Go Wild in Alaska...
Team films live 300 miles from nearest road
THE BBC will stop at nothing to make their much-loved wildlife programmes the absolute best.
For Wild Alaska Live, they will throw one of their presenters into a forest filled with bears, 300 miles from the nearest road.
Others will jump inside an iceberg and dive with salmon.
Steve Backshall, Matt Baker and Liz Bonnin will front Wild Alaska Live later this month as the annual salmon migration run triggers the start of a remarkable summer feast. Black bears, brown bears, Kodiak bears, orca, humpback whales, salmon, beavers, walrus and wolves are among the animals being sought by the BBC’s natural history department.
On her part of the live show, Liz says: “We’re in a tiny, tiny camp, 11 of us in total, and the nearest road is 300 miles away.
“I always move my tent farthest away because the boys snore, but I can’t do that here because we have to be in a tight square, surrounded by an electric wire, with the rangers on the outside of the tents, because there are a lot of bears and wolves around.
“This is the first place I’ve been in that there is no road, no hospital, no way to get us out. This is very much living in the wilderness. It’s a little bit scary, but it’s really thrilling.” On Sunday, the first programme features underwater footage of salmon, as well as the bears that wait to feed on them. Series producer Adam White says: “To have these places on our planet is important. Most people can’t get to them, it is expensive, and doing it live is the closest experience people can get to going there.” Backshall will land a helicopter on a glacier and then go down inside it.