End of the Road | Win the Wilderness: Alaska - Episode 4 Review

Canwell Glacier, Alaska

Win the Wilderness: Alaska - Episode 4

I want to start this blog post by saying that writing about an experience like this, which in it’s simplest form is a competition, is difficult. I don’t want to hurt any of the contestant’s feelings, because we all got on so well and still speak regularly. That being said, we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have feelings of frustration and sadness about not ever getting a chance to head up to Ose mountain and see this place for ourselves, with our own eyes and really decide if in fact, it was worth us taking on. We never got a chance to do that and so we cannot really comment on what our experience there would entail, but we do obviously have thoughts and feelings about what we’ve heard and learned from others who went there, as well as the owners themselves. Maybe I’ll touch on that, but I’m not sure yet.

We’d also like to say a massive thank you to the thousands of people who’ve tweeted, dm’d, commented, emailed, texted, what’s-apped, messaged and everything else possible to say their thoughts on it all - your support really does mean a lot to us. This all went down in June 2019, and we’re over the shock of it by now, but having watched the episode last night where we get to see the productions depictions of events definitely stung, dredged up the feelings we had back then and made us want to explain how we feel about it all. 

I’ve touched on the editing and production side of things in previous posts, and it goes without saying that editing three days worth of footage into a one-hour episode is going to mean a lot gets left on the cutting room floor. Scenarios production deem relevant to the episode are included, and others cut. Events are edited to look a certain way, which at some points they really weren’t how they came across on TV. If you’ve not caught up with our previous review then you can read it here. So, without further ado, let’s get into our review of Win the Wilderness: Alaska - Episode 4. 

We finally got an introduction!

Wowzer, we made it four episodes without anyone really knowing who the heck we were. This episode saw us have an official introduction which everyone else got in episode one. Better late than never!

Reality-TV

There’s been quite a bit of confusion about what the show actually is: Documentary? Reality? Game show? We were told that it was a documentary. In fact, even whilst we were out there the crew would repeatedly refer to it as a documentary when on BBC player it’s under ‘entertainment’ and ‘lifestyle’ and not at all as a documentary. The show was heavily produced, we’d often be asked to repeat certain sentences or even told questions to ask, discussions to have and repeatedly asked how we were feeling (some people even made up a song about it!). 

Time Limits

In the past three episodes, there have been time limits on the challenges, which in reality there were most definitely not. We started the challenges at varying times throughout the day, but most notably was the last one creating our shelters. We arrived at the camp spot around 9 pm, and once CJ had ‘taken’ our bags Myself and Theo were then pulled aside for a 15-minute interview. By the time our interview had finished the other two couples had already scouted out spots and began building shelters, which left us with a limited area to choose from except for where we were standing, as well as creating a more stressful situation, especially as now we know we were being timed.

I cannot stress to you enough how protective the production team were of us out there - we weren’t allowed to choose just anywhere to set up our survival shelter, it had to be within a designated environment which was incredibly limited, resulting in us choosing our spot right next to a dead tree. Of course, the tree was picked up upon in the show, but they didn’t show us push it over. What a surprise there! In reality, the dead-tree drama only lasted for thirty seconds before Theo pushed it over to make the area safe. Widowmakers are no joke, and we’d come across these previously in the Kungsleden, where we’d had to push over multiples dead trees to make an area safe to overnight in our tent. 

Coming back to the time limit; there really wasn’t one - or there wasn’t one told to any of us couples at least. At one point the film crew departed to have dinner and we were left to our own devices, making our shelters comfortable for a night under the stars. The weather was brilliant and no rain forecast so there was no urgency with the shelter. Darkness certainly wasn’t falling (24hr sunlight remember) so we took our time creating a space that would fit us under. We were aware of the glacial wind coming in from the east, so built up spruce to protect us from that side, along with adding a layer atop our thermal roof. Building a survival shelter and the urgency on which you build it is all subject to circumstance. 

This challenge was by far our favourite, and one we’d been looking forward to since we found out before the show started what the four challenges would be. Even though the show wasn’t a survival show, this type of survival task was right up our street and building a lean-to out of the surrounding foliage was a fantastic opportunity to really put ourselves to the test and see what we could do. We honestly had the best nights sleep we’d had the whole time we were there, and it was a shame when production came by at 7 am to wake us up. Funnily enough, they’d been really cold in their tents and had a rubbish nights sleep, who’d have thought it?!

Building the shelter itself, we had a lot of fun using the surrounding materials that nature provided to build a comfortable and safe space for the night. We built the shelter on top of a wonderful carpet of moss, so spongey it was like laying down on memory foam and also added a layer of spruce to add some extra insulation, bounce and protection. Next up was one of our safety blankets to keep our sleeping bags dry and reflect our body heat back up to us. Above us, we’d weaved sticks to create a sturdy roof above our heads with our second safety blanket placed to reflect our body heat back down on us and also protect us from any potential rain, and a layer of more spruce for added insulation. At either end of our shelter, we created spruce walls to keep the glacial wind at bay, which meant we had one open-sided area of our shelter to get in and out. Our jackets were used as pillows, and we hung up our damp socks from the river crossing on one of the poles used to support our shelter. In the limited time we had we were in awe of the home we’d built and could have happily stayed there for days, or even weeks!

‘Humongous and Luxurious’

You can’t win on this show, guaranteed if we’d decided to just bivvy for the night (fast and effective!) then it would have been ‘too simple’ and what have you. Opting to create a shelter between two trees does really limit you to the size of the shelter, we didn’t build it any bigger than it needed to be. All of our shelters were the same size - the exact length of us lying down. 

‘At the end of the night Theo and Bee had this humungous shelter that I felt was more than really what they needed. They might have lost a touch of heat overall’ - CJ to Duane and Rena

Cutter also remarked that we were wasting our reflective blanket by using it on the roof and not the floor as that’s where heat is lost, completely skirting over the fact we put our reflective blanket on both the roof and the floor! Not to discredit Jane and Pete who won the challenge and did a great job with their shelter, but didn’t they use their only reflective sheet on the roof? Why were they not penalised for allowing body heat to seep through the floor? We were also discredited for having a breezy shelter when ours wasn’t facing into a glacial wind as we’d purposely built up spruce to protect us. The next morning over the campfire it was apparent that we were a lot warmer than some of the other couples during the below minus temperatures that night. It seems quite contradictory how they remarked on Pete and Jane forgetting an emergency item, and then praised for adapting without that item. But for us, with both our items we were still discredited even though we had used them both effectively. As many people have already said, it does feel like their decision was already made up on who would be going up to the mountain next.

Feedback

Once we were told we weren’t making it up to Ose mountain within half an hour we had a producer inform us our flights were booked for tomorrow night. That was it, it was over and we had no feedback at all. To this day we still don’t know why we weren’t picked. At the time we asked one of the main producers who said we’d find out when the show came out…well, we’re still none the wiser. 

Final Thoughts

Regardless of not making it up to the mountain the experience was brilliant and was the driving force for us deciding to drive our van all the way to Alaska. We’re currently gearing up to ship our van over to Halifax, Canada in March and begin our North American road trip. We’ve covered Europe and are now ready for a new continent…