Surviving the 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. You see that? Gonna be tough, but we're gonna get the shot. Every scenario, we got to prepare for this. But we're still smiling, we're having fun, still making Life Below Zero. Yes, bring it on! This is what keeps me up at night.
We arrived to the Hailstones Kiwa camp just before dark last night. Unfortunately, the storm that we were expecting turned out to be a little bit worse than what we thought. Winds gusting to up to 65 miles an hour, which is a hurricane-level windstorm, and it keeps getting worse. We actually had to abandon our camp and come and take refuge in the teepee with the Hailstones.
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Survived the night in the crazy winds and woke up, and we came outside, and the temperature dropped about 40 degrees. The wind has shifted to the west, which is really unusual, and it pushed up the high tide underneath the ice. Totally flooded this delta where our snow machines were parked. Yeah, this is deep—couple feet of slush. If we don't get them out really quickly, they're going to become encased in new ice, which is just going to be a disaster for us. So we're going to get some help from Chip and tow these machines out as quickly as we [Music] can.
Is half the fun? We're gonna try to pluck these guys out. Yeah, looks like it's good to me. There's one, and that's the worst part—it's the basket sled. You get that frozen in, and it's horrible. This is a fun winter task, tying knots underwater in ten below. Okay, let's do it. Ready?
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Yep, pretty good system here. Takes a lot of manpower. We got a deep one here, last one sitting pretty low. Let's do it, boys!
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Good job, guys! It was a close call. Nothing's going to stop us; we're undaunted. Yeah, we'll get through it—storms, floods, whatever. Bring it on, bring it on! It's not going to stop television in five years. I'm like, "Below Zero," this has been one of the craziest 24 hours for me for sure.
Now we need to go back to our camp and assess damage, and who knows what we're going to find there? We need to rebuild our shelters and assess our gear situation and make sure that everybody can stay warm and safe. It's a matter of life and death in the Arctic in the winter. Having good shelter—there's no one we can call out here, there's nowhere we can go. We're out on the coastal plain of the Arctic Ocean. We need to be totally self-reliant. This is about as extreme as it gets.
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We made it back to camp. It's become part of the ocean—clearly caved in. Trying to build a small snow wall to block out some of the wind that's going under the tents. Just trying anything at this point to make things a little bit better. Whoa! There's a tremendous amount of water underneath the floor of the tent; it's like a waterbed right now. It's kind of surreal to be in ten below zero in the middle of winter in the Arctic and have water issues. You know, we prepare for snow and ice and winds, but you don't expect your tent to flood in the middle of winter. It's really kind of surreal. Lesson learned, I guess.
It takes such an effort to get out here that once we do make it out here, we really want to make it work because the logistics are just so daunting. And this place is incredible—it's really brutal, beautiful, and wild, and makes for really wonderful television. It's going to take some more work on the part of the crew, but I think we can do it and keep it functioning. Get back to filming until the next storm.
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Celebrating Ben's birthday today—probably not the way that he expected, but we're having fun and making the most of it. Food, food, food, food!
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Let's see while it's hot. So I feel very grateful and fortunate right now. I'm getting a very memorable and unique birthday experience—my birthday caribou. Yeah, it's an Arctic gourmet. It's awesome! It's a great birthday dinner for me and crew.
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