Through The Gauntlet - 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. Working on Life Below Zero can be very dangerous. Guns here, cameras—you never know what to expect. You do that? Gonna be tough. But we're gonna get the shot every scenario we got to prepare for this. But we're still smiling, having fun, still making Life Below Zero. Yes, bring it on.

Well, we're back in Inez now. You got to get that necessities for us, which is some heat. We restrict the temperatures anywhere from, I don’t know, -20 to -30. When it gets this cold, you burn a lot of wood to stay warm. We're gonna drop this tree right down there, yeah, right between these two big spruces here. You don’t want to just cut down any tree; you find a good dead tree—that’s standing dead tree, which is nice dry wood, which will burn like a, you know, like a monster.

Good, what are you doing? Where’s that crotch? There, oh, it's gonna have enough weight; it’s going to punch right through it, bro! I'm gonna try to cut it over here and leave all the wood over here and try to put it right where I want it, though. All right, well, I got it on that side. Yeah, you did! Boom! Took her down! And that, literally, one tree is gonna keep us going for probably, you know, nearly a week. Depends how cold it gets.

The Brett just built quite a big tree, bucking it up now into like eight-foot lengths. I'm gonna pull the snowmobile around and just start loading it up. We hope to get it, you know, three, four feet high before we can get comfy and start our filming here. We need to be able to have enough heat to maintain us for a couple days at least before we have to stop again and replenish our supplies. I think Andy's gonna be impressed. That’s all I have to say.

As you can see, one tree really does the job, right? We aren't even done with that tree, right? Another load like this probably—now we do—we have another load for it. It was hard work, you know, knee-deep in the snow and hefting these little hooks in your shoulders and moving them around. At least we can start up a roaring fire right when we get back. It's cold, it's unpredictable, and we don't know what we're gonna get.

Here, we are currently in a Tucker. We're out filming Sue as she takes her generator to Kavik. This is the crew one that we're filming in right now, but we just—we've literally got three miles, and we've just got it stuck. So, it's going to be a long turning, but first things first, we're gonna need to help get this thing unstuck. It’s cold out—warm up, boys!

As you can see, we have pretty much stuck. We have come out with two Tuckers. This is a river right here; we just sunk into some serious overflow. So, Sue's one's gonna have to try and get us out right now because obviously we aren’t going nowhere. That's pretty deep, actually! Not entirely sure whether it was going to get out at all. The wind is picking up; it's about minus 15 right now. We need to get it out of here before it freezes in there, otherwise, we ain’t moving at all.

There’s a big rush against time right now, too! So, they're going to try and dig out all the excess snow and kind of get it out there quick. Till that's over, for if it freezes, ain’t moving. We got it up—freakin’ awesome! Look at that hole that made—that’s the same karate!

So, just a few minutes ago, this was fully submerged. So it got a bunch of snow piled up inside this track. You got to free this up so that this thing could move and the track could do its job. All that snow’s off this track, they’ll have roughly 70 miles to go in this journey, so hopefully, we'll just be able to carry on a note—akattak, pray that we don't run into any more overflow or any other obstacles.

Last thing you want is to be stuck in the middle of nowhere! Hopefully, we could just keep chugging along and get to Kavik and finish out our story.