JESSI: How many logs do you think we have?
CHRIS: Um... we got about a day's worth.
JESSI: This is a lot.
CHRIS: In town you gauge how much fuel you're going through
by the gallon.
Out here we gauge it by how many logs goes into the stove.
And when it's cold we go through about five logs
every two hours.
I mean, it's just a constant battle.
JESSI: In the past it's been just kinda surviving out here.
Making sure that we have just enough for each day
and for each week.
But I don't want to just make it by.
I want to be prepared.
Does anybody else anywhere go through this much stinking wood a day?
CHRIS: Ha. JESSI: You know what I mean?
This is over a quarter of our time.
CHRIS: I don't like when you put it like that.
JESSI: Well, just trying to be real.
Maybe we should, like, really try to winterize the house, like, fully.
Instead of just band-aiding all of the holes.
Like, it's gonna start getting seriously cold.
I can see all the holes through the wall,
and it feels like I have a, a cold fan.
CHRIS: Yeah.
JESSI: If we wanna take care of that we may only have like
the next two days until the most dangerous and worst part
of winter is here.
NARRATOR: Isolated 100 miles from Fairbanks,
Chris and Jessi rely on the tedious task of chopping wood
to keep their cabin warm.
But with winter temperatures falling fast,
sealing their cabin from the outside will give them
an upper hand against Mother Nature's wrath.
CHRIS: So, take a pause and winterize?
JESSI: Absolutely. It might make a difference.
Especially as it gets 40 and 50 below.
CHRIS: My leg has already been killing me.
And you're right.
JESSI: This is a big deal.
We really need to encase this place.
Cut down on our heat loss.
And if we don't do it now, we're never gonna get a chance
for the rest of the winter.
All right. Winterizing will be happening.
MICHAEL: It doesn't matter if it's day, night,
20 below, 20 above, windy, not windy.
Work doesn't stop.
You gotta keep going. You gotta keep pushing.
Ugh! Bam!
Another slab down.
So here it is.
It's not the beginnings and the origins of a hoarder's lifestyle.
This is the spot where I'm gonna put all these
cabin kit pieces up.
It might not look like much, but this is gonna be
a two-story building.
It's not gonna look pretty, but it's gonna be a nice cozy
place to call home.
NARRATOR: Building a cabin from recently repurposed parts
is a big opportunity at the wrong time of year.
Deep winter brings freezing temperatures and unpredictable snowstorms.
But with his temporary storage container not holding up,
making a new shelter to withstand the onslaught of
winter can't be put on hold.
MICHAEL: All right.
These boards, I'm just gonna nail 'em both together and
make nice strong support beams for my floor.
And then this 16 by 18 deck will get flopped down on these
and these will be the backbone.
Snap a chalk line, and I start buzzing these into boards that
I could actually use.
So, I could just go to a box store and buy lumber,
but I wouldn't have the satisfaction and the pride of
putting in that hard work and make my own stuff.
I'm actually gonna set the corner of this cabin on this stump.
I mean, why not?
It's not like it's gonna go anywhere in the next decade.
(breathing heavily).
Damn.
When I'm working on stuff like this,
I think of all the men and women I served with in the
United States Army.
It was just crazy dangerous, crazy stressful,
and together we built stuff all over Iraq.
Whether it was building bridge across the Tigris River or
building mortar-resistant living quarters for special operations.
This project here is a reminder of how we were trained.
We weren't trained to be perfectionists that have
time on our hands.
We kicked ass, and we got the mission done.
Whoo! Perfect time to run outta nails.
Done!
This is what you get when you're not a perfectionist.
You just get stuff done.
ALEX: Before I came out here I had very little experience,
but I did know the seriousness of winter way up here in the north.
If I don't stay ahead of the game,
I'll either have to run outta here or just die.
You know, those are pretty much the two choices.
It's really becoming apparent that the days are coming shorter.
The temperature's dropped down a lot.
Come on, Sipsey, let's go.
I still don't have everything stockpiled as much as I want
to be ready for winter, because winter here in Alaska
is nine months.
Nine months of cold and dark.
It's not something you can just huddle up and wait out.
Today is water day.
I have to get water about once a month or so.
Depending on how much I haul.
It's a pretty tough slog.
Just suck it in.
Okay.
But it's gonna be even longer today because my good water spot,
if the water table's gone too low I can't use it anymore.
Sipsey! Hey.
So that means I gotta go a little further to the spring
that is still running down there.
I grew up just like most people,
you turn on a faucet and water comes out.
But here I don't have anything like that.
I've been drinking all of my water through a filter or
boiling it, which kinda gets old.
Come on, buddy.
You know water is one of the essential building blocks of life.
It's not something I wanna screw around with.
If I scoop water right outta here,
then it's not necessarily safe to drink because there's all
sorts of stuff in it.
And melting snow isn't really practical.
It's something you could do in a survival situation,
but for day to day living I have to fill up ten gallons of
snow to get one gallon of water.
Simple stuff like getting firewood and getting water,
I would classify those as a danger,
because if I don't do those things then I'll be getting in
trouble real quick.
Taking a risk at dying out here.
BRITTANY: Wherever you live, you always have to have a backup plan.
When you live more remote you have to have a backup plan
for the backup plan.
Do you know what we're building?
ELOVIE: No. BRITTANY: No?
We're going to build an outdoor brick oven.
So we have to go on a scavenger hunt to try and find bricks.
In order to cook anything, we use propane.
Occasionally, we do run out.
I want an option that uses materials that we always have,
which is wood.
So, McCarthy is an old mining town that is closed down,
and I remembered earlier this summer seeing leftover bricks.
Okay, kids.
Maybe there are some bricks in all this junk?
BRITTANY: There's no ice cream here.
ELOVIE: Why?
BRITTANY: What? You found some?
Oh, that's plenty.
What do you think these were used for?
ELOVIE: I don't know.
BRITTANY: Maybe in the old time they were used for
building chimneys out here.
BRITTANY: Yeah. Ugh!
You two, can you dust all the snow off and I'll go get the snow machine?
BRITTANY: That's how much I get. Okay.
BRITTANY: Living so far away from town it's sometimes hard
to keep certain things in stock.
And I have to think about my kids.
Especially if the weather is bad.
We have to have a certain level of self-reliance.
Whoo!
BRITTANY: Yup.
This is definitely Home Ec, McCarthy, Alaska style
and I think that'll serve my kids as they grow.
We're at about 30. We need 20 more.
BRITTANY: Wow!
CHRIS: Some people think that we're crazy out here because
it's so cold and it's so harsh but the Cosna's a lot like a relationship.
There's give and take.
If you don't give to the Cosna,
she's gonna take everything from you.
JESSI: Starting to really ice up.
Getting pretty thick.
CHRIS: Yeah, especially on this side.
I can see where it's all melting from the heat inside
escaping, and this ice dam right across the center,
that's the worst of it.
So, if we can do something about even that area it's
gonna help a lot.
JESSI: What's happening is that the heat is hitting our roof and
it's melting all of that snow and that builds up.
Ooh.
CHRIS: Ooh, that's solid.
JESSI: Creating a really thick ice dam that melts down the
whole side of our house.
CHRIS: It's cracking.
JESSI: Yeah, the water is actually flowing underneath the ice.
So in the deep winter you can actually see ice forming on
the walls inside and it's just weakening our house,
decaying those logs.
This is a big problem.
CHRIS: Real easy. Yeah!
JESSI: Ooh. CHRIS: All right!
I think we're gonna be able to get some of this off.
Whoa!
JESSI: Yeah.
CHRIS: Can you hand me the shovel?
The roof out here is really sketch.
It's only held up by two-by-fours and they're on their sides.
And if I step where the two-by-fours aren't,
I'm going through my tin.
JESSI: Try to be careful about where you put your feet, yeah?
CHRIS: Yeah.
My dad's always like, "Don't go on the roof!
If you go up there, go up there with snowshoes."
You got it, dad.
I'm just gonna go real slow, real easy,
and just try to do my best to get the ice off without
damaging the roof.
Whoo! This roof is a little funky.
Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!
It's slick!
The last thing I wanna do is be replacing roof panels in
the middle of the winter.
All right. I can use that ice pick.
If you can hand that up to me.
Woo-hoo. Whoo!
All right.
I'm gonna sit down because I am sliding all over the place.
Let's just see if this will.
JESSI: Be easy with the screws.
CHRIS: Ooh, the tin.
JESSI: Did you cut it?
CHRIS: No, it's just really flexible down he...
JESSI: Did you cut through it?
CHRIS: No, I just, it's like a tin can popping back and forth.
Just really trying not to.
JESSI: Hold on! Stop! Stop!
All right.
CHRIS: Perfect. JESSI: Not quite.
CHRIS: Hang on! Hang on! You got it?
I'm gonna break off this tip.
Here we go.
JESSI: Ugh! Fudge buckets!
CHRIS: You okay? JESSI: Yup!
CHRIS: Okay, stuff just directly above you head is
about to fall.
All this is loose.
JESSI: We lost our water.
CHRIS: Gutter? JESSI: Yeah.
CHRIS: They're easy to put up. JESSI: It's okay.
CHRIS: All right, watch out.
JESSI: You can prop it up a little bit.
CHRIS: Yeah, but I got screws in.
JESSI: Oh, you got it! Nice.
CHRIS: Huh!
If I had waited a couple more days this would not have come off.
Easy there. Nice.
I think we got the ice off the roof.
JESSI: Can you get back over here?
CHRIS: Yeah.
I know it doesn't look like much,
but this is huge in my book.
In all the years I've been out here I've never been able to
knock this ice off the roof.
Whoa! God, it's slick. Okay.
JESSI: Watch your step.
CHRIS: Okay. Step on the screws.
Here I come.
Now, if we can only get the roof inside so it's not
leaking air, then we might actually have fixed it.
ALEX: I like to throw myself into situations where
necessity compels me to adapt and work.
And so that's why I kinda just threw myself headfirst into this.
Those are the kind of situations I like.
All right.
This is another spring.
The water's safe to drink.
But if I wanna fill it quickly it's kind of impossible,
because there's not room.
I can only dip the bucket in that far.
And also every time I dip it stirs up dirt which is not
what I wanna drink.
Hey, Sipsey.
This needs to dig this down a lot deeper.
I don't know how long this will take.
It kinda depends on how soft the ground is.
Yeah.
So, all this ground is frozen.
I won't be able to dig that with my shovel,
if I can't break it with a heavy iron bar.
So I need to thaw out this ground just so I can kinda
scoop it all away.
And then I'll go around and try to find more big rocks
like this which I can just collect from the area around here.
Start digging, put in the big rocks,
and that's it.
Most of the time when I work out here,
it's either to address some kind of immediate danger,
or to make my day-to-day life a little more comfortable.
I'm gonna make a fire underneath here.
If the fire warms up the snow above,
the snow will drop on it and then kill the fire, so.
I get it out the way before I make the fire.
Okay.
My hands are like numb right now so I'm kinda,
kinda eager to get this fire going.
It's never easy.
You can never go on auto pilot.
You always gotta keep working.
Feel warmer already.
Oh, that's nice.
Okay.
I've been up here for, you know,
quite a few years already.
People say, "Oh, it must take a lot of heart to live up there,"
and yeah, maybe you gotta have some heart,
but mostly it takes ass.
And what I mean is it takes a lot of (bleep) work.
Basically, my work to survive through the winter doesn't
really end until winter's over.
This should be enough to get started.
Okay. See if the fire did its job.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it's real soft.
Cool.
Now I can dig that ground out a little easier.
A lot easier, actually.
Should be straight forward.
It's just kind of wet cold work,
so I'm just trying to get this done before sunset.
MICHAEL: You want freedom?
You're gonna be doing 60 to 80-hour weeks out here.
There's no way around it.
This is a lot harder way of living,
but I have something to show for it.
I have a, a story to tell.
One, two, three.
I'll be really happy when these first-floor deck pieces are in place.
They're really heavy, they're really awkward.
Here it goes.
It slows you down working by yourself.
No building project is ever as easy as you may envision.
Whoo!
No build project is ever as quick as you envision.
When it's wintertime you may as well just tack on another
40 to 50% onto your build time.
It makes me wonder why the heck I'm doing this when new
construction would be a lot easier to deal with,
but I added up the cost of a structure like this,
it would have been about $12,000 to put this together
had I not reclaimed a building and milled up my own lumber.
Like a glove.
Now what's going on here?
Let me get a measurement on this deck.
I planned for a 16-by-18 deck.
That's a 20-foot-long deck, and so that's not gonna work.
Son of a (bleep).
That's not gonna work.
(bleep) son of a (bleep).
You make little mistakes like that.
And so, the support deck is not quite big enough.
I just need about three feet more.
And so, all I have to do is build a little extension and
set a support in place and that'll help with strength.
Make it nice and strong.
Do I look like a perfectionist?
Heck, no!
I look like somebody who wants to get something done.
(dogs howling).
My dogs are noisy today.
(howling, dogs barking).
Have to make sure to hang out with my dogs.
I've been neglecting them.
They're sad.
Nobody's up there.
(grunting).
I can't wait to get all of this stuff up before the real
cold, cold spells, the 40 and 50 below stuff kicks in.
Whoo!
And if I get a real bad storm while the structure of this
isn't sound, it could cave in under the snow.
All right, that was trouble-free.
That never happens.
BRITTANY: Living here, it might not be exactly what you
want it to be, but you have to learn to adapt or die.
This is the way that we're embracing living out here.
Okay, little monkeys.
We're building an outdoor brick oven.
We have to lay a base first.
We need it to be not quite as cock-eyed.
The temperatures have definitely been in the negatives,
so we have to move around, get warm and keep going.
That's better.
Living in rural Alaska has definitely toughened me up.
It's made me adapt to things that I just,
I never thought that I would adapt to.
Oh, man. Who needs CrossFit?
BRITTANY: When you can just build an oven.
CrossFit is a type of exercise that people do to torture themselves.
BRITTANY: Yeah.
BRITTANY: It means they sweat a lot.
And they grunt a lot.
(laughing).
Okay.
Stick these where the holes are down.
ELOVIE: Why?
BRITTANY: So that the air doesn't go through them.
Ellie, you gonna get more?
BRITTANY: You're just gonna get one?
ELOVIE: Yeah.
BRITTANY: Well, how about you put 10 in there instead?
Out here we have a set of skills that we need to know
how to do.
It's necessary for us to learn these skills in order to survive.
So anti-climactic.
But it worked.
Okay.
The cheapest way to get angle iron is to get an old bed frame
so that I can make a roof.
Bring 'em over here.
For my little oven here.
A more structurally sound brick oven.
All right, I'm going to put a couple of these bricks here.
ELOVIE: Mom, we almost done.
BRITTANY: We are almost done.
Look at that. Look in there.
Tell me what you think.
ELOVIE: Lovely. BRITTANY: Lovely?
Let's get some wood and light this baby up.
ELOVIE: Light this baby up?
BRITTANY: That's a figure of speech, sweetie.
ALEX: You know, you get used to things being easy or you
get used to having things your way,
it kinda spoils you.
On a regular basis when you're reminded that you're gonna die,
it helps keep you from, I don't know,
losing sight of the big picture.
It's definitely a, a lot of hard work digging through this.
Yeah, you can see there.
I dig down a bit and probably just as much fills right back in.
So, just gotta keep at it, really.
Just keep digging, digging, digging, digging.
Put in the work.
You know it's kinda like when you go camping, they say,
"Ten minutes spent kinda making your bed
will equal hours of sleep."
Every single time I come to get water in the future this
will pay me back in hours of convenience.
That's probably wide enough.
Think that rock weighed 100 pounds.
The way I'm using the rocks is kinda building a ring around
to keep the dirt from going in.
And I'm also placing them in the bottom which means when
I scoop in there, I won't stir up dirt and those will also
hold the outer ones from coming in.
If I can kinda make a dam here,
that will allow me to get a, ooh!
(bleep), deeper scoop.
Whoo!
Went a little too deep.
Just got a little water in there.
Everything is a pain in the ass with gloves.
I don't know how much water is in here.
Maybe there's 10,000 years' worth of water in here.
Maybe there's 100 years' worth of water here.
But I think this is the best the waterhole's been.
If you wanna get water like that at the store you gotta
pay a lot of money, and then it always ends up
tasting like plastic, anyway.
Okay, that's my last jug.
Thanks for the help, Sipsey.
Hauling water is probably one of the most physically
demanding things I do.
Okay.
I wanna go back as fast as I can 'cause even though it
doesn't look like a lot, it's a pretty arduous slog,
slightly uphill the whole way.
Sips!
Dragging dead weight through the snow.
Okay, that's pretty bright.
I can't see out my glasses anyway.
It's getting pretty dark.
I don't know how cold it is or how much further I have to go
really but, uh, I am a good ways from my cabin.
My back's pretty tired.
Getting cold fingers, cold toes.
Just awful, especially carrying 200 pounds of water
for hours on end.
I didn't bring any extra gloves with me which was
kind of stupid.
Those kind of silly little mistakes can kind of add up.
Really a matter of life or death.
I can get through this.
I do this about once a month to get water.
Sometimes more, sometimes less.
It's a six-mile round trip.
And right now it's 20 or 30 below.
Son of a (bleep).
Carrying 200 pounds of water up the hill for hours on end.
It's kind of like running a marathon.
Stuck on my (bleep). It's the worst thing ever.
But then I'll be home.
I do come face to face with a lot of, like,
mortal danger, on a pretty regular basis out here.
But I also have a lot more power to control it.
In the city, if a guy is driving a truck and he's on
his cell phone, he can crush me and there's basically
nothing I can do about it.
Out here, I have to confront the danger myself.
For me, that's peace of mind.
It reminds me that I am mortal.
And I think that does a person a lot of good.
MICHAEL: This living within my means.
This developing a rural landscape from scratch.
There's a lot of gain from this pain and that is independence.
Lift with your legs.
Ugh. If you can.
Ugh. Ugh!
This is a really heavy section of the wall.
Let's not let this get any sort of momentum.
If it gets any momentum, I'm standing out of the way.
I don't want this falling, on me.
♪ ♪
Not bad.
One more and that whole wall is up.
Bam!
So, this might not look pretty with all this old,
used stuff put together as a cabin.
But I have this old picture of my family's fish camp
somewhere around the Eel Ground Reserve on the
Miramichi River in New Brunswick, Canada.
A lot of folks just took whatever scrap lumber they
could get from a sawmill.
Whatever roll of tar paper they could get their hands on.
They were poor folks.
They were poor, native people, just trying to put up a
structure and survive.
And so I'm not too far off from how some of my
grandparents and great-grandparents lived.
They just lived within their means.
And they did all right, and they were happy.
I'm getting a lot done.
Getting all these walls up.
I just gotta finish this one last wall.
The entry wall, it's not repairable.
And so, I'm gonna have to go ahead and build a new wall.
Having all four walls up of the first story is a good feeling.
I hope to best it tomorrow by getting the deck
and the second story up.
JESSI: You've gotta be stubborn.
Full of tenacity.
Persistent.
That's just kind of part of homesteading out here in the
middle of nowhere, and I will do everything that I can to
sustain this type of lifestyle.
CHRIS: It looks like it'll spiral right off.
JESSI: I mean, if we take this out,
it's gonna be a huge mess.
CHRIS: A mess. Okay. That's fine.
It is really cold outside those rafters.
The back of the house has gotta be the draftiest place here.
My thermometer gun, it hits around 20 degrees at this back corner.
Every time I'm back here, my feet are cold,
my hands are cold.
And we've never been able to stop the drafts.
I was doing some math last night.
I counted them up, I think there's 60 rafters.
And it's somewhere between 1,600 to 2,000 linear feet
that we need to do the ceiling and block off the airflow
up to the roof.
Downfall is, is I was only able to get 800 feet of it here.
JESSI: So, we do not have enough?
CHRIS: We don't have enough.
But what I was thinking is if I just cut this in half,
the diameter actually doesn't change,
and it should still fill the same amount of space.
So if we just cut it, uh, that gives us 1,600 feet.
Right?
And that's going to be like the bare minimum.
Some of the holes above us are really small,
and I was thinking we would actually cut some of them into quarters.
That should give us more than enough to do this entire
ceiling without worrying about running out.
Can put the quarter piece there,
I can put big half pieces into these large logs.
And even some of these larger gaps I bet the quarter pieces will fit.
Backer rod's used for, like, construction with large gaps.
It's a closed cell foam, so I don't mind cutting this in
half and sticking it up there.
I still think it's gonna block the air.
This is kind of a pain.
It's like cutting a wet noodle.
Ugh.
It's, like, hard to cut and then it cuts the wrong direction.
JESSI: Two feet down, 798 left to go.
CHRIS: Ugh. This is painfully slow.
JESSI: We can't do this for 800 feet.
CHRIS: No, I'd rather cut firewood.
JESSI: You're right, it's really, really hard to stay centered.
Oh, no!
What do I do now?
CHRIS: We're wasting material, we're gonna be way short to be
able to cover up the ceiling to get it warm in the cabin.
We've gotta come up with a better idea on how to cut this.
JESSI: This couldn't be worse.
This couldn't be worse!
How do you think that we could do this better?
I don't think I should be in charge of this.
CHRIS: We've gotta come up with a better idea on how to cut this.
We can't just lay in 800 feet of this.
Otherwise, we're gonna be way short.
We need somewhere around 1,600 feet on the minimum to be able
to cover up what we need to cover on the ceiling to get it
warm in the cabin.
JESSI: That's great.
CHRIS: Everything's trial and error out here on the Cosna,
and sometimes you just gotta make do with what you have.
Up at an angle just to make the wire go through a little easier.
Today, I'm trying to figure out a way to make a foam cutter.
Whatever it takes to seal this ceiling up.
I've got a drill battery that I'm gonna hook it up to.
JESSI: And then it's gonna heat up this huge wire,
burn into the wood, and get the middle part hot enough to
melt the foam and cut it.
CHRIS: You've got the idea.
JESSI: Without burning the house down.
Yeah.
CHRIS: I'm just going to test it.
Wow.
This is a great little contraption we built for cutting foam.
I just don't want to do anymore in the house.
Because with every great contraption comes a little risk.
We're using a battery and we are just straight running one
wire from positive to negative,
and we're making it like an absolute open circuit.
You could blow these batteries up,
when they explode, they explode with fire shooting everywhere.
Perfect.
We're gonna try and play this as safe as we can.
Okay. I'm ready when you are.
We hook the batteries up, the wire starts smoking,
the wood's burning.
We get the foam in there, and as we're pulling that foam
through, it gets easier with the heat.
There it goes.
And we're getting these nice clean cuts.
Burn, baby, burn.
That's perfect.
JESSI: To heck with the knives.
In with the bush craft.
CHRIS: And nice. Look at that!
All right.
I feel like this is gonna pay off.
JESSI: Chris and I are working on the back corner.
I'm putting my hand up and you can feel an immediate difference.
Can't feel a draft at all.
I mean, this foam really works.
But we really have to seal up each end all the way to the
ceiling, so you can't get air in or out.
CHRIS: Ow!
Some of these get really tight.
JESSI: Really tight.
CHRIS: Ugh, it's good thing that we made some quarter pieces.
JESSI: Yeah!
CHRIS: Good job, love. That actually looks really good.
JESSI: That looks really good. That was the perfect size.
CHRIS: You're hired.
Next is we've got 100 more to do.
Pow!
It's already warmer in here.
JESSI: It is now 30 below outside.
And it's reading like almost 60 degrees back here.
I mean, that's like a huge difference.
It's a big deal, about the amount of heat that we're
going to trap and keep and the amount of wood we're
not gonna have to burn.
It's going to be the warmest 30-below night that we've ever
spent in the cabin.
CHRIS: We got lots of foam left.
Let's keep after it.
JESSI: Got lots of foam! Let's start on the next piece.
MICHAEL: A lot of the native elders here in Alaska tell you
that sometimes you just should not go out,
and you should not be doing things in certain cold weather.
And if you try to fight it, that could mean your life.
All right, today is 20 below zero.
You take a bucket of molasses.
You try to dump it out at 20 below zero,
it ain't going nowhere.
And so, building in the below zero,
everything slows down.
Your tools don't wanna start, technology acts a fool.
Things get brittle.
And so I just can't sit around and have this structure
halfway done and walk away.
I gotta keep moving and get it up.
And so today's the day that I've chosen to winch up these
heavy pieces up here onto the second-story deck.
I've actually never pulled anything with this thing before.
Winches and chainsaws are nasty devices to use.
And then you combine a chainsaw with a winch?
That's doubly nasty.
We'll see how it works at 20 below.
Got a really steep jump to get this thing up there.
I'm gonna go cautious, go slow.
Probably be about, uh, 500 pounds up on that deck.
Something like this lets loose and that comes back,
that's a projectile.
Crack your cranium.
(motor whirring).
As long as I try my hardest to be safe,
this should go all right.
But there's no guarantee.
This is not the right weather to be doing stuff like this.
(motor whirring).
I think I should be good.
All right.
Got even colder.
You gotta suit up with more stuff to keep the cold off your skin.
All right, this piece is the largest one so far.
It's gonna go in the center.
I'm gonna go ahead and take my time on this one,
'cause it's a big one.
And so, the snap got a little damaged.
But, uh, just gotta get two more pulls out of it.
I guesstimate this one to be right around 800 pounds or so.
(motor whirring).
I feel like the whole building is gonna come tumbling down.
It feels like an earthquake up here every time I touch the throttle.
(motor whirring).
MICHAEL: Ugh. Yup.
I was jamming up the clevis against the top plate.
That's that.
That combined with the weight of that piece,
all hell broke loose, and it snapped somewhere here
near the winch.
This is what you deal with in below zero weather.
I'm really frustrated by this setback.
You can't let mechanical failures in cold weather stop
you from getting the job done.
I got everything I need here to fix this winch.
Cut this off right here.
I took that little clevis pin off,
and I put on a larger five eighths inch shackle.
It's fixed.
This winch is good to go.
I'm gonna set it up top, try again.
You can't push your luck out here when you've been given a free pass.
And so this time around,
I'm gonna put a helmet on for this next pull.
So that if it snaps, this piece of metal ain't coming
back in my face over 100 mile an hour.
It's a sick feeling, when you're just doing something
you know is stupidly dangerous.
There she is.
Miss America.
Everything worked a lot better with my repair.
What a relief after such a setback.
I'm safe.
I'm gonna continue forward.
I'm gonna get this deck in place and start getting the
roof put up.
CHRIS: Just kinda toss it on there.
Snow is like a really good insulator.
That'll get all that airflow to stop.
That's gonna be warm!
I try to think, for every scoop is one less log that
I'll burn throughout the winter.
JESSI: Oh, man, get to scoopin'!
CHRIS: I know.
JESSI: Get to scoopin'!
Now that we have a winterized cabin...
Whoo!
We're not going to have to use as many resources and trees.
CHRIS: Nice.
JESSI: And we're gonna have more time to just enjoy life
out here together.
ALEX: It don't look like it, it's like 30 below right now outside.
That's some pretty dirty clothes.
Laundry takes a lot of water.
It's a lot easier if you can just put it in a machine and
push a button but, uh, I feel like my generation needs to be
more responsible than that.
Clean water is not necessarily an infinite resource.
If you have to haul water the way I do,
you can certainly do with a lot less.
Because it's such a physical chore to get water,
you know, I treat it like it's gold.
I don't waste a single drop.
If I wanted to haul enough water to have everything
crystal clean all the time, I would be the fittest man in
the universe to be honest.
BRITTANY: And there we go.
This is actually working!
What?
It's really great to build something that I can use to
give gifts and also to be more self-reliant.
Look what we made.
KALEB: Yum!
BRITTANY: We're creating memories and I hope the kids
look back at this time thinking,
"Wow, look what Mom and I made."
Moment of truth.
KALEB: Oh, man. Whew!
BRITTANY: Hot or good? KALEB: Both.
MICHAEL: There we go. Just like that.
I'm gonna get the last bit of the structure up today.
Grab up a spare wood stove, I could move into this thing tomorrow.
I traded a little bit of labor for an unused building that
was just going to waste.
And that's how a lot of native people are.
They'll trade work for a tool or they'll trade a tool for
some beaver mitt.
That's more real than going to a box store and spending
thousands of dollars.
Hey, I can see the Tanana River.
(heavy breathing).
JESSI: Last bit.
CHRIS: Well. JESSI: Onto the next.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.