Saving Cabins in the Arctic | Life Below Zero

I'm learning new country this winter, so my greatest challenge is don't let the land or the weather kill me. The water is cold; you feel get used to it after a while. This is a big chunk of ice. Rico and Skyler have traveled to the Celawat hot springs with plans to break trail for vital resources. But with potentially catastrophic flooding underneath the cabins on the grounds, the duo must act quickly to ensure the safety of the structures. If they are unable to stop the water from damaging the foundations, the cabins won't last.

It warmed up out here today, so it gave us a little opportunity to start working on this water situation. Basically, we got the floodplain by creating a channel of all this water going over the dam and alongside of the cabin instead of through the cabin. All this grass and mustard was insulating the warm rocks and mud at the bottom, so when it gets real cold, it's freezing all the way to the bottom, creating a huge floodplain out here.

What I'm trying to do is break away all this moss, grass, willows, and roots, expose that warm rocks and mud, and hopefully that keeps it from freezing down and just has a natural creek to flow through all winter. It's basically a band-aid though, because once it gets real cold, it might freeze all the way down again and create this whole floodplain to start up again.

Eventually, that beaver house has to be destroyed so there's no water flowing around or next to the cabins at all and just no hope for a floodplain happening again. People out here, we depend on these cabins, and we depend on it every year for generations. If we let these cabins get eliminated by water and ice, that could easily eliminate someone's life.

That's coming out here unprepared, thinking they have a nice spot to get cozy in and dry off. Not only that, there's water over the snow machine trail, and if you go in that thing and get hurt, end up in the water, and you come in and the cabins are glaciered over with ice and water, you're in a bad spot.

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Here's a mysterious black bird. The first time we've seen them was when I was a kid. It has this pointed beak, doesn't have webbed feet, but it swims, it dives, it hunts fish way up here in the headwaters. It dries itself off in the snow and then it hangs out in the trees. It's unique only to these areas. I really don't even know if that bird's been discovered yet. If there's no name for that bird, it's a new one!

It's gonna be the Dewily bird.

Okay, let's check it out. Damn, look at this! There's no more water going underneath the cabin. Yeah, I remember this; it was just flowing right here. This will help out a lot. All this driving over with a snow machine was a big old deal. Whoa! Oh, this is hanging nice now. Check out the snow machine trail, and as you can see, the water has quit flowing. See? The trail looks a whole lot better.

Real gratifying feeling, basically saving cabins by playing in a puddle. So, a little tired now, I'm glad we got the job done. Let's go inside, take a break. We're gonna get to bed early tomorrow; we have a lot of work to do.

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