didn't eat that night.

But now I plan things out a little bit better than that.

Make sure that if those caribou don't show up,

I'm still not gonna go hungry.

Because the caribou are unreliable.

But now I know better,

I know you can't always count on the caribou,

that's something I learned a long time ago.

So you want to make sure you get plenty of meat in the fall.

See you through just in case the caribou don't show up.

JESSIE: If something goes wrong out here,

I'm on my own, and there's nobody to save me.

♪ ♪

Fire out here is your lifeline.

Without fire, you ain't got much out here.

This is cold country.

[crackling, popping]

To me, it's just nice to get away from home,

and get out here, somewhere new, and learn some new things.

I was kind of hoping to catch something to cook tonight,

but it got kind of late on me, didn't see anything.

It's disappointing to come out of somewhere empty-handed,

but at home, there's nothing but security.

Out here, there's adventure and adversity and challenge,

and those are the kind of things that make us a team.

[dog howls]

I think that it's a good confidence builder for them

to be out here in these temperatures

and know that I'm gonna take care of them

and provide for all their needs,

and that just builds a trust and a bond,

and that's what we thrive off of

is our trust and bond in each other.

That's what this trip's all about is coming out here

and enjoying a nice couple nights camping and hunting

in some great country with some great company for my dogs.

Yeah, good boys.

This is as good as it gets out here.

It's still cold and tough out here,

but this is as comfortable as we can be.

Getting out of this comfort zone,

testing my survival skills, is keeping my knife sharp,

so when things do go wrong, I'm ready.

It's good knowing that I put a good effort in

at the end of the day.

This is what I love doing, and I'm happy to be out here.

I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now

than under this tree.

♪ ♪

SUE: People weren't meant to be out here, but you know what?

[bleep] that, I can do it.

50 and fat is not a stopping point for me,

it just makes the challenge that much sweeter when I win.

♪ ♪

A little bit more.

Planes have been calling,

wanted to know if I'm ready for the dark time.

So the goal tonight is to get these checked out,

make sure I have enough of them that are in good shape,

get them filled up, get the wicks in.

I have to have my flare pot system ready

so that people can land.

You want a nice, fresh, clean wick.

A clean surface is gonna light fire easier and burn brighter.

There we go. He's awful cute.

So I'm gonna stuff this little dude in there,

screw this down, another one good to go.

So this whole process is kind of slow and repetitive,

but the payoff is the potential for safe nighttime landings.

♪ ♪

I filled up all these little flare pots.

Let's get rock and rolling.

Now I'm going to the runway, and what I'm gonna do,

I'm gonna light a T, to show from the air,

the pilot will see, this is the area I land,

this is the area that takes me into safety and Sue.

Alright.

♪ ♪

I cannot put out so many

that the pilot is going to have a difficult time distinguishing,

what's the runway, what's the turn-in?

Can only do a couple at a time here.

Okay.

I'm looking across the way,

trying to make it equidistant on both sides.

♪ ♪

Got to have one here.

Propane gels at 30, 40 below zero.

So I got to keep everything warm.

♪ ♪

When I was very, very tiny,

and they ask you what do you want to be when you grow up?

I always said lighthouse keeper.

And in my own way, I am.

What does a lighthouse do?

It is a shining beacon to remind people where safe channels are.

I want to be the beacon that leads people to safety.

I'm gonna go down here, I'm gonna turn off my lights,

and I'm just gonna see, can I, can I see

that this is a straight, unbroken line of lights?

And just see what it looks like.

Because I want to live alone

doesn't mean I don't care about the rest of the planet.

If I think you're my family, you're under my protection.

Gonna shut off my main lights,

and determine visually, did I do a good job?

Can an airplane see this? Can they recognize it?

Will they go, this is a straight line, it's a runway?

And they absolutely can.

We got her lit up.

For somebody 50 miles away

that's starting to have engine trouble, guess what.

They're gonna see this and go, 'Oh, my God, someplace to land.'

That's what I need to be.

I need to be the safe zone

in the middle of a turbulent set of circumstances.