Tougher in Alaska - 1 ª Season

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.

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.

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.

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 forest. 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.

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.