Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Across the Arctic,

the dog days of summer draw to a close,

and Alaska braces for Mother Nature's icy grip.

On this episode of Life Below Zero...

One, two, three.

NARRATOR: Sue Aikens' grandson

struggles with a lesson in bush survival.

Don't splash.

NARRATOR: A sudden danger could doom the Hailstone's journey home.

-Watch out. -(SCREAMS)

NARRATOR: Glenn scours the tundra

for an essential element of winter survival.

And in Eagle,

sparks fly as cold weather preparations get underway.

One spark, this whole place will go up real fast.

You can see the bugs are kind of thick and heavy and...

Sometimes they're there, and sometimes they're not,

but we're gonna go ahead and try to put the sneak on it.

My name is Nathan. I'm Sue's grandson.

She is trying to teach me how to get a caribou.

Keep your eyes open.

NARRATOR: Nathan is visiting from the lower 48

with little experience in the bush.

Sue hopes to teach him how to better survive Kavik's harsh conditions.

NATHAN: My grandma's life is very, very cool.

Hunting, most grandmas don't do that.

I do worry about her a lot.

Um, it is good for me to come up here and check on her.

A couple of years ago, she got attacked by a bear.

NARRATOR: With winter on the horizon,

Sue has a limited opportunity to hunt caribou

before the tundra freezes and the animals become scarce.

SUE: This ground is extremely uneven, isn't it?

So take your time, lead with your toe,

let your toes and everything tell you where the obstructions are.

Breaking your ankle out here, nobody's gonna be helping you, are they?

There's gonna come a day.

I don't know what my expiration date is, but it's coming.

And I'd like to know that

if he needs to, he has a skill called hunting,

and he can get his own food.

What I try to instil in my grandchildren is

believe in yourself, be proud of yourself,

be a good person all the time.

Grab life by the balls and live it.

I'm thinking if we don't spook them

or see them by the time we hit that next copse over there,

then we'll turn around and head back.

Bugs like this, this late in the year, it's just not even heard of.

So they are keeping my food source away.

We haven't run across some caribou.

So I'm thinking they're,

they're probably fairly stunned at the bug situation.

They don't eat them, but they do get bugged by them.

And when you're hunting

for a means of supporting yourself, foodwise,

it is not a guarantee.

Nature has a way of just doing what it wants, huh?

Yeah.

It is part of life up here, and if he's really interested in it,

you know, like he says he wouldn't mind running this place when I keel.

Well, this is part of the territory, better get used to it.

Think you could work in an office like this?

-Yeah. -You think so?

Bears are gonna try to eat you.

Cold is gonna try to kill you.

Bugs are gonna try to carry you off.

Think you can handle that?

GLENN: If you wanna live in the wilderness,

close to nature, in an area that hasn't been

changed drastically by human activities,

this is one of the very few places left.

By the end of October,

the sun sets for the last time.

I won't see it again for over 100 days.

Got about a month to get certain jobs done that I want to do outside.

It's important to be all set up ahead of time.

I have to cut a considerable amount of wood out here to get through the year.

During the wintertime, during the coldest months of the year,

I'll go through four cubic feet of wood in one day.

That's about a cord a month.

Food, water, clothing, shelter.

And to keep that shelter warm, I've got to have wood.

You can see the forest here, it's all green trees that are living.

I don't like to cut those for wood, I like to cut dead wood

because it's lighter, and it burns better.

I've cut all the dead wood in this area close to my camp.

Over the years, I've had to go further and further

away from my camp in order to get firewood.

So today I'll probably go a few hundred yards from camp.

It's a long ways to get wood back,

but that's the nearest that I can get enough dead wood now.

I don't use a calendar out here, but I pay attention to the seasons.

When the leaves start changing colour,

it's time to get ready for winter.

Pretty soon that lake's going to freeze over,

and I need some firewood out here.

So this looks great.

Lots of dead trees,

close together.

I just like the feeling of being in shape

and using my body physically.

Out here, I don't have to worry about going to a gym.

All the jobs I do,

I choose to do them in ways that I get a lot of exercise.

Even though the job itself might get a bit mundane,

it's the environment I'm doing it in

that keeps it interesting.

I didn't come here because it was paradise

or the Garden of Eden.

I chose this spot to live

because it was the last place in the world

where I thought I could live this way.

The winter that's coming,

I'm gonna burn this amount of wood in just a couple of weeks' time.

So I have to start building piles up now around the woods,

make sure I stay a little bit ahead

and have plenty of wood to get me through the cold weather.

This is a good start, but I got a lot more work to do.

ANDY: You're always gonna have a few setbacks.

That's just a part of living out here.

Everybody gets their butt kicked every now and then.

Hopefully, you don't lose your life doing it.

Feels like fall to me.

Feels like the middle of fall to me.

Holy cow. I can't believe the hills.

Right now, we're getting into the waning part of the summer.

The fall colours are already happening

in the high country across the river from us,

and that's our barometer telling us

that fall and winter are very soon to be here.

Today's project is to start emptying out the trash

we've been accumulating since the flood around here

for four or five years now.

My hopes are to get rid of this trash

by bringing it over to the landfill,

burning what will burn, pushing the rest into the pit.

The pit is full of water,

so any metal's gonna rust away pretty quick.

We're getting into late summer.

We've had a little bit of rain,

so things are a little bit damp.

And that's why I'm choosing this day to do this,

but there's always a potential for starting a forest fire,

and once started there's no putting it out.

I think what I'm gonna to do here

is fire this pump up,

and then try and spray some water around here to wet,

wet the area down a little bit.

The type of stuff I'm burning is a lot of paper,

and stuff that's gonna throw out a lot of embers.

It only takes one spark in this black spruce forest

and this whole place will go up real fast.

(WHIRRING)

I think it's time to go get the bulldozer,

and start hauling trash.

CHIP: I wanna be able to give my kids a more rounder education.

I want them to have a countrywise education.

They're gonna remember this stuff the rest of their lives.

And it'll be important lessons, and it's also an important feeling for them

to know that they're successful, that they can do

exactly what it takes to provide for themselves.

AGNES: I'll go find our new place for our cache.

CHIP: A cache is a place where you store your things.

We frequent this spot from February till about the end of August.

And then the rest of our year is spent up Noorvik.

This is a higher ridge right here.

I'm thinking more, more towards past the old house pit here.

I'm gonna leave my equipment behind, fishing net,

maybe a tent,

cook stove, stuff like that, easily removable.

And put it right here where there have been other caches

and people for a couple thousand years probably.

Just to think a whole family probably lived there

-at one time, huh? -Yeah.

-Now it's just a hole in the ground. -Yeah. Now it's our turn.

Yeah. (LAUGHS)

We could take all this stuff home, but it would be very expensive

and it would take many loads.

Just taking it across the ocean would be very costly,

and it would be very, very, very time consuming.

I don't want to build a cache too much higher than you or myself

so I'll make it just high enough

for myself to go into, and then build you a ladder,

-and we'll put our things right here. -Yeah, I want it

in the willows, too, so that we could be kind of...

-Private? -Private, yeah.

-Right on. -Yeah. Yep.

Yep, this will be the place then.

I need to have it weatherproof. I need to have it animalproof,

and I need to have it riverproof

because in the spring, the river floods.

Water will be flowing right over this.

All right, I'll get to it.

When you're gonna build something,

you might as well use the best materials possible.

Since those best materials are available just upriver from where I camp,

I decided that instead of using driftwood,

that I would make a right, proper, long-lasting cache.

My plan is to get some longer poles,

the ones that will go in the ground.

What I need are fresher trees because they can bear the weight.

They have the strength that I'm looking for,

and they'll last a long time.

Yep.

Oh, yeah.

Part of having camps and living the way we do

is to be able to leave certain specific equipment behind.

So if I have certain things that I use only in a certain area,

I would rather put them into a cache,

you know, instead of hauling the equipment back and forth with us.

We trust in our neighbours,

and we trust in the people in the Kiwalik

and the neighbouring villages not to mess with our stuff.

This could be pretty tough work.

Work up a heck of a sweat,

hopefully, not injure yourself,

but nobody's gonna do it for me.

(WHIRRING)

Whoa!

Two things went on there.

My foot found a hole,

and I just skipped a chain off.

Man, I could have fallen over backwards on that one.

And I use a chainsaw quite a bit by myself,

and that's a power tool.

And any power tool, you have to respect them.

The reason why we use them is 'cause they're more powerful than us.

Freaked me out.

Get her in the groove, in the groove.

The last thing I want to do is cut myself.

Getting myself back downriver

and then finding a flight that would take me to Anchorage

to a proper doctor

could be hours or days in the making.

And, um, a lot of people don't really survive that.

Okay, here we go.

You know, you really can't drive a car for an entire lifetime,

you can't shoot a gun for an entire lifetime.

There's a time that comes where things are wore out and need to be replaced.

(WHIRRS)

I got the four logs that I came up here to get.

They're pretty long, pretty straight,

and I'm going to make eight pieces of wood out of them.

So I'm pretty happy with what I got.

(STRAINS) This is about the most I can manage myself.

(GRUNTS)

If I cut them up right now,

the fact is you can make a long piece of wood short as much as you want.

You can't make no short piece of wood long.

So my best bet is to keep them intact like this...

Put them in the boat, balance carefully,

and go back home now.

Oh, green trees are so heavy.

These are still full of moisture.

They have a lot of integrity, they're fresh,

and they'll last many, many years.

GLENN: I really enjoy living out here

because the whole environment,

it just suits the way my brain works.

I find it intellectually stimulating to be out here,

physically stimulating.

And it's just a very sensual experience, too.

NARRATOR: With winter approaching,

Glenn Villeneuve works around the clock

gathering wood to help him survive.

The firewood process is that I take a standing tree,

fell it in the woods, and cut it into a six-foot-long piece

that will fit in my sled to get it home.

Once I get it home,

I stack the six-foot-long sled length pieces here in the yard.

Then I use this sawbuck

with the larger diameter pieces

to saw them with a bowsaw

into lengths that will fit in my stove.

If it's large diameter,

I also have to split it after I saw it.

Winter can be

pretty challenging if you're not ready for it.

And you get caught behind.

If you don't have firewood, for example, and all of a sudden winter sets in.

It can be quite a challenge just to keep up.

It can be hand-to-mouth.

I've done that before

when I don't have any wood in reserve.

There, just made it.

Uh, this is an interesting thing.

Gosh, I can't count them

with just my fingernail for a reference,

but this tree is very old.

There's the middle right there.

One, two, three.

So that's about 10 years right there.

Ten, 20, 30, 60, 70, 80.

That tree is well over 100 years old.

Larger pieces have to then be split,

then I can fit them in my stove.

It doesn't want to go.

It's gonna take several whacks at least.

A wedge is a powerful tool.

You can do a lot with a wedge.

For the most difficult pieces,

I have to use this system.

Yeah.

I'm gonna do it.

Inside, I've got a little wood crib.

This is four cubic feet.

On a really cold day in the winter,

this full wood crib will get burned up

in one 24-hour period.

And wood is what I use for cooking.

It's what I use for heating hot water.

It's nice to have a little bit of reserve wood pile

built up.

When I start moose hunting in the fall,

I wanna just focus on hunting every day.

I don't want to be worried about

cutting firewood for a couple of weeks, so...

I've got some firewood now to see me through that period.

I feel prepared and I feel excited.

Just a few more weeks.

It'll be time to start hunting.

ANDY: There's always a challenge out here.

There's always adaptation.

Nothing is the same every year.

You're constantly rethinking how you're gonna do something,

adapting to it, and hopefully winning, not losing.

We'll see if I can take this over there

and use my big bucket on this to get rid of this trash

by bringing it over to the landfill.

Well, we've got some electrical lines

that I need to go underneath of.

If I was to catch that with the bulldozer

on the way underneath,

it would rip out the power lines from our house.

Right now we're running a 6,000-watt generator

to run the dehydrators and the freezers.

So it's pretty dangerous handling overhead power lines.

I better go get Kate,

make sure she can keep an eye on this wire for me.

The last thing I wanna do is snag that with my boom

on the tractor 'cause that's gonna electrify my tractor,

and I think I'm gonna get a new hairdo pretty quick.

So we've got to come up with a method here

to get those wires up and out of the way

until I can get past them.

So I need you to

-keep an eye on this wire here... -Yeah.

When I go under it with the boom, make sure I don't snag that wire, okay?

Just holler really loud.

KATE: I'll stand right here by it.

Yeah, you need two hands on it

'cause you may have to push it up. I don't know.

Okay. Watch for my fists, that means stop.

Whoa!

(ANDY SPEAKS)

(ANDY SPEAKS)

KATE: What Andy's doing now

is a task that needed to be done.

A lot of this is stuff that was left from 2009.

We've got a lot of debris and things that are ruined,

and uh,

there's just no way of getting it out of here.

So what we're gonna do is burn it.

It's been a really, really wet summer,

and it's a good time to try, and uh...

But you know,

a forest fire would mean the end of Calico.

ANDY: I am concerned about forest fires.

That would be absolutely devastating to us.

If we burn this country around here,

we got no protection from the elements.

All right, let's get a fire going here.

GLENN: Basically, I got a philosophy in life.

If I don't need something,

I go without it.

What I wanna do today is I wanna build a ladder and put it right here

just to help me get up to my chimney.

I clean my chimney as often as once a week.

The reason I have to go up there

and clean the chimney so much

is creosote, a build-up inside the stove pipe.

It's a highly flammable material.

If that catches on fire, the stove pipe can get so hot,

that it can catch the whole place on fire.

But it would be nice to just have a ladder here all the time.

Then I could just come out and easily go up whenever I wanted to,

make the job a lot simpler.

This is some leftover wood from another project.

Hopefully, I can get enough here to get started with the ladder project,

if not finish it.

So I'm just going to set it upside down.

I don't want it too narrow, but I don't want it too wide.

So, time to make some rungs.

In this environment, the reality is you have to think ahead.

You have to plan

because the resources just aren't here year round.

You have such extreme differences in seasons.

You do have to take into account

what's around the corner.

So when something's available,

I have to take advantage of it.

You might wanna live in the moment,

but you do have to plan for the future,

there's no doubt about that.

Let's see how this goes.

Ah. It's a beauty.

Look at that. I'm gonna go up and check my chimney.

A little creosote in there.

There.

That looks nice and clean.

SUE: You have to be

dead nuts about who you are, what you want out of life,

and how the hell you're gonna get it.

You better have both hands on the pistol and ready to aim and shoot.

Got an assload of caribou right there.

We gotta get going to go get them.

So I'm gonna head down the road.

NARRATOR: After a failed caribou hunt,

Sue and Nathan head out for another attempt,

before the herd migrates.

SUE: I've noticed a little bit of a change this year.

Uh, the caribou just changed their migration route

and I'm gonna make the most

of the opportunity while I can.

Let's go start hiking.

All right.

I wanna get closer,

but they're gonna make us.

Coming on the road, they kind of made us.

We're gonna have water to go through.

Try to stay low.

(SPLASHES)

Nathan, don't splash.

Don't fall.

They've seen us. They've made us.

Give me the sticks.

Shit.

Next time I want you to hand me to them,

I want you to open them.

He recognises that hunting is gonna get the meat that I need.

He recognises that I can love animals,

turn it off, and shoot one.

Can he do the same thing?

(GUNSHOT FIRES)

Bugs.

Safety's on.

Well, let's go see what we've done.

He's a young man that seems to be making really good choices.

He's looking at life with a career frame of mind.

But in the end,

he's a grandson just wanting to be with his grandma

and get a little time in.

You got kind of wet.

Boneheaded that one section of stream, didn't you?

What do you step on?

You step on the weeds, huh?

I think you kind of missed it, and decided to go for a swim.

Need a shower that bad, huh?

You're travelling with a firearm.

Safety's on.

SUE: Yeah, I'm not swimming that.

I don't get to see my family very often.

That's something I've chosen.

That's one of the repercussions

of having a lifestyle that pleases me.

But when I do, it's cherished and valued time.

What do you think?

Meat in the freezer?

(NATHAN SPEAKS)

(PANTS)

Phew.

Well, come here.

So, this is a bull.

In the caribou family, females and males get racks.

Males are generally bigger, not always.

First thing we do,

you always say thanks.

This guy gave up his life so we could have food, didn't he?

So what do you do? Get over here and tell him thanks.

Yeah, you respect the life you take, man.

Being here,

I think it's a healthy experience.

He's developing a sense of self

and responsibility for his own actions.

Thank you for helping me, buddy.

SUE: We've gotta get back to the four-wheeler,

get the knife bag, get the trailer,

and bring him in.

CHIP: A lot of people just don't get the idea of being out here.

They just don't realise that we get to shape ourselves here,

and we get to flow with nature.

NARRATOR: With winter looming,

Chip must build a cache to store his supplies

before their venture back home to Noorvik.

This should work.

Cut through the sod first with the shovel.

We know this area very well,

and we come back all the time, so I really need to have the cache here,

so that I'm not hauling this stuff back and forth.

It'll be here in place.

It's a good waterproof place to put my equipment.

Okay.

And it's kind of a landmark too, because

in the middle of winter when this is all white,

that cache will stick out.

I guess the next one will be about here.

I've selected an area where it's nice and high

where it's fairly brush-free at the moment.

And then I'm gonna dig down the holes,

and when I have the measurement of how deep my hole is,

then I can measure my cache off of that.

I'm pretty happy with that. Now I've hit permafrost.

Permafrost is permanently frozen ground

that northern Alaska is full of.

The permafrost here is probably about

two, maybe three feet down, the deeper the better.

We'll call that good. I got four holes.

I need to put in my eight posts,

my four good strong rigid ones,

my two shorter ones,

put my crossbeams, make my floor,

make my walls, make my roof, make a ladder,

and be done with it.

I want to make it about high enough to walk under.

And it keeps it above the water, and it keeps it above most animals...

Takes me and my wife to carry the posts.

Pack them really good so they don't go anywhere,

and then just start building on the platform.

There, see what we can get.

Is it all the way in?

-It's about to. -Whoa.

This one is kind of heavier.

Those logs are kind of heavy but light enough for Chip and I to carry them.

But if something were to fall on us, I'm sure it would

put a pretty good scratch.

CHIP: Part of the renewal process is making storage.

If you don't store your things properly

through the winter away from the animals and the weather,

you ain't going to have it very long.

Ooh, my God, I can't even lift this over my shoulder.

This one's heavy.

Add some mud in there, oh, that one go deep.

Right on.

Okay, I can do the rest of this myself.

AGNES: Oh, that's gonna be a good one.

Yep. I'll get to doing this.

Do you have berry picking to do?

-Yep. -Get your berry picking.

(SCREAMS) Oh, scary. Oh, my God!

Fucked up.

CHIP: Never trust a tree.

That was fucking scary.

One of the posts just leaned so it freaked me out.

But always got to remember your surroundings and keep your eyes open.

CHIP: I have my four tall posts in the ground,

and I'm making my short posts that fit right up next to them.

This place floods out every year.

That's why I wouldn't build anything permanent here.

Because every year, this is completely underwater.

If I had to take it down and move it

or if I needed firewood for burning,

this would be down in probably 20 minutes.

That's the way I like it.

Uh, this is recycled rope,

probably costs me less than a gallon of gas.

When it came to using the chainsaw,

probably cost me 10 gallons in gas

to go get the trees from up the river.

So I would say it costs me 100 bucks probably, and my time, of course.

It's coming along like it should be.

These are sheets of plywood

that we collected up off the coast.

If you go down the coast, and there's a sheet of plywood

sitting by the side of the beach,

you tend to throw it in your boat.

Two summers I accumulated 11 sheets of plywood.

Yeah.

I can handle that.

Well, a fellow can certainly look around at the Kiwalik

a little better from up here.

This is an excellent perch in the middle of an excellent hunting place.

I'm gonna box this in basically.

Whenever we want in the cache, we'll just have to untie the front board,

and drop it down, take out whatever it is we're looking for.

We spend so much time here at this camp,

that this is worth leaving behind.

This should work out pretty good.

GLENN: I'm not out here for the isolation,

but it goes with the territory.

I'm out here for nature and wilderness.

Where there's much wilderness left,

there aren't a whole lot of people.

Maybe I should put another piece of wood on the fire.

Fall's short up here.

It's about a month long, and then it can be winter.

Then all of a sudden, there's snow over all the land.

The resources just aren't here year round.

You might want to live in the moment, but you have to plan for the future to a degree.

There's no doubt about that.

I remember the first time I ever camped at this lake.

That was...

Must have been 13 or 14 years ago.

It was like I just found

a perfect little spot for me out here.

I just thought it was like paradise here.

(SIZZLING)

Tasty looking.

Whitefish, mmm.

Really tasty.

Days are getting shorter.

My favourite time of the year is just around the corner.

In another month from now, I'll be hunting moose.

I'll be real busy with plenty of work

to do at that time, so I don't want to think about firewood.

I don't want to think about building a ladder.

This is the time to get all that taken care of,

so I got my ladder built, chimney clean.

Got some wood cut.

I'm going to be well prepared to take advantage of the hunting season,

my favourite time of the year.

Go out and get a moose,

and I won't have to think about firewood,

and these jobs that I'm taking care of now.

SUE: I'm already worried about winter.

I've got to think all of the time.

How can I get what I need to survive?

NARRATOR: With the mosquitoes dying down,

and the caribou herd migrating,

Sue must seize every chance to stock up for winter.

SUE: I am an opportunist. We all are when we live out in the bush.

The opportunity to get meat, sure you're gonna do it.

There he is.

I gotta be very careful, I'm close to camp.

If we stay low, there's a chance they could cross this direction.

So let's get closer to the bush.

Camp is here.

We're here.

The caribou are between the two.

-Do we have clients in camp? -Yes.

Do you know? Can you tell exactly where they're at?

No.

All right, so what is the one direction we can't shoot?

We can't compromise the safety of other people, huh?

-Yeah. -SUE: It would have been good

had it been the right direction, huh?

You're guaranteed an opportunity to hunt,

but you gotta do it wisely, huh?

We've got a little meat in the freezer we gotta take care of, so let's go do it.

You know what,

proud of you for that decision, man.

Sometimes all's you get out of the hunting experience

is a good stalk or a good stretch of the legs.

Anything that way?

-Just right about there. -Right about there? Okay.

That's the direction we can shoot in, huh?

So you wanna try and go over there? Is that a clear shot?

-Yeah, it is. -You wanna try and sneak on them

-and see how far it is? -Yeah.

All right.

Just keep low.

That's an awful tough location.

Come on, Nathan.

You're gonna have to hang onto the brush.

I need sticks.

Gotta get a clear shot without him being in the water.

(GUNSHOT FIRES)

I can't see him, where'd he go?

He dropped to the ground.

SUE: Another one down.

That was the way to take a caribou down, man.

Well, he's another decent one.

This guy has a big rack.

Get up his belly.

I'm putting my knife

in between this fascia area and the skin.

What you want to do, you feel their muscles,

and that's kind of where you want to cut.

NATHAN: I do enjoy watching my grandma hunt,

and I do learn from it.

I do feel like I'm learning many things.

It was pretty amazing.

SUE: My grandson came up to visit,

I got to spend quality time with him,

help teach him some skills that he didn't have.

Meat paw.

This thaw season has seen the end of my first year being a business owner.

It's been good, clients in and out.

Thank you.

SUE: I've learned a lot. I've learned that I have a lot more to learn.

And there's been epic fails.

No, no, no, no, no... (SCREAMS)

Ah!

Mother!

But there's been epic rewards.

-(GUNSHOT FIRES) -Got it.

Yes! It's working. Yay, me.

(GUNSHOT FIRES)

Thank you very much.

You'll be some tasty little meat.

But that's life. Whoo!

All's I can say about this winter

is bring it on, motherfucker.

I'm ready for it.

This next year's gonna be a blast.

ANDY: Every day's an experiment out here.

The only thing you can really rely on is yourself

and your skills,

and your creativity with those skills.

KATE: I can't even imagine

what would happen if this place burned down.

-Fingers crossed. -All right, let's give it a shot.

Three, two, one, go.

-(SCREAMS) -Whoo-hoo.

(LAUGHS)

Oh, my... I think I had a heart attack.

-We got a little fire going. -Yep.

All in all, kind of a disappointing summer.

Nothing in this end.

The fishing was disappointing.

That ain't working.

The cabin project didn't get nearly the amount of time

that I had hoped it would.

Almost every day it rained.

But you never know on the Yukon River.

Things can go from really easy to really bad

in about two hours.

Yeah, baby.

There's a definitive timeline, and that's winter.

When winter hits, everything stops.

If you didn't get it done,

you wait another year to get it done.

I don't think I've ever

gone into winter completely finished with all the projects or all the things on my list,

but my whole reason for living out here is to live with the land.

So to do it well, you just gotta get your ass up in the morning.

You gotta get out there and do what you gotta do.

Whoo!

KATE: Bye-bye, garbage.

CHIP: I like getting up every day,

getting absolutely filthy, dirty, bloody, muddy,

and sweaty wet.

Going home, cleaning up, getting up the next day

and doing it again.

Well, I imagine if we're gonna pack stuff up,

what I need to do is make a better ladder up to the cache.

You guys take this apart, take everything out of here, and dry it out.

When it's all good and dry, we're gonna wrap it up and pack it up,

and by then I'll have the cache ready.

We'll put it in the cache, and pack it away.

And then we can get out of here.

We'll be Kiwalik to Kobuk River Express.

We always hate leaving this place,

but we have more things to go do closer to home.

We've gathered lots of meat, lots of food,

and now it's time to go home.

We're starting to get darkness now,

so basically our summer is over and our fall is here.

It's not sad to be leaving here, but I ain't glad to be leaving here.

This is just wonderful country.

AGNES: So we have a whole day

of just cleaning up camp today.

Getting all our stuff dried out and emptying this teepee

so we can go on ahead and collapse it

and put it up in the new cache Chip built for us.

Yeah, that'll work.

Okay, empty.

It's very educational for the girls to come down here.

It's always a good investment and good learning process.

You know, we're always getting ready,

always getting ready for the next season.

All of summer is just nothing but a preparation for winter ahead,

and the winter's nothing but a preparation for the summer ahead.

We're basically gonna leave this here for the next time.

And there will be a next time, I'm sure.

All we got to do is move everything over

-and we're ready to go. -Yep.

I always feel like I'm never done here.

There's just so much to do,

there's so much excitement around.

Have to bring everything to the cache and secure it.

It took all the family to work together

and managed to put it all away today.

We're all stored and ready to go.

CHIP: I'm gonna put the front door on and call it good.

Okay.

CHIP: Everything we own except for our boating stuff is in the cache.

Tighten it all down real good.

I call this cache done.

Ready for next season in the Kiwalik.

And the one after that and the one after that.

The girls got to catch caribou.

Ooh, ooh.

They got to go out and catch geese.

They got to catch salmon in the nets.

They got to go egging.

They got to learn how to look for smelts.

Not only did they learn and observe,

but they got to put hands on and participate.

And my daughter Qutan can cut a salmon now just as good as I can.

Well, if we're gonna do any travelling tonight, we better get started with it.

Let's go, Carol. Pull it in, Qutan.

We got a big ocean to cross, a big sound to cross,

and then we have a big lake to cross.

Okay, we're loaded.

Just the adventure and the health

that came out of it is worth every penny.

The whole summer's turned out.

AGNES: Yeah, ready, girls, to go home?

Home sweet home?

Gonna be a long ride.

Yeah.