Original subtitles

My parents were world class musicians.

I, on the other hand, wanted to wrestle alligators

and milk rattlesnakes.

Eventually, this led me down the road

to making wildlife films about the animals I love.

Imagine biking with a quarter million

dollar camera on your back!

Quite the work. (cameraman laughing)

We're surrounded my bears.

We got as close as we could get.

So making wildlife films has been a

passion for me for the last 30 years.

I look forward to taking you to some of the

great places to see some of the best wildlife

in North America.

Welcome to American Wildlife.

Welcome to the Alaska peninsula.

This is a wild and exotic place.

(dramatic violin music) (plane motor buzzing)

It runs 1500 miles all the way down to the Aleutian Islands.

There's really no roads connecting this

to any part of the world.

(dramatic violin music) (plane motor buzzing)

It's just one of the most remote places

that you've ever been.

(dramatic music)

I've been going out here for about 32 summers

and I've seen all kinds of incredibly beautiful things.

But you've also got incredible danger right here.

This is part of that Ring of Fire

that's produced so many volcanoes

for so many years all over the Western part of Alaska.

This is all a part of Katmai National Park.

4.3 million acres of wilderness.

(dramatic music)

(upbeat guitar music)

The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes,

it's one of the great wildlife areas on earth.

(gentle guitar music)

Giant mountain ranges

all along the edge of the Pacific Ocean

with no houses, and no people.

Just bears.

In fact it's the largest and densest

population of Brown bears in the world.

Over a bear per square mile.

That's incredible!

We see maybe 30 to 50 Brown bears in one day.

This guy pops out from underneath the bush

and he's on the way to finding salmon as they turn red.

Salmon are much easier for them to catch

when they're bright red.

They can see them, and they're a little slower.

(gentle guitar music)

It's a great place for young bears to come and hang out.

When you got that much food, they're gonna play.

Knock each other around.

Play with their mom.

And this is the best of all times

when you've got that much food.

(gentle guitar music)

(dramatic music)

Some of the danger here,

lurks beneath the ground.

(dramatic music)

There are massive magma chambers

all along this volcanic ridge.

(dramatic music)

You can look at even a piece of water

and there's methane gas popping up.

These are just indications of how warm it is

underneath the ground.

And you can see just how

volcanic the whole real estate looks like.

(dramatic music)

In fact, on June 6th, 1912,

(loud explosion) a monster went off.

One whole volcano drained down into another volcanic tube

and all the hot ash came out of one hole in the ground

from two separate volcanoes!

This is the top of one of the volcanoes that went off.

It imploded 17 hundred feet.

It was so loud that if you lived in Washington, D.C.

And it erupted in Chicago,

you would've heard it!

It shot ash 27 miles up into the atmosphere

for 60 hours and changed the mean temperature

of the Northern hemisphere by two degrees for two years.

This eruption was so powerful

it put ash in the Sahara desert,

and the valley was slathered with a thick gumbo

of super heated rock and boiling ash.

This must have been what it was like

after the original eruption.

Just huge winds blowing up and down the valley.

Blowing ash that is so fine

that it gets into everything.

It got into our cameras, it got into our backpacks,

every bit of clothing that we had.

We actually anchored our cameras

with 50 pounds of weights to be able to continue to film.

This volcano is west of Kodiak island.

But the winds were blowing the right way

and so about a 150 miles away,

it dumped six feet of ash.

The residents just thought it was the end of the earth,

and that literally loaded up boats and went off shore.

(dramatic music)

So at first, some of the animals may have

thought that the volcanic eruptions were weather changes.

But, soon there were vibrations in the earth

and everything started leaving the area.

(dramatic music)

(somber music)

Within the next couple of years

there were a number of adventurers

that just went out on the valley

on their own and looked around.

When they first saw the valley itself,

they were blown away.

Here were giant steam vents

all up and down the valley floor.

Literally hundreds and hundreds of them.

'Course they call it the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes,

but it was actually steam.

And it was once a riverine valley!

(somber music)

The steam was from

an incredible blanket of extremely hot ash

all over these streams and creeks.

Well, water can't be compressed

so it came up through the valley floor as hot steam.

(somber music)

It was completely covered in ash,

300 to 700 feet deep.

Now it's not loose,

it's packed kind of like a construction site.

You can walk on it.

They actually roped down inside some of the steam vents.

They looked all up and down the valley at the hot

chambers of magma right underneath the surface

that were steaming everything up.

(upbeat guitar music)

So they came in and cooked,

they fried bacon and hot cakes

and all kinds of things, over the steam vents.

Scraped away the volcanic ash,

put the ice to good use by making water.

They created their own little world,

for several years going back and forth

into the valley and exploring.

(dramatic music)

These are magma plugs from farther down the peninsula.

But they're much like the plugs in

the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.

These ancient plugs, have absolutely no life growing on them

after all these years.

There may be a few insects,

a lichen or two,

but you'll see no green plants.

The ash is still 300 feet thick.

And so today, you can see exactly

where the volcanic ash ends,

and where the forest begins.

(upbeat music)

Wind, rain have eroded these big walls of ash

and made it all kinds of unusual shapes.

The fluted tops here have been

hammered on by 50 and 60 mile an hour winds day after day.

Water, of course it rushes through the valley floor

and creates little canyon like areas,

much like miniature Grand Canyons.

The force of the water is incredible.

And it waters a big area down below the valley itself.

(inspirational music)

A volcanic area like this, after a big eruption,

looks like the end of the earth.

But it really is more like the beginning

of a new kind of earth.

You're getting all kinds of nutrients,

and the ash itself is permeable so

water will pass through it

and deliver those nutrients right into the soil.

(inspirational music)

And some of the birds are even nesting

right along the edge of the valley, in ash.

(upbeat guitar music)

The salmon came back after this original eruption,

and very quickly, and in short order,

the bears and the salmon were right back at it again.

(upbeat guitar music)

In fact today, a majority of the people who come here,

don't even know that this is an active volcanic area.

So today, there's still many, many bears

lots and lots of salmon,

and just about everybody has salmon on their plate

at one time or another in the summer.

(upbeat guitar music)

(dramatic music) (plane engine buzzing)

The tectonic plates, are still moving.

And the valley floor has a few surprises of it's own.

There's still a magma chamber,

less than a kilometer down, according to some scientists,

that is as big as the original eruption.

But for now, the valley floor is quiet.

There are still all kinds of critters

making their living right along the edge of the valley.

But underneath, deep down below the surface of the valley,

there's a sleeping giant.

A giant just waiting to roar again.

(dramatic music)