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CHRIS: Wow, what a view!
JESSI: I think this might be a pretty good space to
put some snares.
Trapping is a really important part of living a subsistence
lifestyle and we need to be where the animals are.
CHRIS: Man, that thing's (beep) up.
Bears hit it hard.
JESSI: Do you have your gun, Chris?
Yeah?
CHRIS: Yeah. JESSI: Okay, I'll follow you.
CHRIS: We haven't been back to the trapping cabin since
last year so it's very likely we're gonna
have some bears come by.
Best to be prepared.
JESSI: Wow!
CHRIS: Having the trapping cabin has been really essential
to our survival out here.
If it's not repairable,
the trapping's gonna be really difficult.
Oh, yeah.
JESSI: What does inside look like?
CHRIS: And to make things harder,
we're starting to dwindle on our fresh meat.
Oh.
JESSI: Dang.
CHRIS: This thing got annihilated.
There's still some lumber in there.
Definitely got some cleanup to do in here.
I think that was the bottom of the window.
JESSI: To live a life like Chris and I do,
you have to be at your strongest.
You have to have fresh meat coming in.
Trapping cabin, it's our key to survival.
It's our shelter, our home away from home,
and the halfway point between us and
a winter's worth of food.
CHRIS: The front of our stove is smashed.
JESSI: Well, part of it's okay. CHRIS: Yeah, it's not terrible.
I can probably straighten that,
oh, look at that.
It's full of bear hair. Bear got inside our cabin.
I expected a little carnage out here just 'cause we were
cutting up meat in here,
but I didn't expect a whole wall to be missing.
JESSI: Oh, (bleep).
CHRIS: Usually when a bear wrecks things,
they put their paws up onto the edge of things and
they just push on it,
push on it until they break the boards inside.
So I expect that we're gonna find most of the boards either
right in front or right inside the cabin.
I was thinking we might be able to take stuff like this.
I don't know where it broke it from.
Oh, right there. Right?
Bada-boom. We're back in business.
JESSI: Come out here and let's see what we got
and what we don't have here.
Okay, so let's make space, let's shovel out some snow,
we'll pin these up, see what we need to cut and then we're
going to have to go and we're going to have to go
and mill some more boards.
CHRIS: Yeah. So, let's get to work.
JESSI: The trapping cabin is the home base out at my trap line,
so I can just stay there for the night and get up early
in the morning and go check my traps and spend all day out
here instead of wasting so much time driving back and forth
and back and forth.
CHRIS: Let's get all of our stuff put inside,
button it up for the night, and then we'll bug out and get home
before too dark.
JESSI: All right! Our stove!
We'll head back tomorrow and we'll get this finished.
CHRIS: It might be a little harder,
but we're going to get this done.
CHEVIE: You live out in the woods,
you do stuff in Alaska a lot of times,
you need guns, chainsaw,
axe, snow machine, sled.
Things do happen quickly out here,
and you have to be able to take care of them yourself.
All right, Ry-Ry, are you excited about getting
this thing running?
RYDER: Uh-hmm. No.
CHEVIE: Will freeze up in town multiple times when it's
40, 50 below and there's no way to get water.
So, knowing how to get it, that is a necessity.
RYDER: Snow is so hard. CHEVIE: Yeah, it is.
It's from the little bit of rain.
Yeah, so we're trying to go get some ice.
We get big chunks of ice off the river,
melt them for drinking water.
And one of the first steps is to get this snow machine out of
this snow bank here and fire it up so we could use it
to haul ice.
RYDER: I'm gonna try lifting.
CHEVIE: Make sure you keep your back straight.
RYDER: Let me see your hammer.
I'm mostly focusing on breaking this tree.
CHEVIE: We can saw it down with the chainsaw if we
absolutely have to but, all that stupid rain,
we got in the middle of winter making this project
a little more difficult than it usually is, huh?
I think it's, it's broke.
RYDER: Free?
CHEVIE: This track is anyways. RYDER: It looks broke free.
CHEVIE: It got a bunch of rain and ice on that clutch.
Definitely gonna have to get a bunch of heat on it.
You're gonna run down and grab an extension cord.
RYDER: Uh-hmm.
CHEVIE: You get that, I'll get the master heater ready, okay?
Living out here in remote Alaska,
you have to be a jack of all trades.
You have to know a lot of different things about
a lot of stuff.
And teaching Ryder how to take care of equipment...
RYDER: Get this ready.
CHEVIE: How to warm it up, how to work on stuff,
all those small steps of how to be successful in this
journey are super important.
So I think what we can do, Ryder,
since you want to cut this tree down so bad.
You've been talking about it.
We'll cut it right here and we'll use it as our
little stand for our tarp.
RYDER: Okay.
CHEVIE: So our tarp doesn't go all the way down on our heater.
(chainsaw motor)
It's just a little home to keep the heat in.
So what we'll do is we'll fire off this master heater.
Okay. Ready?
Heat will solve a lot of problems when you live in the
Arctic and this is a good way to get heat fast.
RYDER: That's hot, dad.
CHEVIE: You liking it? RYDER: Yeah.
CHEVIE: Just gonna let it do its thing for a minute.
Let it run. Hopefully it pulls over...
ROBERT: Finding the habitat, getting the right bait,
setting the pots right, hitting the currents right,
having the right tools...
shrimping ain't easy, that's for sure.
RJ: Is this, this one we did pretty shallow, right?
ROBERT: Yeah. This is all around 300 to 338.
So it's definitely a little shallower.
Coming up on a buoy. See how our first string does.
Well, we're shooting for 20 gallons of tails.
Ten gallons a piece 'cause that's our limit
according to fish and game.
RJ: You know, it's the middle of winter.
The larger animals are kinda hard to find at the moment.
It's probably the only time of the year that we can
go out and get shrimp, so to be able to make the time
to do it is really important.
ROBERT: Come out, spend one week,
dedicate our lives to it, go home, eat for a year.
Nice out today.
Love this.
RJ: It's hung up on the bottom.
ROBERT: I have a good feeling I know right where
these shrimp are.
But I've come out here with that same confidence before and
not found 'em.
If we don't get these shrimp on this trip,
I don't know another time frame that I'm gonna be able to do it.
Hung up on the bottom a little bit.
RJ: Maybe try forward and away from the cliff or no?
ROBERT: The water's rough.
If you don't have your head on a swivel and constantly paying attention,
you'll sink your boat.
There it popped.
Hopefully, there's still five pots on there.
RJ: It's hard to get a good coil on that.
All that stuff was just slipping.
Oh, yeah. That's good.
ROBERT: Good haul right there. Look at that.
RJ: That'll work. ROBERT: Oh, yeah.
That's a good start for the pot number one out of twenty.
RJ: Rope needs replaced on this one.
ROBERT: Loaded though, isn't it?
Oh, yeah.
RJ: It's about the same. ROBERT: Good haul, man.
Oh, the bottom came open on that one.
The rubber probably broke.
That's strange.
Lost out on that one.
But it was a pretty good haul for our first set.
All right, let's go set the (bleep).
Ready, RJ?
RJ: Yeah.
ROBERT: Throw! RJ: All right, we're good!
ROBERT: Yeah, if we don't get any shrimp on this trip,
I'm probably not gonna have another opportunity to go out
and get shrimp until the fall, which is six, seven months away.
Okay, throw!
We're gonna check different depths,
check different bottom types.
That's why they call it shrimping and not catching.
We gotta go out and prospect.
All right, go to the next spot.
JOHNNY: It's not easy above the Arctic Circle.
It's a hard life out here.
So, the goal is to go out trapping and get some fur.
And the animals out here that are growing with the land will
make garments that are meant to be on this land.
This is what I what I'm looking for right here.
I got a natural game trail.
The animals, they continue to use this because
the snow's so deep.
They take advantage of any sort of little, like,
natural trail that they make and being on the border of this lake,
there's a lot of natural cubbies for me to
set some traps.
But I have to be able to find them.
So, I'll take advantage of the bank of this lake,
and this game trail.
I honestly think I could take advantage of this little spot
because there's a lot of these little alders standing up and I
can use that as a way to funnel the animals
to the front of the trap,
so I might, I might make that little game trail.
You know, I gotta walk up to the trap so using snowshoes
kinda makes a nice little trail for them.
And what I'll do is I'll make a trail going to the front of
where I'm gonna build the trap,
and then I'm making a connecting trail to that
game path that I saw over there.
The middle of winter is the prime time to trap.
The reason is the fur is the thickest,
and that's the type of fur that I'm after.
It's a much better cubby than I thought it was gonna be.
I got these six branches to work on my favor.
The back of it is just kind of naturally encased and enclosed,
so the animal won't go through the back and steal the bait.
It's gonna come around to the easy access,
which will be the front.
This is the caribou stomach from the last caribou I shot.
It's all frozen.
It's technically fresh.
This is the stuff that wolverines and scavengers and
fox like to eat.
So, I'm gonna offer them this.
I'm gonna throw it all the way in the back there.
I've used leg-hold traps in the past.
And they're not always my favorite style of trap.
So, these are body-gripping traps,
and these are the most humane traps you can use,
and they're my preferred trap to use.
So, I just take this rope, put it through the hole here,
string it through.
Pull here.
And what that does is compress the springs.
So, these are compressed, these springs,
I got a little clip that holds 'em on.
And now it's kind of like the safety.
This is the trigger, so if a wolverine or fox or something
like that came through, it's gonna hit these,
and this trap will close on it.
Any curious animal is gonna find itself inside the body
trap before reaching the bait.
There's no suffer-age, there's no pain.
'Cause these things are, this is dangerous, man.
I mean, this could easily break my arm.
Something that you gotta feel confident with,
you gotta feel comfortable with,
or you're gonna get yourself hurt.
The safety's off. This thing is live.
(metal clang)
JOHNNY: Woo! That was close.
The trap's where I want it to be,
and now it's time to just start really camouflaging it
with spruce boughs and sticks.
It's gonna look like maybe a weasel or wolverine or
something dragged the caribou guts into and another animal's
gonna come smelling it and say,
"Sweet. I'm gonna go get the rest of that."
So, let's not pretend like they're not gonna smell me here.
So, how do I counter that, and it's by creating my presence,
but also an animal's presence that's been here after me and
dug this all out.
So, the next thing I wanna do is create that scene,
that crime scene.
Bust everything up, and that's why I'm taking all these sticks
and just kind of throwing 'em about.
Something came in here and just dug and dug and dug.
Throw these sticks around.
No animal is neat and precise.
They're quick. They're fast.
They're hungry, and they're trying to get a meal before an
animal comes up to it.
And when an animal comes up, they're gonna say,
"Oh, man, something cached food in this hole,
and it looks like an animal's already been here.
So it's probably a safe place to go."
I got some caribou stomach pieces right here.
Scatter them around a little bit.
Show them that an animal came here after me.
The way I go about trapping is to think like the animal
that I'm after.
And it's a really cool way to engage with them.
And the next that I'm gonna do is gonna be very similar.
It's gonna be on a cut bank of the lake.
An animal comes down the path to meet the grim reaper.
ROBERT: The spirit behind the harvest is probably the same as
it was since time immemorial.
We're trying to get this food the best we can.
And we're trying to bring it home to our families.
Those pots that we set yesterday have been in the
water about 20 hours now.
They could be a little wind chopped.
I heard the forecast this morning,
they're calling thirty-naut winds for the next
day and a half, two days.
And I can tell that it's starting to move in.
It's starting to pick up right out of the east here.
I'm scared to death of the water.
The last thing I wanna do is end up in it.
We're gonna go over a three-footer right now.
I try to turn the boat around in-between sets,
keep the boat stabilized for RJ working in the
back deck back there.
First buoy right here.
This was a very deep soak.
I set this one way deeper than I set any of the other strings.
Yeah, first pot.
RJ: Looks good.
ROBERT: First pot. Look at that.
RJ: Well, we got some shrimp.
ROBERT: That makes me real happy right there.
That's a good score.
Nineteen more pots to go, hopefully they all do that good.
And then the next pot comes up with three.
Isn't that crazy?
Same bait, everything.
These are spot prawns.
These are our target species right here.
Look at that.
A little bit of tail there.
Well, we're shooting for 20 gallons of tails,
ten gallons a piece.
We can do better.
It takes a while to find 'em.
We're still prospecting.
We just have to work harder, find them.
RJ: All right, we're good. ROBERT: Thank you.
Prospecting, it's all about gut-instinct.
With the best knowledge you have that's been accumulated
for over 30 years, hands-on experience.
See if we can find 'em quicker than if that was a
brand-new rookie out here.
We got a pot coming up.
About 200 yards.
We've got a buoy coming up, RJ.
Kiska, he wants to know what's coming up just as much as us.
He loves watching that.
A lot of orange in there.
3-38 just got a little better.
RJ: There you go.
ROBERT: My lucky number.
Look at that. That's a good haul right there.
First pots we threw out were the shallowest and they
did the best.
RJ: Yeah. You wanna do a shallow set?
Just do a side hill?
ROBERT: Yeah, because this is what the doctor ordered right here.
Yeah, this one's loaded too.
RJ: Yup.
ROBERT: See, we're talking big prawns right here, man.
Nice.
We're gonna re-bait 'em. We're gonna set 'em again.
Hopefully we find the mother-load.
RJ: Definitely, can be a little more productive now
that we know that they're in this area.
Instead of having 'em all clumped together,
we're gonna space 'em out on the same string and
hopefully catch more shrimp.
ROBERT: The funny thing is, we did real good here one time,
we could come here tomorrow and not get a shrimp.
You just never know.
We got three more buoys we're not gonna check tonight.
And we're gonna let 'em soak.
Tomorrow morning, we're gonna check 'em all.
We're always on the hunt out here.
JESSI: So many things that could happen out here,
and if you're gonna take the risk,
you better have the guts to back it up.
CHRIS: Let's get a tree knocked down and let's get
some boards ripped out.
And let's get this trapping cabin habitable for ya.
JESSI: Yeah, let's do it.
What tree do you wanna get after?
CHRIS: I'd like to cut down some deadwood,
but there's not a lot of dead standing around.
I'm thinking I'll take down this tree here.
It's already leaning out over the lake,
so it's gonna die in the next year or two.
I figured that's a good one to work with.
JESSI: I'll grab the axe and follow you.
CHRIS: It's sitting on a slant, so what's gonna happen is it's
just gonna fall into the lake and make a big mess.
We may as well use that tree.
Wow.
Once we get this down,
we should bring the snow machine over...
Pack in a trail.
JESSI: So, we're not working in this?
Make sure you pack a exit out of here.
CHRIS: This tree's a lot bigger than I thought.
JESSI: Yeah. It's gonna fall straight.
It doesn't have any twists or breaks?
CHRIS: I'm gonna make the cut right, I mean,
there's this big knot I gotta try to avoid.
I'm gonna cut kinda low right through where there's
a bunch of ice.
Cut right through about here, that's gonna start to tip over.
I'm gonna cut about that far through,
so it tries to stay attached when it falls.
JESSI: Okay.
CHRIS: You just gotta be careful once it hits the ground.
JESSI: Okay, you wanna try to, where's your exit strategy here?
This way?
CHRIS: Yeah.
JESSI: Okay.
I'm just making sure you got a nice, easy way out.
I'm gonna skedaddle this way.
(chainsaw motor)
About halfway through,
I hear it. Here it goes. It's cracking.
And, whoa.
I felt the shelf-ice drop underneath me.
CHRIS: I bet. I can hear all the ice cracking.
JESSI: I know, it freaked me out a little bit.
CHRIS: Listen.
(distant cracking)
It's making a lot of noise right here under the ice.
JESSI: All right, I'm moving,
like the ice is gonna break through it.
CHRIS: All right, it's settling down.
JESSI: It definitely bothered me when you first dropped it.
It was a lot of movement.
See the overflow over here?
CHRIS: Oh.
JESSI: So, when that tree fell, the whole lake fell.
CHRIS: Pushes some water up.
JESSI: And now we're gonna have overflow.
It doesn't look too deep, though.
You know?
CHRIS: What's up?
JESSI: I just need to keep out, an eye out for the snow machine
so it doesn't get stuck in that.
CHRIS: Yeah, at least it's up above it so the track's not getting wet.
Cool.
JESSI: So far.
All right, I'll come in and I'll start chopping some limbs.
CHRIS: Leave this here for ya.
JESSI: Oh, my gosh.
(chainsaw motor)
CHRIS: That looks pretty good.
I'll kinda clean this up,
make it a little nicer for milling.
JESSI: Okay, here's this.
I'll be right back with your stuff.
CHRIS: Before I can get to milling boards,
I have to cut a couple large notches out of the tree
so I can fit the mill in there.
See if the mill fits.
There we go.
JESSI: There we go.
Now we're gonna start milling our very first board.
Then we're gonna measure, and cut them to fit,
and pin them right back up on the wall.
CHEVIE: So, there's a lot of things out here that
we don't necessarily control.
But you work around all your variables.
You come out with a good solution.
You're educating yourself.
Hot coming out of there?
RYDER: It's really hot. CHEVIE: Really hot.
That's what we want.
It's like pulling it out of a 100-degree shop.
Let's shut 'er down.
Ryder's learning and growing with the snow machine.
He's fixing it.
We'll use it to get ice and then use that
for drinking water.
Should look just like how it looked when it came off the
showroom floor in 1986!
It's part of a journey.
Hopefully it pulls over now,
hopefully it was just an ice situation.
(engine starts)
All right.
RYDER: Well, it runs. That's the only good thing.
Or there's more good things, but the throttle is sticky.
CHEVIE: Sounds like it a little bit, huh?
It's always a little bit of a process.
It's just getting it tuned in here a little bit.
I mean, there's technical difficulties in everything.
Even with going to get ice for water.
RYDER: Hey, what's that thing do?
CHEVIE: This is the slide.
This is what lets the fuel in.
All right, you can see right here though that
the throttle's stretched.
That could be from my apprentice mechanic working on
it without adult supervision.
He's gonna be driving it and I gotta get it to where
I trust it.
This is sitting up too high.
The cable needs to be lengthened.
But it's gotta be consistent and it's not.
Put him in a dangerous situation.
I'm gonna need a couple wrenches, Ryder.
RYDER: I'll get it.
CHEVIE: Jeez, that's tight. Let's put the cab back on.
All right, Ryder, let's get it all the way over here.
We're just in that big pocket of ice right there, okay?
(bleep).
During the winter months, ice freezes up.
Okay, you got it?
RYDER: Yeah. Yeah.
CHEVIE: And, you know, after going and working and being physical,
you just wanna drink water.
So, my being able to go get some ice for drinking water...
It's a necessity.
There we go.
Ryder.
RYDER: What? CHEVIE: Kick snow under there.
Okay, let's see if I get that to go now.
(engine revving)
She lives!
She's up and running now.
Got a lot of work still to do.
Load it up with some sleds, and go find ourselves some
crystal-clear blue drinking water.
RJ: Big day today. ROBERT: I think so.
I think we're gonna kill it. What's going on, Kiska?
You ready to go catch some shrimps?
This morning them easterlies are gonna pick up,
to 30 knots.
It can make for a real interesting shrimp check.
It can be dangerous.
That wind and current doing some funky stuff here, isn't it?
RJ: Can you turn your motor to starboard?
There you go. That'll drift nice.
ROBERT: The anticipation associated with shrimping for
me is a lot bigger than maybe any other thing I'd do
as far as being out in the woods or on the water.
A few here but not great.
Every time you pull a pot,
you just never know what you're gonna get.
Head up to the next pots.
It doesn't take much wind going against the current to
really pile these waves up.
It just makes it like a washing machine.
Coming up.
We got a buoy coming up, RJ.
There's some serious water.
RJ: Slow down.
ROBERT: Holy (bleep). RJ, hold on.
RJ: (bleep). Maybe take it a little easier.
All gung-ho about the shrimp.
ROBERT: To cut that weight, it just shifted everything,
didn't it?
RJ: Almost tipped the boat over.
ROBERT: You wanna go out and get the shrimp in a storm.
One lapse in judgment, that's all it takes out here.
RJ: Other side.
ROBERT: I'm on the bottom, isn't it?
RJ: It feels like it.
ROBERT: Yeah, I turned that corner a little sharp.
The waves weren't that big, but it doesn't take much,
this boat, because we're lighter on fuel and we've got
all the weight out of the bottom,
and it's a little top-heavy and almost tipped a little bit.
RJ: I mean, I almost went over.
ROBERT: It scared the hell out of me.
Come on, buddy.
There, it broke free.
Did it break the line?
RJ: I don't know. What do you think?
Did we lose a pot, or did it rip a hole,
or did it just come undone?
Right here, it was wrapped around rocks and stuff.
It's all chewed up right there a little.
Oh, it's got tension now.
ROBERT: Hey, buddy, go lay down.
RJ: The weather's picking up.
ROBERT: It's picking up big time out here.
Yeah, we're blowing a steady 20 right now.
Getting a little nervous.
I'm just trying to keep the boat calm for you,
so we won't get sideways into this.
RJ: Yeah.
ROBERT: Otherwise, we're just gonna get the (bleep)
beat out of us.
Got some shrimp.
RJ: That's a good one.
ROBERT: Good one. Big, big shrimp.
I love it. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, this one's loaded too.
Lotta orange in there. Yeah.
RJ: This is looking good.
ROBERT: That's the best pot out of all of them, yet.
RJ: Yeah. It's full on the first bucket.
ROBERT: One for the books for a while.
This is an amazing haul. I mean, I'm happy with this.
All right, we've almost got her overflowed, RJ.
RJ: I think this is working out pretty well.
I'm just gonna get a nice 40-foot spread on these pots
and do the same thing we did on the last string.
Good to go!
ROBERT: All right, we've got enough to feed both of
our families for quite a while here,
but I like to shoot for the stars.
One more set. Five more pots. See what we can do.
JOHNNY: Out here there's not a lot of food.
It's all spread out thousands, and thousands,
and thousands of acres out here.
It's hungry country.
And these animals work hard, day and night, to get a meal.
That's a dead one. I need a nice, green one.
All right, I grabbed these 'cause I wanna just be able to
rub my hands on this spruce bough,
and it kinda will mask any human scent.
First trap's right here.
Kinda fooled myself.
Just sticks, and debris, and (bleep) flung all
over the place.
Stomach contents just kinda flung out.
Looks like a, maybe a wolverine or something.
I went in there and started digging everything out.
But there's no tracks going in and there's no animal in the
trap, which is bad news for me.
I always like to bring a little something to kinda
sweeten the pot.
This here is a pelvic bone.
You can see it's been chewed on and stuff.
I found this by a wolf kill sight.
So, I'm gonna toss this over there and just kind of
add to the scene, just lob that in there.
Okay. I got high hopes on this one.
I'm gonna move on to the next one.
Looks like the trap kinda tilted back a little bit.
I don't see any tracks.
I'm going to go in and check it out, just kinda readjust it.
I don't want a fallen trap,
so I think it did fall a little bit.
I'm gonna go in, try to get this on my hands.
It's not gonna be perfect.
But spruce has a pretty strong smell to it.
You know, you could set 100 traps and maybe only
get something in five or ten of 'em.
You know, the odds aren't huge.
I'm gonna let these marinate.
Let these soak for a little bit longer,
see if they produce anything.
It's just a matter of time, patience,
and a little bit of persistence.
JESSI: We have no business being out here if we can't
provide for ourselves.
It doesn't matter how cold it is or how much daylight.
CHEVIE: We've been at it for a while, huh?
JESSI: To be strong to survive out here,
you just have to get out there and experience that fear.
And you have to be at your strongest.
You have to have fresh meat coming in.
JESSI: Wow, it actually is really, really beautiful.
CHRIS: Yeah.
Jessi and I worked really good as a team.
And so Jessi and I have been through a lot together.
When you come across a big obstacle out here,
work hard, and not giving up.
JESSI: There's a grouse in the tree.
CHRIS: You said there's grouse?
JESSI: There's two grouse in that tree.
CHRIS: I'm gonna get my gun.
I'd love a fresh bird.
Do you see 'em, Jess?
JESSI: Yeah, look at 'em.
CHRIS: I don't think I can him 'em with this thing,
but I'm gonna try.
All right, let's see if we can get one of these little guys.
(gunshot)
JESSI: Woo.
Well, not quite, but it's good to see 'em here.
It's been a long time.
CHRIS: Yeah.
I really didn't think I was gonna be able to hit it
with .38 but.
JESSI: Woo. Gave me a little heart start.
Well, next time we come out here,
we're bringing a .410 or something.
CHRIS: Yeah. JESSI: Right?
CHRIS: Cool, well I'll go put the gun away.
We'll get back to work.
If we can't fix the trapping cabin to make
it through the winter,
it's gonna really hinder our ability to do some trapping.
JESSI: All right.
CHRIS: But it's not like we have to rebuild the
entire trapping cabin.
I'd like to take the small chainsaw,
and I'm just gonna kinda, you know, kinda come along
like this and trim and trim.
Let's go see if it fits.
JESSI: Okay. Put the trapping cabin together.
CHRIS: Ha! Look at that. That's pretty good.
JESSI: Yeah, for just picking a tree and cutting it,
it's almost exact.
CHRIS: I'll just trim that end off to fit.
We can always work together to overcome obstacles.
JESSI: That's pretty successful, Chris.
We are back in business. I'm stoked.
CHRIS: Good job. JESSI: Yeah.
CHRIS: What do you wanna do next?
JESSI: I think we need to put something in the windows,
and then we should get the, the whole stove and put that in
here and start warming it up and start bringing some life
back into the trapping cabin.
CHRIS: No problem.
We're gonna have you out trapping in no time.
JESSI: My goodness. I can't wait, get out of there.
SONTA: There's shelf ice right along the sides of
the river that's really good drinking water.
Do you see where it's nice and clear under there?
That's what we want.
CHEVIE: That's how high the water was this fall, Sydney.
And then once the water drops,
this ice that we're standing on falls.
So there's nothing feeding these rivers during
the winter months, and as they fall,
that shelf of ice is established.
You're gonna have to hit it in a couple different places
all the way around there to knock that off.
SONTA: There you go.
Yeah, stop.
So, this is what we want, guys. Look how clear that is.
RYDER: Clear.
CHRIS: Yeah, look at how clear that is.
SYDNEY: I wanna see through it.
SONTA: You can see right through it.
So, what's so cool about this is this is
really pure drinking water.
All the sediment and silt,
settled down to the bottom and left this nice, pure water.
CHEVIE: In an emergency situation,
not having any way to get water,
this ice and knowing how to get it, is an necessity.
RYDER: Hey, that's good.
SYDNEY: Ooh, that's good.
There's a piece.
SONTA: So, we'll have to chip off some of this bad stuff.
CHEVIE: Chipping that yellow stuff off.
SYDNEY: Yeah, it's really, it's really gross.
CHEVIE: It just kinda naturally pops off between the clear ice
and the bad ice.
There you go.
You see how it just comes right off?
SYDNEY: Way to go, Ryder.
CHEVIE: You get a little nervous sometimes
when Sydney's standing on top of the ice shelf.
You know, going to town.
Ryder's underneath it, sticking his hand under there,
and you know damn well that that big chunk of ice
is probably 200 pounds, you know?
And the last thing you wanna do is see that ice fall
on somebody's hand.
I'll try to chip off a couple so I can warm up
a little bit too.
Sometimes the best way is still the way that they've
been doing it for hundreds and hundreds of years.
That's what's gonna ensure that my kids are gathering ice,
their kids are gathering ice a long time from now because
it's still the best way.
SYDNEY: You didn't know we had our own ice-maker
out here, did you?
CHEVIE: Ooh, look at that nice, big, piece.
It's a lot more ice than I thought it was gonna be.
We're able to go back quite a bit.
SYDNEY: Yeah, we can probably get one load out of
this whole ice shelf.
Great job, everybody.
CHEVIE: Big load of ice. SYDNEY: Big load.
CHEVIE: It's kinda just close to a couple hundred gallons
of water there.
SYDNEY: I'm pretty thirsty.
I think I'm ready to go melt this ice at home now.
CHEVIE: I, I'm ready to have a cup of hot something.
JOHNNY: Trapping isn't going out and expecting all
your traps to be full.
You have to give multiple options.
Just thinking like the animal, thinking like nature.
There's no limit or boundary in how clever you
can get with it.
All right, it's trap checking time.
I'm gonna go check the traps I set.
I think they've been sitting long enough.
Aw, man, the trap's been set off.
They cleaned out, man.
This is like wolverine behavior hands down.
Well, they come down my trail here.
See the little indents.
It's pretty obvious there was a wolverine that got in this trap.
No other animal is gonna cause this kind of damage.
Just wreaked havoc.
Look at this.
No way, man.
Look at this, dude.
This spring went off and somehow this one,
the safety is still on.
This is kind of messed up. I've never seen this before.
Somehow the safety caught back on.
And if the trap's upside down,
sometimes it'll just naturally just flip right onto it.
I think that's what happened.
So, this is kind of like a half-live trap at this point.
One of the springs was sprung and the other one was not.
So, the animal got lucky.
Like do I feel upset?
Am I, you know, mad because I didn't trap it?
No. Hell no, man.
I'm excited because I did step one.
Step one is luring an animal to your trap.
Check.
Step two: catching it.
Still gotta figure out step two.
So I'm gonna take that extra bait,
and I'm just gonna reset this guy.
Because if a wolverine has been here, it's coming back.
So, like, it would be silly to not set this again.
All right, so I got some more of that same bait that
I already chopped up.
Sneak it back in there.
And I'm gonna kinda leave it a mess.
I'm gonna leave it just like it is and hope it's complacent and
it comes back around.
So, this is the little safety right here.
And it latches on.
And I might even put this body trap
kind of like it already was, where the wolverine left it.
'Cause this animal knows that trap now.
So, what do I have to hide, you know?
Trap is live.
So I'm gonna go check that other trap real quick
that I set further down.
These things can smell for miles.
So got the bait at the first one.
Why wouldn't it have gotten the bait at the second one?
I better check and make sure there's bait
but like a lot of times, you get your hopes up so high
it's like, "Oh, cool man, an animal visited that trap.
So, let's go see if it visited my other trap."
It's not always the case, you know?
It's not, you don't get like an animal in
every trap you set.
No, (bleep). Look at this. No way, man.
JOHNNY: Look at this, man.
We got a wolverine right here.
God, this thing is beautiful.
Look at this thing, man.
Oh, it's still limber.
It must've been a quick death, you know?
That's what you want.
Got cocky, ate all that stuff at the first one,
and then cruised on down the trail.
He put his head in to reach at the bait,
and it closed right on his head.
It's taking a life, you know?
But you want it to be quick like that?
It's just an incredible, incredible animal.
And they have this just beautiful, beautiful fur.
This thing is gonna help me persist out here in the cold.
It's gonna keep me warm.
He's heavy.
I wanna get him back before he freezes,
and start processing it out, skin it out.
I'm proud to be a part of this animal's life and for it
to be a part of my life.
This guy's got a lot of fat on him, man.
You know, it's a nice, old male and I'm happy that this
wolverine spent time, you know,
living a good life out on the country doing
the stuff I like to do, man.
You know, climbing these mountains.
Look at it next to mine.
That's a big whomping paw right there though, man.
It's really cool to see a very up close and personal
view of how these animals live.
And with that, I get a lesson.
You know, 'cause I like to be untamed, and I like to be wild.
It's just a beautiful, beautiful pelt.
It's just so thick and I'm super grateful for it.
You know, the warmth and the, the use I'll get out here.
And, you know, it's not a traditional food for me to eat
wolverine but I'm probably far from traditional.
JESSI: Oh, yeah.
Rabbit tracks are nice and thick up here!
CHRIS: Jess is one of the toughest women I have ever met.
She's competent. She's confident.
And she's good with a pistol.
JESSI: Now that we have the trapping cabin back up and going,
this is it for me.
Ready, set, go.
So really the best for all of us is for Chris to take care of
finishing the trapping cabin and I'm heading out to set
some rabbit snares.
That's a rabbit hole.
The snowshoe hare dug all the way down to the
grass right here.
And I'm guessing just slept in there.
Rabbit is a perfect source of meat.
So now I'm just gonna follow these tracks before they
disappear with the snowfall and go up into the trees.
CHRIS: I see Jess out tracking down those rabbits...
She's got a big smile on her face and she loves to do it.
I'm gonna stay here,
but I got a couple surprises for her.
JESSI: I wanna find a place where the rabbit tracks
are going through somewhere really, really narrow.
They have to go through my snare.
Hop. Hop. Hop. This is good.
Hey, love!
CHRIS: Hey. JESSI: How goes? CHRIS: Good.
I got it all warmed up in here for you.
Check this out.
JESSI: Nice. Check that out. CHRIS: Yeah, like that.
Just as a seat, and you can do whatever you need to do.
JESSI: Yeah.
CHRIS: Or you can just hop on top.
You got yourself a nice bed.
It's picked up in the air, so you're not gonna get cold.
And with the nice new stove, I think you're gonna have some
nice, warm, comfortable nights trapping out here.
JESSI: I'm loving it. Good job, Chris.
The trapping cabin is stronger and better than it was before.
I can have a real chance of bringing home
some fresh, healthy, meat.
ROBERT: Nice haul. Pretty happy.
We've got dinner tonight. We earned that dinner.
What do you think we got here total after we pluck 'em?
Maybe five gallons of tails?
RJ: That's what I was thinking.
That's a lot.
ROBERT: Heck yeah. I gotta pluck the heads off.
The head, the body, this is all completely edible,
and this good if you wanna make like a soup stock
or something with it.
The jumbo's right there.
Imagine if you were in a restaurant and you had
six of these with a steak.
It'd probably be an $80 or a $100 meal.
We get to come out here and enjoy it,
just by putting in our own labor.
I love it.
You like that?
You don't know what to think, do you?
It's a lot of fun, a lot of effort,
a great reward for your hard work.
Dinner is served.
RJ: Looks good.
ROBERT: Thanks, RJ. I'm having a good trip with ya.
It's been fun.
RJ: Yeah.
You look back at it in four or five months and
pull a package of shrimp out and it's all worth it.
ROBERT: Next time I try flip the boat over,
I'll give you a warning first.
RJ: All right.
CHEVIE: Dang, that's a lot of ice, huh, guys?
SONTA: Right now we have the ice melting down in the barrels.
But for now, this'll be enough to get us by for the night.
CHEVIE: No chlorine.
SONTA: It doesn't have any chlorine.
It's not treated.
It's really good just by itself,
and then it's extra good in other things mixed with it,
like tea and coffee.
Emry, you wanna get the first little taste.
EMRY: Yes!
SONTA: In your baby-sized cup?
RYDER: Then can I have the second?
SONTA: Sure.
SYDNEY: From one to ten, how good does it taste?
EMRY: Ten! RYDER: 100!
I'm not gonna do ten, I'm gonna do 100 million.
SONTA: Do you like it?
SYDNEY: Yeah, it's off the charts.
EMRY: Mama, can you...
SONTA: Off the charts. Get some for Daddy.
Chev, what do you think?
CHEVIE: This right here is pure.
SONTA: This'll last us a couple of weeks and then we're gonna
have to go out and get some more again eventually,
but if you ever need to use this skill,
you'd have the knowledge to do that.
It's gonna be there for you.
ROBERT: I've often thought my entire life that I could
grow up in 1500's or 1600's and been a Tlingit provider
and warrior, and you had to work hard to
take care of your families.
Well, it's not much different from this day and age.
JOHNNY: To put my mind in the mind frame of, you know,
somebody thousands of years ago, and how they thrived.
And I now know what that's like.
I mean, it is a lot of country out there for me to explore.
JESSI: Everything is untouched. Everything is raw.
Everything is an opportunity out here.
CHEVIE: When you're invested in whatever it is,
getting water or building a house, it is sweeter.
It's 'cause of the work that you put into it.
You're gonna enjoy it.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.