An Alaskan Storm - Behind the Scenes | Life Below Zero

We are here to document the lives of people living in Alaska. The harsh reality is the environment we're up against. It makes it tough to do our job. Get out of there, working on Life Below Zero can be very dangerous. Guns here, cameras here; never know what to expect. See that? Gonna be tough, but we're gonna get the shot. Every scenario we got to prepare for this. Well, we're still smiling; we're having fun still making Life Below Zero. Yes, bring it on.

It's 9:00 a.m. Day five of our extended stay here at Chandelar. I'm still waiting for a weather window to get a plane in here. This beautiful blue sky here, but the area in between here and where we need to get to is the problem. We're wrapped, but here we remain. It's 13 days without plumbing or heat. Every day I've thought, including today, I thought there was a really good chance we would get out. Messaging back and forth via satellite to the office, and you know they're doing their best to keep us safe, so I appreciate that. We just gotta wait until things are safe to get out. What can you do? Man makes plans and God laughs.

So, this is our gear pile staged on the beach, ready to go if we get the call that the plane is coming in. We're just going to leave this out unless the weather gets really bad. Run pretty low on food; it's definitely getting to the point where we're scraping by. Some peanut butter, this could come in handy. A couple of cans of sardines, that's about it. Probably had about two or three days of food left.

We moved into Glenn's sod house. It's got an open door and then a hole in the roof. Dragged our tarp over here to kind of close up the roof hole a little bit to keep a bit more of the heat in. We'd set up cots, but just barely fit in the open space in there, and it's been a pretty great little home. So, here's our door; keep the heat in at night. It takes a little bit of gymnastics to get out in the middle of the night without making a lot of noise and waking up your mates, but it keeps the heat in really well.

We need some wood to keep our sod house warm. We don't want to burn all of Glenn's wood, so we're going to go out into the forest and get some. It'll keep us warm later, and it'll warm us up right now and give us something to do. Well, you want a standing dead tree, so you're looking for one that doesn't have any green needles on it. Doesn't seem like it's green at all; seems like it's dead. We could try for that one. I think we could take that down. I think it'd be fun, guys.

A human beaver starting to have a little concern about it falling the other way. We'll see what happens. Yeah, I think it wants to go the other way. It's almost ready to go. Tony - [Music] - get out of there. Yeah, we got firewood!

So, now that we've dropped this tree on the ground, we need to cut it up into manageable pieces. We're about a quarter mile from the sod house right here, so we're gonna have to just carry them on our shoulders. We don't want to cut them too big; we don't want to cut them too small because that means more cuts and more trips. So, we'll just take a guess at what the right length is and cut it up into some chunks. [Music] Warm you up for sure!

You know what they say, Tony: wood warms you twice. We've got the tree cut up into four usable chunks that I think we can manage to carry out of here on our own, so we'll do true trips. We'll throw them up on our shoulders, walk them out. [Music] [Applause] Good job! That was fun. Yeah, it was! Thank you. All right, should do us a while. Thanks for getting all that wood, notch. Yeah, that was a fun project. Yeah, good group.

[Music] It's effort! Colder every night, and having all this wood is a killer thing to do. I mean, not only is it like it's keeping us warm in here for one thing for sure, but just having something to do is key. Trapped in this sort of weird limbo that we're in, you know, waiting, waiting, waiting for a new message from production, a new message from our friends or family, and just trying to find something to do in the meantime to fill time.

One of my favorite things about spending an extended period of time out in the backcountry is it really gives you an appreciation for all the things that we can kind of take for granted. Food is a huge part of that for the crew. I am very, very excited; it smells amazing. [Music]