When bears, wolves and foxes are your only neighbors, life can be pretty lonely. Add minus-60-degree days and a constant battle for the most basic necessities, and you have the daily challenges of people who live in remote corners of Alaska. This series takes viewers deep into an Alaskan winter to meet tough, resilient residents as they try to stay one step ahead of storms and man-eating beasts to survive the season. The closest neighbor to Sue Aikens is more than 300 miles away. Eric Salitan subsists solely on what he hunts and forages. Chip and Agnes Hailstone catch fish for currency in bartering for supplies, and Andy and Kate Bassich use their pack of sled dogs for transportation. Also highlighted is a time of year not always part of what viewers see in Alaska: spring! Ice is breaking, animals are waking, and residents face new tests before deep cold returns.
Extreme survivalists go head to head in a race across the Alaska wild. Using ingenuity, experience and just the gear they can carry in their packs, the participants have 60 hours to reach the finish point of each leg of the adventure -- the series features 13 legs -- and in addition to navigating treacherous glaciated river valleys, barren ridgelines, and high mountain peaks, the challengers battle hunger, dangerous predators and unpredictable weather. There is no grand prize awaiting each leg's winner, other than the pride of accomplishing a grueling feat. For season three, the 12 competitors are divided equally into four teams -- Military, Endurance, Alaskans and Lower 48.
The old Dolly Parton hit "9 to 5" isn't a tune worth humming for the blue-collar pioneers featured in "Filthy Riches." The series spotlights ingenious Americans who skirt a conventional workplace in favor of making a living in the deep rivers, soggy mud flats and wild backwoods of the U.S. Ray Turner, for example, has been catching eels in Delaware for 30 years. He uses a self-made smokehouse in the woods to cook the critters and sell them. Billy Taylor and his sons hunt for prized ginseng root in the Appalachians. Taylor, a fully licensed wild ginseng dealer, promotes sustainability by planting its berries. In Maine, Jim Campbell and Andy Johns make the coastal mud flats their office, as they dig for valuable bloodworms to sell to fishermen. And Greg Dahl and Albert DeSilva are burl hunters. A burl is a hard, unwieldy outgrowth on a tree, usually at the trunk. Burls have value because of the spectacular patterns found in them when cut open.
Patrolling America's largest state is the job of roughly 400 troopers in one of the toughest law enforcement agencies in the nation. Essentially, these cops say, nearly every Alaskan resident is armed and they know how to use their weapons, which makes any scenario a trooper encounters a potentially fatal one. Follow along as the "blue shirt" Alaskan State Troopers police the towns and villages, and the "brown shirt" Alaska Wildlife Troopers enforce regulations covering both commercial and sport fishing and hunting activities.
Wilderness guide and survival instructor Hazen Audel attempts to stay alive in some of the world's most inhospitable places by using centuries-old techniques. Hazen joins tribes in the rainforests of Ecuador, the Kalahari Desert of Namibia, the mountains of western Mongolia, the frozen Arctic of Canada, in equatorial Kenya, and on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean to learn the skills firsthand. He hunts with bows and poisoned arrows, climbs harsh mountains in search of prey, and harvests food beneath shifting sea ice, among other challenges that push him to his limits.
"Yukon Gold" follows four gold-mining crews who have merely four months in Canada's wild Yukon to earn a big payday. Fighting an impossibly short mining season and with their savings on the line, they work against difficulties to dig the precious ore out of the ground. The crews battle mechanical breakdowns, the elements and 18-hour days under the midnight sun -- all because of gold fever -- and it keeps them coming back year after year for another chance to wager it all.
Famed survivalist Bear Grylls says goodbye to Hollywood and takes celebrities on journeys into some of the wildest locations in the United States and around the world. Whether it's searching for food in the most remote environments or battling intense weather, each episode chronicles the celebrity's experience of pushing their body and mind to the limit to successfully complete the adventure.