Tougher in Alaska on History, not for wussies

Throughout history, Alaskans have had to fight for survival. Even now, everything is STILL Tougher in Alaska – the last American frontier.

A New Weekly Series on History Premieres on Thursday, May 8 at 10 pm ET/PT Everything is tougher in Alaska. From earning a living to burying the dead, everyday life here has always been shaped by severe weather, rugged terrain and vast distances between communities. The people who call Alaska home have a long history of overcoming adversity and adapting to their extreme environment. Host Geo Beach, who has lived in Alaska for more than 25 years, is on a quest to find out what it really takes to survive and thrive in Alaska. It wouldn’t be a tough show without a tough host, and the host Geo Beach is just that. Since moving to Alaska, Geo has worked as a logger, firefighter and medic, and commercial fisherman – including winter crabbing on the Bering Sea. He knows his way around oil spills and industrial kitchens, construction sites and law enforcement. Like most Alaskans, Geo has endured plenty of waves, winds and blizzards while living here. Armed with his own experience and the centuries of Alaskan tradition, Geo reveals the guts, self-reliance, ingenuity and technology it takes to survive and prosper in this challenging land considered America’s last frontier. Each episode charts an expedition through the far-flung corners of the huge Alaskan state – from the tops of mountains to the depths of the Bering Sea. It investigates unique aspects of life in Alaska, looks at how Alaskan pioneers got things done in the past, and explores how they overcome harsh conditions to get things done today. Along the way, we meet a lot of plucky Alaskans – all following in the footsteps of the great explorers who originally survived and thrived in the extreme environment. EPISODE GUIDE:GOLD MINING (Airs 5/8)
Since the 1870s, the promise of gold has lured men north to Alaska. With the cost of gold skyrocketing, the race is on once again and Geo joins in on the chase. He’ll see how individual prospectors around the state use ingenious techniques (including a giant underwater vacuum) to get the gold out, and he’ll join a team of hard rock miners outside the frontier mining town of Coldfoot as they blast through 250 feet of solid rock at 20 below zero in the hopes of hitting the mother lode.SALMON FISHING (Airs 5/15)
Each summer in late June, nearly 2,000 fishing vessels converge on Alaska’s Bristol Bay to await one of the greatest natural spectacles of the north: the annual run of millions of sockeye salmon to their spawning grounds. Bristol Bay is the most productive and best managed commercial salmon fishery in the world with an average annual catch of ten million fish valued at more than 100 million dollars. What follows the fish during the short, three-week run is an altogether man-made spectacle of the highest order: thousands of highly competitive fishermen doing serious battle with one another in their specialized, high-performance boats. Geo will be on deck with two crews as they navigate the bay looking for the mother lode of sockeye, or red salmon. It’s all about getting the fish in the nets. But staying up all night, avoiding collisions with other boats and confrontations with other fishermen and keeping the peace with the State Troopers who patrol the crowded fishery by land, sea, and sky just makes it more interesting. ELECTRIC LINEMEN (Airs 5/22)
What does it take to keep the power on in a state where more than half of its people live off the grid, and where plunging temperatures, high winds and heavy snow loads can snap even the hardiest overhead electrical wires and transmission towers? Geo flies out to the remote village of Kasigluk to help install power poles and string electrical wire by hand (there are no bucket trucks in the bush) and he’ll dig in with the linemen of the Golden Valley Electric Association during the infamously bitter winters in Fairbanks as they brave temps as low as minus 40, just to keep the lights on and heating systems going in the state’s second largest city. WINTER (Airs 5/29)
Alaska’s second largest city, Fairbanks, is infamous for its long, dark and bitterly cold winters. Situated in the center of the state, just 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle, Fairbank’s winter temperatures can plunge as low as -50 degrees F. On the shortest day of the year, the sun rises around 11:00 AM and sets around 2:45 PM. That’s less than four hours of daylight. How does a major city stay up and running in such an extreme environment? Geo finds out when he spends a week in the Fairbanks metro area during a winter cold snap. He joins the North Star Volunteer Fire Department and finds out how the bitter cold, homemade houses and lots of wood stoves create a situation rife for disaster. He’ll go on a hunt for a roaming band of wolves plaguing the city’s pet population. And he’ll get a tough taste of daily life in Fairbanks, where even basics like getting fresh water and commuting to work are complicated challenges for the city’s residents.RAILROADING (Airs 6/5)
In the Lower 48, the Amtrak or subway may not run on time, but in Alaska, avalanches and earthquakes make pretzels out of train tracks and giant mountains put a strain on even the strongest engines. Deep in the state’s Interior, Geo hops on the legendary Alaska Railroad and travels 450 miles through some of the most perilous and unforgiving terrain on the planet. He’ll load coal at the Usibelli mine, join the rail gang in Denali, clear snow at wintry Moose Pass, shoot a cannon at the snowy mountainside to trigger a “controlled” avalanche, and visit the spooky, isolated end-of-the-line town of Whittier…all of this to find out what it takes to keep the railroad on track, and supplying Alaskans with what they need to survive. LOGGING (Airs 6/12)
Logging is a dangerous and challenging profession anywhere, but in Alaska’s Southeast Panhandle, unforgiving coastal mountains, steep valleys and ugly weather make this work downright deadly. Geo will learn first-hand just how risky logging can be when he embeds with veteran loggers in Ketchikan, located in the heart of the Tongass National Forest, the nation’s largest. They’ll teach him how to fell giant spruce trees with a single chainsaw, “choke and chase” them with a cable-logging machine, and deliver them on teeth-chattering logging roads and rocking barges to the mill. And he’ll join the most extreme loggers of them all – heli-loggers – who FLY deep into rugged stretches and steep areas where no roads can go to haul the valuable logs out of the wilderness.DANGEROUS EARTH (Airs 6/19)
Geo knows the danger of living on top of one of the most active seismic zones in the world – he can see three steaming volcanoes from his backyard. In this episode he will travel to the sinking native village of Newtok, work on a glacier that is actually growing bigger and threatening the salmon-fishing town of Yakutat, and he’ll fly into the spectacular Lake Clark National Park to install an earthquake-tracking GPS station on top of two colliding tectonic plates…and will be forced to escape in dramatic fashion when a deadly storm rolls in and threatens to strand the crew on the mountain overnight. DANGEROUS ROADS (Airs 6/23)
It may be the loneliest, deadliest road in Alaska, but the Haul Road is the only road connecting the oil fields of Alaska’s North Slope to the rest of the state. Geo rides shotgun with one of the roads most legendary truckers in the deadliest season of all -- winter. On this 400-mile journey, he’ll learn how to load giant oil pipe to survive the rough ride; plow, repair, even ice the road with state highway workers to keep it passable; and deliver the load safely to Prudhoe Bay before turning around for the long and dangerous trip back to Fairbanks. Geo will also work with a construction crew on the historic Alaska-Canada highway – the only road connecting Alaska to the Lower 48 – blasting away a mountainside to straighten a “hell on earth” stretch of road that was pioneered by the Army Corps of Engineers as A military supply route during the Second World War. EXTREME SALVAGING (Airs 7/10)
Thousands of ocean-going vessels – from massive trans-pacific container ships to small fishing boats -- brave the perilous Alaskan waters each year, and in this episode, Geo will get up close and personal with one of the unlucky ones. Geo will join Alaska’s premiere salvager, Dan Magone, as he attempts to salvage a wrecked 197-foot barge in the deadly Shelikof Strait in the middle of a severe winter storm, where vessels are swallowed whole and 60-knot gales and 20-foot sea swells happen on good days. Geo will also explore Alaska’s dramatic history of ship wrecks and ride along with elite Coast Guard helicopters on a trip to service and maintain remote navigational aid stations out at sea. FROZEN FREEWAY (Airs 7/17)
Where else, but in Alaska, do high school sports teams travel to their away games on snow machines along a frozen river? Geo travels to the wide-open tundra of western Alaska to experience how life keeps moving along the Kuskokwim River. Translated from the Yup’ik word for “slow moving thing” – the Kuskokwim is a 724-mile lifeline for the Native Alaskan communities scattered along its length. The river provides a ready-made highway for moving people and goods, year-round. In this episode, Geo races the coming winter “freeze up” to deliver home heating fuel with a tug and barge crew. And once winter descends, he witnesses the transformation of the river into a frozen freeway as he plays mailman on a giant hovercraft for a day, plows out an emergency ice road so that a needy village can get heating oil before they run out and goes on a search and rescue mission for any stragglers on the icy, fierce frozen river.EXTREME ISOLATION (Airs 7/24)
Alaska’s southeast panhandle, a 35,000 square-mile stretch of the state is cut off from the rest of the world by steep coastal mountains on one side and the stormy North Pacific Ocean on the other. In between lay hundreds of remote communities perched on the area’s thousand of islands. Geo explores the region to see how people get by with almost no roads. Juneau, Alaska’s capital can be reached only by air or water and there are no telephone or power lines connecting it to the outside world – or even, the rest of the state. Geo boards a ferry on the Alaska State Highway system - the only federal road system that goes over water, helps blast an underground hard rock tunnel for an ambitious hydroelectric powerhouse that will tap a glacial lake to power Juneau, and works with flying telephone workers to install and maintain microwave repeaters on top of snowy and stormy mountains.WILD WASTE (Airs 7/31)
In the Lower 48, people don’t think twice about flushing their toilets or leaving their trashcans on the curb. In Alaska, waste disposal is a much tougher business. In Ketchikan, the BLACK bear capitol of the world, Geo will race to collect trash before the bears can get to it. Then, Geo teams up with a guy who may have one of the toughest jobs in all of Alaska—a remote maintenance worker. This guy is the sole plumber, electrician and carpenter to nearly a dozen bush villages in the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta, an area the size of Washington state. Once Geo’s out of the bush, he’ll head to the frozen city of Fairbanks and make house calls to help thaw frozen septic pipes and tanks so that can be a Fairbanks a free-flowing city once again.ARTIC TROOPERS (Airs 8/7)
How do Alaska State Troopers keep the peace in a state two and half times the size of Texas? Geo will find out when he joins a team of recruits for an intense survival course at Alaska’s Trooper Academy in Sitka, investigates caribou “crime” scenes with Wildlife Troopers in the Brooks Mountain Range, and helps the sergeant at the northernmost Trooper post in America to hunt for alcohol smugglers and arrest criminals in the remote arctic bush villages outside Kotzebue. The official mini-site for the TOUGHER IN ALASKA series, here, will feature images and video, including our host Geo Beach, who will share insights about the Alaskan lifestyle and daily activities in the last American frontier. The site will also include interactive maps, history content on Alaska, and background information to supplement the programs. A teaser page with on-air promos will launch first, followed by the official mini-site on April 23.