Sue Aikens, a Life Below Zero star, thrives in Arctic isolation 197–200 miles north of the tree line, where she runs Kavik, a mobile ecotourism and hunting retreat—leasing land due to North Slope’s property restrictions for Caucasians. She survives extreme -100°F cold with DIY insulation, hunts bears/wolves for meat (and defense), and rejects scripted drama, even after a bear mauled her twice and an intruder invaded her camp. Despite fame, she dismisses romanticization, calling prison emails from men like the "Wolverine Killer" delusional, and insists her lifestyle is purely about self-sufficiency and raw wilderness—where survival means outsmarting nature’s cannibalistic instincts. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, and I don't feel that just because it's brown it has to go down.
I do hunt for the meat that I eat, but, you know, I find...
Where else are you going to go?
My main pack of wolves has 22 in it.
They're not always out to eat me, so I get to see some pretty amazing things.
Two, three winners in a row, you always have a couple of bears that wake up out of season.
They either didn't store enough fat, they woke up for some reason, but once they wake up, they're straight-up killers.
And the past couple of years, I've been able to watch a pack of wolves take down a grizzly.
Whoa!
And, you know, like this last year, they just have to get him running, because within a mile or two, he's used up all of his calories, and there's no way he's going to survive.
So when they came running through camp, crashing into my building as they go, I'm sitting there on the inside, you know, with my gun going, yeah, come through the wall, fucker, I'll get you, you know, but not until they do.
And they went right past, and boom, they took him down on the end of the airstrip and ate him.
So those are things that I get to experience that for an adrenaline junkie, somebody that's always pushing the limits, that's pretty skookum.
You get a little bit, during this particular time frame that it happened, you get a little bit of ambient light.
You don't actually have the sun, but your sky will lighten a little bit.
And even when the moon is out, it lights up.
It's an all-white landscape.
It lights it up.
And I routinely, even in winter, as long as it's not blowing a gale, I go up on my rooftops and I'm always looking around.
You always want to give yourself as much advance notice on anything coming in.
It could be a food source for me.
It could be a predator.
It doesn't matter.
I want to know what's around me.
And that's where I saw something going on there and I saw a big red splotch.
Or what I assumed was red.
And so I know something was bleeding, something was attacking something, and then I could make out as it got closer that was a bear running and the wolf pack was in the river and down.
There's 22 wolves and they just tag him to keep him running.
They are, they're top predators, and they're top predators for a reason, and they live in that.
They genetically are predisposed to succeed.
So, you know, for me as a human being, being there, yeah, I've got guns, I've got other things, but, you know, left to your own devices, I mean, we are nowhere near top predator.
Now, for clients, in order for me to be there, as a Caucasian, I'm not allowed to own property on the North Slope, so for me to have a lifestyle there, I have to lease land from the state and have a profitable business.
If the business stops being profitable, they have the right to eject me.
And people say, oh, it's reverse discrimination, and you have to stop right there.
There is no forward or reverse.
It is a fact.
I knew that going in.
So it's a challenge.
It just becomes a challenge.
The clients can stay in the trailers.
There's bear-proof, sound-proof trailers they can stay in.
Now, if I stay in that, it's a very small amount of head space for me.
I don't like that.
The door is open to the outside world.
You have to get your life down to all of the doors.
My final door going to the outside world opens inside.
Because I guarantee 15, 20 times a winner, I'm going to open that door and it's a wall of snow.
I have to dig a tunnel so I can get out and have an open space.
If I had a door that opened to the outside world, I wouldn't get out.
So I've trapped myself.
But the tent that I live in, I'm not allowed a permanent structure, so I have a tent.
It's just, you know, figure your Coleman tent, maybe a little bit thicker material, and that's it.
Well, it's like the bear that I got this last year.
The background of that, my dog was outside in her house, and the bear came up, tore her little house out, hockey-pucked it around the pad, tried to eat her, chased after some kids that were camping.
So it became...
After the bear attack that I had a few years ago, there was a certain fear factor.
I did not aggressively go get bears.
I waited, hey, if you come through my wall, I'll take care of you, but there was a fear factor.
Well, now as an owner, I can't afford to be passive.
This bear presented a danger to my dog, but also, more importantly, to clients camping.
So I had to go proactive.
It was 16 and a half hours of tracking, belly crawling over 800 yards, and then I coughed and he turned on me.
Well, the long and short of that story was I just got the hide back.
This was a bear that was probably getting closer to the end of his shelf life and was going to attack anything.
When they get ready to den, it's almost a certain insanity that they reach where they're going into hibernation and all they think is, I've got to eat, I've got to get fat, I've got to eat, I've got to get fat.
If you are...
I always say don't act like a pork chop.
If you're acting like a pork chop, you're in their sights.
You know, it became, because I was working for the company that I later bought the camp from.
It was a workman's comp case.
They put the hips in, they had to do one twice, and they took a couple of discs out, and then the insurance company said, well, we're not going to do any more work, you've got to get a lawyer.
And I'm like, why?
I'm not arguing, the company's not arguing, neither is the fucking bear, he's dead.
And they said, that's just the way it goes.
And my personality was, well, how about if you go to hell, I'm going home.
So I called the owner.
He said, yeah, if you think you can do it.
And I said, there's only one way.
I had to accept that there's 83 tag grizzlies within 10 miles of camp.
At any point, they can decide to charge camp or come in aggressively.
It's only a matter of time before I do get charged again.
So that's my test.
When it happens, how am I going to react?
If I hesitate at all, I have no business being there.
I can't perform the job it takes to be there.
But when it did happen, I was able to.
I took care of the bear.
It was just automatic response.
So I knew I would be okay.
But how many injuries do you have?
When your head stops being able to get in the game and take care of it, then that's when I have to leave.
He's twisting, and your body's just not meant to do that.
It's an outside force applying pressure and twisting.
It's not a good thing.
But as with anything, it's like for me, I was later, a couple of years later, working on the overhead electrics and fell straight down from 22 feet, broke both ankles and the bones in my right leg.
And that's where, at the beginning of the episodes, you see that I'm having surgery and coming back to camp.
I've since had a few more things that I've had to look at.
You know, you beat up your body so much, and I'm not a spring chicken.
I mean, I'm not the Crypt Keeper, but, you know, I'm going on 52. At some point, my body's going to say, Bitch, you want to do that, do it on your own, because I'm checking out.
You know, so you must, if you're going to do this lifestyle, you must always assess, reassess, and be extremely honest with who you are, what your limitations are, and how can you work within those.
People assume that because I live alone, I am antisocial.
Or I'm running away from something, and that's not the case.
You know, I run to a lifestyle that I enjoy, and I really enjoy being social, but I'd like to know when it's going to start and when it's going to end.
I don't want to live extremely social, but I love engaging in it, and then, you know, like a hit and run, I know when to leave.
I mean, they are animals, and there's an instinct, and there's a drive to survive.
And sometimes I get in their way, and I'm in their sights.
Like this summer, the troopers even came by several times and said, we need to know that you have an emergency plan.
This is going to be one of the worst aggressive bear seasons ever.
How do they know that?
Because the numbers are so high.
You know, as man decides it's going to like the caribou herd size, they count it and they go, oh, there's too many caribou.
Let's up the amount that people can harvest.
Well, when they do that, it went from two a year to five a year.
In the villages, it's ten a day.
So you're putting all these bones and gut piles out there while your predators are going to eat those and then their numbers are healthier.
They reproduce more.
And then all of a sudden, like this year, the caribou migrated out a full five, six weeks early.
And so their main food group left the North Slope.
So then you have all these bears roaming around and nothing to eat.
But here I am walking around like a little pork chop.
But the bears this year, I had eight that were circling camp just religiously every day.
But they never did anything...
They weren't dickheads.
You know, they didn't come through the walls.
They didn't ransack.
You know, I'm very careful with garbage and everything else.
Whatever I have to have in camp, it has to be flown in.
Well, it's a protected ecosystem.
You can't just go bury your garbage or leave it in bags.
I, by law, have to take all of the garbage and even human waste, separate the liquids and solids, burn everything to its lowest ash, bag it up and send it to town.
There used to be a theory in the oil fields because some of those companies have a lot of money to spend.
If they don't spend their whole budget, they don't get a new great big budget.
So there's a theory that you don't need to be more efficient.
You obviously just need a bigger gen and more power cords.
So every time you plug in a power cord, you have what's called line loss.
You know, and that's, I guess, one of the neatest things about the lifestyle I have is, you know, I wasn't born knowing how to do diesel mechanics, and I tell people, you know, the only thing I used to know about it is how to bake bread.
In other words, I knew nothing.
But I'm learning.
And it's just like electricity.
I don't like electricity, but I have to learn how to do it, so, you know, you learn line loss.
If you plug in, keep plugging in extension cords, you may have 100kW when you start, and you only get 80kW at your final ending point because you've lost so much of it along the way.
So I improved the electrics, did more direct wiring, fell and hurt myself in the process, but got back up and did it again.
Learned wind power.
I have a big battery bank, and I can store power and use it later.
That's my entire internet system that I put in 12 years ago.
Back when I first got there and I was working for the other company, I said, hey, we got to get internet.
The analog phones, there's two types of signal for cell phone usage or phones.
You have an analog signal and a digital.
Analog travels much further than a digital.
Digital only goes 27 miles.
Well, I'm 83 and a half miles from Deadhorse.
No matter what I do, I can't get it, throw the signal again.
It's still not going to reach me.
Well, the government took away the analog signal and privatized it for themselves, so I knew you're going to have no communications other than a satellite phone, which is horrendously expensive.
So I told the owner, I said, you need the internet out here, you know, and he says, yeah, no, at this point, you know, technology where it was then, you have to get over the curvature of the earth to clip the satellites.
So he said, if you want it, you're going to pay for it.
Well, alright, there's a challenge.
It cost $8,000 to get the dish, fly it up, get the tech, and I worked with a geologist to find the bedrock, and I bounce a signal off the bedrock, and I haven't lost signal yet.
Yeah, I need to know for myself that the kids and grandkids are okay.
And we have a system of talking to each other, social media.
I throw up ten fingers, ten toes, they know I'm okay.
Six fingers, four toes, they know there's a problem.
You know?
It's pretty basic.
And then they also, we have a phrase, and I won't say what it is, but there is a key phrase, an if- If the kids or grandkids ever say that to me, that means drop what you're doing, get here ASAP. And how long does it take you to get to civilization?
Depends on the time of year.
To even come down here and do this, I had a previous engagement in New York City.
I've been trying on last, a week ago Monday, I called and I said, you need to pull me now.
We're going to get a bad storm.
And, you know, my original flight out was Saturday.
And they're like, well, we got days.
And I was like, no, you really don't.
We got a system coming in.
I need those weather days.
Well, if somebody in the real world, you know, they need to get to the airport a little earlier because maybe it's bad traffic.
They're talking hours.
Well, today is day 13 of this major blizzard up there, and I just happened to have a window, a three-hour window, where a plane could make it in.
But the turnaround for me is when I get home, I'm calculating that Saturday I'm going to have another window.
And I hope so, because that's my way to get back in.
Right now, I've got a wolverine that's just been acting like a real creep around camp, trying to get into things, and so I don't know what he's doing while I'm not there.
I can't afford to lose all my water and let everything freeze up in my tent, so my heat is still going.
If that animal gets into my building, he's going to knock over my heater and burn my camp down.
I don't know until I get there what I'm dealing with.
Wolverines, if they've ever been injured or you've ever angered them or they've ever gotten trumped on a hunt, they'll remember that like a GPS coordinate and they come back and they keep trying to attack it.
I guess it's a challenge.
So, for whatever reason, this Wolverine has picked one trailer as his nemesis.
And he goes and he rips the angle iron off and twists it into a little knot.
So what I've done is I've tied a little piece of angle iron down there and he takes that and keeps re-tearing it up.
I don't think, you know, it'd be like somebody, if there was a race of people that, you know, bigger than we are, and they come in, and I'm drinking my coffee, and he tags my ass.
I mean, that would be a bum day.
I don't see any reason to shoot an animal simply because it exists.
So what I can do is, hopefully, I'll just keep dissuading him, and he'll go, wow, she's crabby, and he leaves.
Or it'll come down to, yeah, I've got to take him out because he's now costing me revenue.
Or he's going to go in and, you know, he attacks the walls.
I mean, I can only let it go so long, but I'm willing to bet that if I keep, you know, he keeps trying to come in and I keep dissuading him, sooner or later he's just going to say, wow, whatever, and leave.
But I do...
I do enjoy the animals in their natural habitat.
I enjoy, you know, I've been able to see one of the moodiest grizzlies up there.
She's tagged, and her name is Marty.
Well, a couple of years ago, and she is, what, 38 years old or something like that now, or she was then, but she ended up popping out a couple of babies.
Now, she's the worst mother on the planet.
You know, she'll let them get two miles away from her.
Wow.
Which, for a hiker, it's really easy to get in the middle of mama and cubs.
So I try to warn people, but I was sitting up there on the roof of my, I call it the perch, and I'm watching, and here's Marty crawling up the hillside, and there's still a snowfield, and she goes, whee, and slides down.
Here come the two cubs, whee, and they just all day long played, and they were so loving.
So it's really, you know, it's a dichotomy.
I see the aggressive side, but I also can appreciate the maternal, natural side.
Well, you know, and even to do the lifestyle at all, and I don't care what part of the world, if you're going to go this remote and immerse yourself in their territory, you have to be comfortable with your own death.
Not the same as having a death wish, but like with my kids and grandkids, we do one big meal a year, and whether it's over the Skype or whatever, I tell them, tell me three things you can't stand about me.
What did I do that really pissed you off?
But tell me three good things.
And I do the same for them, and it's just a very honest relationship.
I have accepted that I may die due to either conditions or animals out here, and I'm okay with that.
That's a roll of the dice I'm willing to accept.
But we each year tell each other, I love you for this, I think you're a douchebag for that, but you know what, I'm going to miss you when you go.
And, you know, over my life, I have this big chest.
And I've been filling it.
All the cool, crazy things they've ever heard about me.
And some things are pretty, I mean, there's some things in my life, even as a very young person, that were really fantastic.
And so I take the photographs or the proof or whatever, and I stuff it in this box.
So when I go, they're going to be able to open that for the first time and see, oh my god, that really happened.
You know, my lifestyle, the challenges I face, and overcoming that...
There is such pride in yourself that, oh my gosh, I did that.
How cool is that?
When I was really little, I mean, I'm terrified of the dark.
But now I live in a place that's dark for nine months out of the year, you know?
I mean, there are always challenges.
Know yourself, better yourself, you know?
When I go to a city, a bear, I know exactly what he wants from me.
You know, pretty much.
He's either going to eat you or he wants something here or he's just passing through, but it's a pretty honest relationship.
He wants to eat me, I don't want him to.
You go to a big city and I'm used to seeing my horizon.
I'm always checking things.
There's no trees, there's no buildings, there's nothing to mar my horizon.
I go to New York and you can't go 8 feet and you've got a 60-story building.
How the hell do you check your horizon?
How do you know what's coming at you?
You see people, but you cannot be guaranteed.
When I see a bear and he's charging, I know he wants to attack me.
You see a person walking down the street, you don't know whether he's going to pull a gun out of his pocket, shake your hand, pinch your ass, or wave goodbye.
You don't know.
So that's a predator that I'm pretty impressed people want to be around.
And when I got here, I look at all these lights and all these people, I'm like, oh my god, and they're here on purpose.
I've never held anything against her, you know, and that's the thing.
I mean, when people, they hold grudges on other people or they let it affect their lives, you know, how many people are in therapy saying, when I was 10, this happened?
Well, fuck you, it's 40 years ago.
Get over it.
You know, I mean, you have to move forward.
If you have one foot in the past and one in the future, the only place you're not living is today.
Gluten-free, diabetic, any nutrient diet, other than there's some people, there was only one group, and I don't know what they call themselves, but they will only eat something, an apple that fell to the ground.
It has to commit fruticide or something, and I'm like, yeah, no, I can't do that one.
Sometimes you're just going to have to put on the gear.
There's been times where, you know, the wind is your biggest enemy.
So as the winter goes on and you're building snow up the sides of the building, I try to let it get six, eight feet deep because that's a form of insulation.
But where the wind hits your fabric, it's going to wick away the heat as quick as you can make it.
So I have battery-operated fans to convect the air, and then sometimes you're just going to wear your winter gear for a week or two until the temps come up.
I'm not the proud owner of a piece of equipment that's all enclosed and heated.
Whatever it is outside is what I'm experiencing.
So, like, for me to even get out on my two to three hour window, I had to go out there, clear it, and then sit there for an hour and a half until, boom, the plane landed.
And so, Ermie, my dog, and I jumped in the plane and left.
It's, in the end, a plastic product and it will, at a certain temperature, instead of keeping you warm, it's going to turn hard and then it's going to conduct the cold.
So I'm not a big fan of Polypro.
I like natural materials, fur.
It depends on what the temperatures are.
I do have two fur outfits, one with the fur facing in, one with the fur facing out.
At those temperatures, you're going to wear both.
And you get out there and you just get your work done.
Yeah, three of the major herds migrate right through camp.
The Kavik River Valley is, if you go into the different geologic papers, professional papers, even in the late 1800s through the mid-1900s, the Kavik River Valley is very unique among the watersheds there.
My variety of plant life is far different than it is in other ones.
Well, the type of lichen that a caribou eats and moss that they eat to gain the most fat for their journey out is right in that valley.
All of a sudden, like there was one year and all the bears, rather than, like they'll dig their dens into the side of the bank, and when the water starts to rise, it comes in and wakes them up, and a bear's favorite food is cub.
So the boars wake up the male bears usually first, and they run around, find the other dens, and eat the cubs.
But then one year, all of a sudden, the bears came up and about 3,000 foot level, 2,000 foot level started digging dens.
And I'm like, I called Fish and Game, and I'm like, wow, what the hell's up with that?
And nobody's ever there but me, so I'm like, dude, I see this going on, and what's happening?
And they said, I don't know, but all the bears, the ones that are collared, they're all moving up.
And I was like, oh shit.
So I try to get everything set up in camp because that usually means an excessively high amount of snow, which means an excessive amount of water and flooding in the spring.
So I try to get everything ready by watching what they're doing.
I can set camp up differently to be protected from a flood in the spring.
Yeah, spring bear is always better than fall bear.
The gamey taste, if you will, is more concentrated in the fat.
A brown bear from down south is eating a lot of fish diet, and you are what you eat, so it's a very fishy-tasting product.
I don't care for that.
But up by me, I like to tell people that the bears eat berries and slow tourists, so I'm cool, you know?
But yeah, the bear that I got, what you don't see in that episode is, you know, I shoot the bear, I make sure he's gone.
It was an emotional thing.
But I start skinning him and I start getting the meat.
I got about 300 pounds of meat off of him while here's another bear, another grizzly.
Start circling in and getting real tight.
So I had the four-wheelers, I brought them up and boom, the fog came down, it went totally dark.
And so now you can't see.
So the safety dude for the filmies was there with his weapon and we put the headlights all out and you'd see this bear come in and sideswipe the four-wheelers.
Well, after 300 pounds of meat and harvesting the fur, I just had to say, it's time for me to back off.
The bear can munch on this, which will buy me the time to get away.
I don't know what started that with bears, but it's a sure bet.
In an area where the caribou may not have migrated out early enough, and when the bears wake up, they're fairly sluggish, they walk around like drunkards, their muscles are atrophied, and there's not a lot of food.
But it's a sure bet that the mothers with cubs tend to wake up later, so they just go in, dig it out, and it's an opportunity for food.
When I was in Alberta, the camp that I was at, the guy who was there, this guy John, his son, saw a bear kill the cub, attack this female, kill the cub, and then ate half of it, left, and the female came back and ate the rest of her cub.
It was crazy watching these, like, ultimate fighting championship of bears.
They just started going to battle because the male kept trying to come into camp, and the female would send her cubs up the tree and try to chase off the male, and he would deal with it for a little bit, and then he would come back in, and then they would start fighting, and they were standing on two legs and going at it.
Yeah, so the wolverine's up by me, and even the wolves, they're considered to have, they call it a throwback to the Mackenzie River breed, and they're averaging about 200-250 pounds.
They adjust their pack size according to how much food there is and opportunity there is.
Well, there is enough by me that they've actually, they never split the pack.
They're still, and I used to say 21, and then the people that do the air censuses, you know, he called in and he says, hey Sue, it's Andy here, you know, you always say 21 wolves, and I'm like, yeah, so what is it, 18?
It looks like 21 to me, and he says, no, 22 plus pups.
And I'm like, dude!
And he says, yeah, they've actually dug a permanent den now, which is unusual.
They follow their food source, so to dig a permanent den shows me that my ecosystem is changing enough that the wolves feel they can stake a territory and stay there.
It's not just everything migrates out, you follow it, it comes back in, you follow it.
They feel that there is now a good enough food source that they can stay year-round in one place.
Yeah, I was doing a shady move, so he needed to get out, but I don't know how long he was back there, and he certainly could have chewed me up, but he was as curious about me as I was about him.
Do they normally go, oh yeah, let's find a city and start attacking people?
No.
But I'm not a city, I'm an individual.
But like when my granddaughter, when she first came up there to visit, and she was six, five or six, and every time she got more than ten foot away, here out of the riverbank, the big gray wolf would start slinking.
So I had to tie a rope from her to me, and she couldn't get more than ten foot away.
Which frustrated her, so I took her for a walk down to the old fox den, where the little babies were, and all the little bodies are there, and bones are there, and the wolf had gotten in and eaten them.
And she was all bummed out, and I turned her around to walk.
Now we had not even two minutes there, and here's a wolf track about this big, and I have a picture of her hand next to it, and it was right in her footprint.
And I said, okay, and she says, he is stalking me.
And I said, yeah.
So what does that tell you?
I said, where is he right now?
And then her eyes got big and all she sees is brush.
And I said, yeah, we need to get the hell out of here.
And when the kids get up there, you know, I teach them with little weapons first.
You know, they get a 410 shotgun and a 22 single action.
And they learn gun safety.
And then like my grandson this year, he came up and for the first time he got to take down a couple of caribou and feed his family.
You know, I helped him prepare the meat, and he took it back down south.
So, my granddaughter, though, you know, that's the difference in, I have to celebrate who she is, not who I am, when I'm with her.
And after her first year there, you know, I asked her as I was bringing her home, I said, so are you going to come up and visit, you know, Nathan, my grandson, he's all booyah about coming back.
And I said, so do you want to come back up and see Grandma?
And she said, well, Grandma, you know I love you, right?
And I'm like, Yeah, and she says, but I'm going to go visit Uncle Jesse and Aunt Megan, because they do mani-pedis and they like to shop.
Anything sparkly, shiny, and pink is on her hit list.
So, I told her, I said, well, okay, you can't bum out at your brother when he gets to come up, but when I do take a break, I'll hook you up, we'll go to Laughlin, and we'll go get big-ass sunglasses, drink virgin Mai Tais, and go shopping for dresses and get mani-pedis.
So I have to celebrate who she is, not necessarily who I am or who I think she should be.
The creator of this show also created another show called Flying Wild Alaska, and I used those pilots to fly for me, and so I appeared on a couple of those episodes.
Sarah Palin also did a show, and she came out there to hunt.
And now I already had a family out there at the time.
It was very early in the hunting season, not a lot of animals around, so I flung her in a little plane further out because I had an 8 and a 10 year old girl that were hunting for the first time out there.
But they had seen me do these other shows, so when he created the Life Below Zero concept, He called and he says, I've got this idea.
Do you want to do it?
And they came out and I said, well, I never do anything scripted, period.
I don't want to hear how you think it'd look cool, then go do it yourself.
I mean, there's enough natural stuff that happens.
That's what we stick to.
And that's what the show does.
I mean, if we swear and go psycho, I mean, that shows it on TV. If we pooch it and don't stock enough of something, well, it's going to show that.
Or if you get hurt or whatever.
So anyways, they did the sizzle reel and asked me and I said, alright, as long as you don't ever ask me to do something stupid, you know?
I don't have any reservations about showing what I do.
There are some things, you know, privacy is privacy, and I do expect a certain amount of it, and I'm certainly, I treasure my alone time, so I can sometimes get an attitude about sharing that.
There is a trade-off.
You know, for me, doing the show and the premise that it does it on, one of the cool things for me is, you know, sooner or later my number's gonna be up.
You know, I've looked all over, there's no expiration date I can find, I just simply know what's coming.
Now, I may not ever get to meet my great-grandchildren, but if they want to know who I was, pop in a DVD, they see who I really was, not who they thought I was.
So, that's a pretty cool trade-off for me.
Occasionally, there is some unique territory that comes with Being in a social setting, there are...
Go to some of these sites and, you know, I've had people send me emails, why don't you just die?
Well, whenever people have access, just any kind of access to people, there's going to be a certain amount of shitheads that are going to do things like that.
I don't have a desire to live a subsistence lifestyle, but I really enjoy watching all these guys do it, and you do it.
But you're very different than anybody else on the show, because everybody else on the show, they live in a place where there's woods, and they have a house, and like I said, you're the gangster of the gangsters.
It's called Happy People, Life on the Taiga, A Year in the Taiga, the Taiga River in Siberia, and it's about these guys who are just hunters and trappers, and they live this subsistence lifestyle in Siberia, and they're incredibly happy.
They're always joking around and smiling and laughing.
And that's one thing, maybe on the series you don't get to see, I'm a really big goofball, and I laugh a lot, and I dance a lot, and I... But you do it by yourself, though.
Yeah, yeah.
Well...
There's a lot of footage, because every time they do a time lapse, I, oh, what are you doing?
Oh, that's been done for a little while, we're just letting it run out.
Well, I go out there and I do these songs and dances, and there's one really good video that they did.
But, you know, I swear too much, so I can't go on the air.
It's like me, you know, for the hunting sequence because, you know, for me, any of us when we go out hunting and there's a camera right behind you, you know, the very first episodes were learning experiences for us all.
You know, I'm out there trying to get the ptarmigan.
And they're all flying away, flying away, and I'm, you know, bitches, you know, what the hell are they doing?
Well, I turn around, here's a six-foot-something guy in a bright blue outfit going, dude, there are no six-foot blueberries in the winter out here.
Can you fucking get it down, you know?
And so we've all learned.
But so for the hunting sequence, me and my hilarity, you know, I went and got Cornish game hens, and, you know, what kind of a trail do they leave?
You know, big sludge and the thing.
So I have this whole thing, where are they found?
On the shelf.
So I did this whole hilarious sequence of, you know, hunting the Cornish hens.
But, you know, all of us have a unique set of challenges.
Part of the challenge is still being in love with your lifestyle at the end of the day.
I think the cure to this sort of aimless life that a lot of people find themselves in when they're stuck in a cubicle, they're working for a company, the end of the day, they just go to sleep, they get up again, they have to do it all over again.
It doesn't feel like they're connected to what they're doing, or it doesn't feel like they have a passion for what they're doing, and then they see people that are living the subsistence lifestyle, and it has this romantic quality to it, this sort of throwback.
They're going to have to work a lot of hours, they're not raising their own children, and they're eking out enough money just to pay the electric and the water and do it all over again.
Are you living life or are you just getting through it?
And is that the fault of the government?
Is that the, you know, I mean, are you over-governed?
I mean, where is the break?
Where's the profit margin on the companies gonna fall down short enough so that the money a family makes, you get your two weeks vacation and you go play in the woods with your kids?
Right now, people can't do that.
So I think these shows go, look, you know, these people, we're governed by the same law.
Yeah, I think the over-competitive nature of a lot of people has led us to all agree to this really ridiculous life where you're working 50 plus hours a week and you don't really have a life outside of work.
Well, I've got a couple of.44 Mags, some have shorter barrels, some have longer barrels, and I just got a.454 pistol, so with a chest harness, there's something I'm going to be doing here in the near future where I felt I needed something a little bigger, a little closer to the chest, because I'm going to need hands-free.
You know, when I, like I say, Raven personality, there may be something awesome that I find out about or I see or I want to do or maybe I want to go gold panning for a while.
I don't limit myself.
My vision is my own, not anybody else's.
But because I am only there through the grace of having a lease with the state and a profitable business, If that turns around, or the state, or anybody else says, look, there's been a land swap.
It's no longer owned by the state.
These people don't want you there.
It may be out of my control when I leave.
And that's something that I have to reconcile.
I'm also not a spring chicken.
Not that I'm the cryptkeeper, but my age and my body is starting to wear down, so I need to read the signs.
That was in January, February, the coldest time for us.
And it was not pleasant and I didn't enjoy it.
And I don't necessarily ever want to do it again.
If I have to, I have to.
But I don't want to.
But you don't know what's going to be thrown at you.
What if a blizzard sends something...
You know, if somebody dropped a pop can on the tundra and I don't know about it, in an 80, 100 mile an hour breeze, that's going to become a missile that might take out my tent.
So I have to have several places, another tent that I can go to and live in.
That gets taken out, a trailer that I can live in.
We could be alright with a bunch of you running around.
I mean, it probably wouldn't happen, but, you know, have you thought about doing your own version or another show that just kind of entirely focuses on you?