yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Solo Trip | Life Below Zero


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] My name is Martha May Salatan. I'm married to Eric Salatan. I'm from Ilama, Alaska, was born and raised here. I enjoy hunting, fishing, camping—anything that has to do with the outdoors. Beautiful day to go play on the lake, see if I can't find some birds. Eric left early this morning with a fishing client, so I got the rest of the day to go out and motor around on the lake.

I'm going to first check out this little pond that's not too far away from here. Eric and I have hunted over there and been successful before, so I figure that's a good place to go. Hopefully, I can prove to Eric that I'm just as good a hunter as he is.

Martha and Eric Salatan live on the Ilna Peninsula during the summer months, where they hunt and fish to maintain their subsistence lifestyle. I grew up out here; you really learn to love and hate the lake. It's a renewable resource that you can always depend on, but you also learn that it's very dangerous.

It's the largest freshwater lake here in Alaska: 80 miles long by 20 miles wide. If you get caught up here on an ugly day, winter or summer, it can potentially be really dangerous. This is the first spot; there's a little lake that's right over here, so we're going to head over there. Hopefully, there's a bird.

The lake's right there. I'm going to take a peek at that spot there and see what's on this side. You got to be a little quiet out here so as to not spook the birds, let them know you're here. There's one duck over there. Oh, there's two ducks! I think they're good dabbling ducks.

I'm going to walk down behind this brush line here and see if I can't get a little bit closer. I immediately spotted two ducks; there could be more. I haven't really taken a full look. Hopefully, those come a little bit closer towards us, and I'll be able to shoot them.

We'll see what we got here; they're still pretty far out there. I'm going to go down a little bit further and see if I can't get right across from them. They're right in front of us. I can't tell how far out, but I think it's shotgun range.

So, I got a little bit closer and noticed it's some merganser, which is a fish-eating duck. They don't taste very good, so on to the next. There are certain kinds of ducks that taste good, and certain kinds of ducks that don't. Mergansers are one of the ones that don't, so we're going to keep moving and see if we can't find something else.

Came to this lake here; had two birds in it, but they're just not the kind that we want. I'm going to load up here and go over to this island right over here called Rabbit Island. It's a good spot—couple of small little ponds on it. Hopefully, there's birds over there. [Music]

More Articles

View All
Hunt And Gather | Life Below Zero
Or definitely gonna be spending our evenings picking salmon berries, which is when the salmon are here after July. Then, the salmon berry should be ripe while Chip collects building supplies for their fish rack, and Sig woke Magnus and the girls must gath…
Watermelon vs Potato in Slow Motion - Smarter Every Day 155
Hey, it’s me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. I have built a potato gun out of clear pipe, which is amazing because you can see what’s going on on the inside of the potato gun. Today’s experiment is going to be pretty fun. Please excuse my scra…
The Call of the Land: Meet The Next Generation of Farmers | Short Film Showcase
Well, there’s no other real choice, is there, but to fix what we have? It’s kind of like you don’t have that much control over what you’re passionate about. We’re not really used to hard work, a lot of people. We didn’t grow up on farms; we didn’t grow wi…
Shipwreck From Explorer Vasco da Gama's Fleet Discovered | National Geographic
[Music] [Music] A storm from the north wrecked two of the ships, the Soj brothers’ vessels, onto a reef. We were the first people to discover this shipwreck, and the reason being because it was such a remote part of the world. It’s an island in the Indian…
Implanting Memories | Breakthrough
My work focuses on finding individual memories in the brain and actually turning them on or off. We had a series of projects where we started off by asking really simply: can we go in and can we just find a memory in the brain? Can we isolate a memory in …
Expedition Amazon – The Trek to Ausangate | National Geographic
[♪ dramatic music playing] [Thomas Peschak] At least you got some horses, eh? [Narrator] 30 horses and llamas, 60 bags of gear, 1,500 pounds of food, and 15 guides and porters. [Spanish] All needed to install a weather station 20,000 feet above sea lev…