Day two passes in a blur, with banks, bikes, cellphones and a wild goose chase for free wifi all on the agenda. Waking up at 5:30AM, I look out on a grey and moody day; rain cascades from a heavy sky as I walk slowly through the local park in search of the Pacific. Twenty minutes from home, I arrive at the beach- a gravelly scrape nestled between a railroad and an almost unbelievably huge cargo ship. The main road passes by and the noise is overwhelming- this park is not a place to relax, more an afterthought, trapped by the sounds and smells of industry. Perhaps it’s not the best place to start the day, I think, as I traipse back through the concrete and steel of the local amusement park, a world of fun made gloomy by the hour and the weather – lone residents scuttle purposefully between the vast buildings, never once glancing up to the leaden skies.

A few hours later, I’m sat in a Starbucks on the main drag in my area- ‘Hastings’. I’ve been warned that Hastings is one of the hotspots for drug addicts and so the rate of crime is high, but this far out of Gastown, the locals seem friendly and there are smiles on the faces of the people walking the streets. My coffee does its trick and I prance back out into the city; the rain has now stopped and although the sun has yet to break through, the air is warm, further inspiring a hitherto hidden optimism. I discover the tranquil, beautiful streets between the main thoroughfares; clapperboard homes with big green gardens, borders neatly defined, with beautiful collections of flowers in every other lawn. On the wide, empty roads, sleek modern cars are the norm here, while occasionally an old American gem shines through. It’s bin day, so the back streets are lined neatly with recycling, alongside children playing happily on bikes; I pass a trash collection lorry, which lumbers down these narrow roads between the backs of the houses. Off in the distance, beyond the telephone lines, the skyscrapers can again be glimpsed; tomorrow I’m off to downtown and I can’t wait!

In Summer 2011, I shall again be jetting off across the Atlantic, for what will hopefully be the last time. I have lined up a working holiday visa and intend to pursue my (three year-old) media career in a location which better suits my ambition and love of nature.

I know of a few others who are either interested in applying for, or who have already applied for, such a visa, so this blog will give you a run-through the key processes and payments involved.

Step 1: BUNAC
BUNAC is a student-led non-profit organisation, which aims to enhance the lives of young people and expand their awareness of other societies by providing easy access to working holidays and working holiday visas. It’s a good way in to the visa process, although the £250 upfront cost might at first seem quite steep. The organisation will provide you with advice, put you in contact with like-minded people, allow you access to free WiFi and job listings in a Vancouver-based centre and, crucially, reserve a working holiday visa for you. By reserving the visa, you avoid competition with others and ensure that the only thing between you and a successful visa application is time.

Step 2: ACPO Certificate
This is actually a very simple step,but it must be completed before you send off your visa application, so start it as soon as you can. It is basically a glorified CRB check, and will simply confirm to international authorities that you do not have a criminal record. You will need to pay for two of these certificates, at a cost of £40 + £5 for a passport photo which must be attached. I should point out that, although simple, this step took me three weeks from sending off the application to receiving my certificate, so plan ahead!

Step 3: Canadian Embassy
Once you have received your ACPO certificate, attach it to the myriad forms which you will need to fill in for the Canadian Embassy. There are at least 20 pages of forms to fill out, detailing your previous and current addresses, your parents’ details, your workplace and sundry other factoids about your life. Though incredibly tedious, these forms shouldn’t take more than a few hours to fill out. Send off the certificates in an envelope to the Canadian Embassy in Paris (I know; what!!?) and you should then have about 8 weeks to wait before you hear back about whether or not you have been successful in your application. When you hear back, you will then need to pay the £170 cost of the visa. You must bear in mind that you have to prove you have about £3000 in your bank account before you will be able to apply.

Step 4: Panic!
At this point, and only at this point, you will need to start booking things. A one-way flight to Vancouver is between £350-£600 in summer, then add-on the cost of insurance for your trip (which must be renewed if you plan on coming home at any point, and you are looking at far more than £1000 for just getting out there! You must buy premium travel insurance, as the Canadian Border Agents will not let you into the country unless you have a vast amount of medical coverage.

I’ll try and keep this blog updated with miscellaneous hints and tips as I prepare for my flight.

Swifts gather and swarm through the air, picking off the insects, which gradually descend to the cooling ground below. Deep in the bushes, Nightingales buzz and squeak, safely hidden from view. As night descends, a chill wind sweeps through the fields and verges, causing dry grasses to shift nervously and rustle their disapproval.

From the village square, the sounds of night echo out across the wide-open fields; a game of boules, diners laughing outside buzzing restaurants, slamming doors and creaky shutters. Cars thrum past, whipping up the grasses into a frenzy, before speeding off, lights glowing ever-brighter into the gathering dusk.

Tussocks of grass lift me up above the marsh, before giving way altogether too easily and casting me headlong into the next dip. As I slide down a soggy log, it tips gracefully, sending a foot flying into the water below. At the edge of a glittering lake, I plunge through the shallows; newts and sticklebacks narrowly escaping the looming threat of my rubber soles.

Looking up, the clouds track my gaze, zipping at high speed over oak trees which fidget restlessly in the wind. A skylark reaches out in song from the fields above, before cascading down into the short-cropped grass below.

After a while, the doors creak open and two travellers stumble out. They’ve seen it all- the seven-lane freeways of San Francisco; the awe-inspiring vistas of the Big Sur coastline; the smashing, crashing, booming waves of the Pacific, carrying the lithe bodies of sea otters and seals- but here in this valley, they’ve found something new.

Down by the stream, they paddle through smooth, warm currents, cruising between giant boulders. Lime-green frogs bounce from hot rocks into the algae below. As they walk through the water, slipping and sliding on the weeds, they chatter about the views, the days that have passed and those yet to come. Harsh words occasionally surface, but these pass swiftly, sinking rapidly from memory.

Two miles further along a violently bumpy track, garnished with sharp stones and light brown dust, they find a campsite. Beside it, the warm waters slow and deepen, providing a refuge for shoals of dirty brown fish, each more plump and tasty-looking than the last. Above the tents and vehicles, low scrub and desert-trees stretch up into the sky on either side of the steep valley. Later, these same slopes frame a perfectly black sky, the stars grains of shining sand scattered across the velvet night.

We drift off to sleep, our thoughts disturbed only occasionally by the interesting smells emanating from the composting toilet.

On arrival, we will spend a night in the city, before picking up our hire car and heading out to Route 1 – described by many as the ‘most beautiful highway in the USA’; an accolade which can presumably be attributed to the spectacular scenery through which it passes, rather than any particular characteristic of the road itself. Along this long coastal route, we’ll see stretches of some of the most pristine beaches, coves and cliffs in the world, and I fully anticipate the sighs of disbelief as sharp bends peel away to reveal idyllic vistas shimmering excitedly in the September sun.

As we travel along this epic road -and perhaps further into the dusty, dry interior past salty lakes and parched, rocky valleys- I will be posting regular blogs with photos of the exciting animals and adventures which my sister and I hope to encounter on the way. Keep an eye out, too for the video, which should hit YouTube a month or so after we return.

In late September, I was contacted by a crew from the BBC Natural History Unit who wished to film Polar Bears at the whale bone pile. This led to me delaying my flights home by three weeks (as much as my 90-day visa would allow), and an incredibly anxious month during which winter arrived early and it looked as if the bears would be long-gone before the BBC would arrive. However, as in all good stories, everything eventually came together for a few days which I will remember for the rest of my life.

MONDAY

Excitedly spilling out of the plane like schoolchildren at lunchbreak, the 6 members of my BBC crew arrived in Kaktovik. Here to film two half-hour shows for children’s tv, they got to work immediately, recording the presenter’s descent from the air-conditioned aircraft into the freezing temperatures that I have grown to love over the past few weeks.

“My bogeys are freezing up!” exclaimed Rosie, whose break into television involved a somewhat bizarre incident in which a heron ate a moorhen in the middle of London. The whole team concurred that their bogeys were indeed freezing up; an unfortunate side effect of the extreme temperature.

The crew couldn’t have asked for a better first day; clouds hovered around the edge of the horizon, framing a perfect blue sky in relatively mild temperatures (for Kaktovik). It was agreed that, despite only 2 hours’ sleep, they would set to work immediately, making the most of the delicious lighting. After a short trip back to the hotel – which was regarded as ‘lovely’ by most of the crew, despite its outwardly ramshackle appearance – we set off down to the bone pile, cameras at the ready.

Down at the bones, the only sign of life were the Arctic foxes, which were still very obliging, allowing Steve (the presenter) to get so close that he could have reached out and stroked one. I explained the basics of the whale hunt, trying my hardest not to make it sound like a massacre, and including something of the history of Kaktovik.

After a few hours of foxes, the initial excitement began to wear off and the team started to lament the lack of bears. The sole reason that they had travelled to Kaktovik was to film at least one presenter piece-to-camera with bears in the background, and, with the hotel costing each person $225 per night, plus $400 per day for a native guide and $400 per day to hire their two trucks, the team couldn’t afford to go home empty handed. People began scanning the horizon with binoculars, desperate for a glimpse of the animals. They seemed to have run out of luck, however; three helicopters from US Fish and Wildlife (the government agency) were out tracking and darting the bears in order to take tissue samples, and so the animals had developed a healthy caution, bordering on paranoia towards anything vaguely human.

After a while, Rosie pointed at a black dot on the horizon, and asked us what it was. Assuming it was just another young Arctic fox, I casually picked up my binoculars and held them to my watering eyes. What with the strong wind and the condition of my eyes, identifying anything was going to be a problem. My immediate impression of the black dot was that it appeared to be an anteater. However, as I hadn’t seen an ant in three months (alongside other, more logical reasons), I thought this was unlikely. Looking again, the anteater turned into a tiny black bear; again, this was unlikely as we were at least several hundred miles from the nearest black bear. It was then that I remembered the photograph of a wolverine which was attached to the wall in the hotel’s lounge. Most Alaskans are lucky if they see one wolverine their entire lives; the animals are incredibly secretive, and rightly so, as they are regularly shot for their warm fur. However, there was nothing else that this bizarre creature more closely resembled, and so I shouted out to the group; ‘WOLVERINE!’. To be perfectly honest, at this stage, the black lump could have been anything – I thought however, that, should I be correct, the identification might make me look like an expert, whereas a misidentification could be cast off with a simple ‘my binoculars must have been shaking too much’.

As it turned out, my identification was accurate, and the group jumped into gear, moving back towards the vehicles and pulling out all the stops, zooming in on the distant creature and presenting to camera, while simultaneously crossing all our fingers that the creature would come closer. Wolverine are an extremely dangerous animal – the size of a badger, but able to take down prey larger than a horse – so I was slightly less enthusiastic about the idea of the animal coming to visit. Paying no attention to the wishes of either the BBC crew or myself, the wolverine wandered around, playing with the Arctic Foxes at about 100 yards distance, before standing up on its hind legs – enabling us to get a full view of this bear-badger-anteater curiosity – then strolling casually back off towards the Eastern end of Barter island, across the ice.

TUESDAY (12:53AM)

I roll over in bed, desperately trying to get some sleep before my alarm goes off again at 1:30AM – I’ve been lying around for 53 minutes in my snow boots, which occasionally crashed against the metal frame of my bed. For the previous 5 hours, I had been venturing outside for five minutes every half an hour, in order to check if the Northern lights were ready to make their presence known to the BBC. The rest of the crew had crashed out in bed, exhausted from a combination of jet lag, very little sleep the previous night, and the tiring effect of the cold weather. Having suggested myself, that I keep an eye out for the lights, the others were incredibly grateful, but the idea seemed to become progressively less intelligent as the night dragged on and an early start the following day drew ever nearer. At 7pm, the lights had started to show – like the faint glow of clouds above a distant town at night, but ever since then, they had evidently decided to turn in for bed themselves, and were completely invisible to the naked eye.

I muttered an expletive, and decided that, rather than wait another half hour, I would cut my losses and check outside now – the lights were bound to be out, and I would then be able to get a few hours sleep before the morning. Stamping towards the front door, I thought longingly about the sleep ahead of me, and wished fervently that the sky would be dark above the Arctic Circle. I stepped through the front door, and let my eyes adjust to the streetlights and resultant glare from the snow beneath my feet. Stepping a few yards away from the house, I turned around and looked up.

I muttered another expletive.

Above the house, a snaking line of iridescent green, winked and spun across the horizon, mocking me from afar. I raced across the road and then crunched over the snowy tundra towards the hotel, beyond caring about falling over. As I ran, I glanced back and the sky exploded – brilliant flames of half-light flickered over me like icy fire and behind them, strong waves of emerald danced hand in hand from the far stretches of the icy arctic sea to the towering mountains, 65 miles south.

I crashed through the hotel door and raced up the steps of the front porch, haring towards the bedrooms of the BBC. It took another 15 minutes before the crew were up and ready; some of them stared out the windows at the incredible sight, having never seen it before in years of working across the globe. 6 of us crammed into a truck designed to carry four, and camera equipment was wedged onto knees and under feet. As our vehicle set off down the dirt road towards the runway (the best place to the see the Northern Lights due to the lack of light pollution), the others told me how grateful they were that I had stayed up so late. I grunted a tired reply, hoping for a late start the following day.

On arriving at the runway, the lights had begun to fade, and we struggled to film them with equipment not designed for filming such a weakly lit subject. As the crew began to pack up, I explained to Steve that the best way to see the lights was to lie on your back and gaze up at the sky. Everyone else derided this idea as ridiculous due to the icy road beneath their feet and the freezing temperatures. Just as the crew decided to call it a night, I looked up and saw the beginnings of an explosion. It was as if somebody had lit a match in the far corner of a room – a distant region of the lights began to glow more intensely. Within seconds, the sky was invaded by armies of green, marching and twirling in from every direction. I shouted; ‘LOOK UP!’, but everyone already had. Looking around, it was as if an unseen gust of wind had passed me by – 5 people were lying around my feet, flat on their backs, staring up into the green eye of the arctic night.

SUNDAY

I wake up, drunk from lack of sleep, and wipe the condensation from the inside of our caravan window. Outside, flocks of sheep and whole forests of trees spread out to the horizon. The ground is yellow-green with a lush carpet of grass – a stark contrast to the gleaming white with which I have become familiar. Distant rainclouds rear up and gallop across the sky before crashing down with the power of a million fat drops of rain, across the roof above me. All of this seems strange, but, at the same time, strangely familiar. Red kites and buzzards hang motionless in the valley below, feathers flickering in the gusty breeze which carries the humid, hot smell of fresh autumn rain through the gaps in the leaky windows.

A caravan trip to Wales has never sounded so appealing.

I am home.

This blog is dedicated to Ted Oakes, and all of the Deadly 60 team, without whom I would never have accomplished this much.

NB: A brief CV (résumé) is now available on the ‘cv’ page of this website (www.thicketfilms.com); simply click on the relevant link in the link bar at the top of any page.

Lying on my belly, I edge forwards, sliding through the thick snow, propelled by skinny elbows. I look up and into a shining white face whose piercing yellow eyes glare back at me in contempt.

Less than a week until my flight home, and the Arctic foxes have moved into the bonepile, taking advantage of the reduced number of polar bears in order to stock up on vital food reserves. There are more than six of the animals scurrying around the bones – a tourist from New York describes them as ‘a little bigger than the rats from the subway’. One small fox cub is outnumbered by its older, whiter relatives, who rapidly melt into their snowy surroundings.

I struggle to remember a time when I have had more charming subjects filling the frame of my camera. The younger foxes are more tame, and will allow me to approach within three feet of where they are feeding. Preferring the more intimate, eye level photos to those taken from a height, I slither on my front across the snow, in temperatures which hover around -20C. One of the tourists returns to the truck to warm up, after his guide notices that his nose has turned white at the tip – an early sign of frostbite. I snuggle into my warm snow boots – kindly donated by the proprietor of the hotel at which I am staying. Even so, the wind cuts through my thick gloves, and I return again and again to the comparative warmth of the truck, so as to massage life into my fingertips.

In these temperatures, batteries last mere minutes – I discover that the best way to keep a camera battery going is to take it out and suck it every so often. However, as metal freezes to wet skin in less than a second, I take care to avoid touching the terminals with my frozen lips. Sometimes I simply stop recording the images forming before me, preferring to watch the story of the foxes unfold without a lens blurring my enjoyment of the moment.

As the sun grazes the horizon, the polar bears return – a mother and cub cruise across the pack ice, while foxes dance around them at a safe distance. When the bear cub catches sight of a fox, its head sweeps towards the animal, small feet propelling a fat little body across the ice at surprisingly high speeds. As the foxes race to escape, they remind me of newborn lambs; rocking their whole bodies up and down so as to build up speed. However, like Tom and Jerry, the fox is always too fast or too sly for the cub – always jumping out of the way in the nick of time.

The falling sun colours the scene a resplendent orange, painting the fluffy white fur of the foxes and the bears. Reluctantly, I jump back into the truck and return to the hotel, happy at the prospect of another week with these obliging animals.

This blog is dedicated to my parents and sister, currently basking in the warmth of the British autumn.

Sitting in my warm bedroom, the cold hard drifts which carpet the village outside seem like a fairytale set in a distant country. It’s often so hard to believe I’m marooned in the arctic circle, that I am forced to edge up to the windows and sneak a look at the real world.

I type away on a modern laptop under the glare of fluorescent lights,  carpet under my feet, a modern bathroom suite across the corridor and blinds at the windows. Make no mistake, however; life is not easy in arctic Alaska. Outside, temperatures drop to -5C in the daytime, the sea has frozen for hundreds of metres offshore and just two nights ago, I drove my truck so far into a snowdrift that it took nearly an hour for two other vehicles to pull it out. Walt – the proprietor of the hotel in which I work for room and board – has begun wearing a warmer hat. “It’s my fall hat” he tells me, explaining that he has a thicker, fur-lined model for winter.

A pair of young snowy owls (pictured above) has moved onto Barter Island in preparation for the cold and dark months ahead. On November 21st, the sun will set on Kaktovik, and two months of perpetual dark will begin. In the depths of winter, temperatures drop so low that you can throw water into the air and watch it freeze before it crashes to the ground. Winds may reach 100mph or more – the winds which battered Kaktovik for two days this week were only 30mph, and yet ripped apart the windsock which flies above the runway. Snow drifts in a Kaktovik winter can reach the top of two-storey buildings. It is hard to believe that, for thousands of years, people survived in shelters made entirely from snow through just this type of weather. In the deep midwinter, venturing outside requires a full face mask in order to prevent frostbite, which can occur literally in seconds.

The native people of the North Slope of Alaska not only survived in this environment – they thrived in the cold, using it to their advantage; storing food in the permafrost, hunting and fishing from the ice and creating well-insulated temporary homes from the snow. In the summer, sod houses were hacked from the frozen ground, and provided ideal protection from the whistling Arctic winds.

Some of the more senior native residents of the North Slope are understandably reticent in giving up the old ways. Just last week, an 88 year old man, who had lived on his own in the wilderness for the previous two months, crashed through the ice on his skidoo while crossing a frozen river. Unfazed by the accident, he pulled himself out of the water and ploughed on towards a hunting camp. However, in a terrible twist of fate, the cold water on his clothes became his downfall, and he was later found frozen to death out on the tundra. His determination and tragic passing mean he will be remembered for many years to come, in a society where death is regularly caused by extremes of weather.

Sat in my truck at the bonepile, I reflected on the death of a noble hunter, whose life was the embodiment of his cultural traditions.

My breath fogged the inside of the truck windows as I scanned the sea ice, waiting for polar bears to approach close enough to film. In the distance, two cubs played in the snow, rolling over one another then breaking through into the sea beneath them, splashing through the water then running for their mother, who nursed them in the lee of a snow drift. Pure golden sunlight pierced through the omnipresent clouds, lighting up a perfect scene of family bliss. On three sides of my vehicle, brilliant white snow stretched off towards the horizon, the sea only visible as a notch of deep blue just below the sky. I gazed out, taking in the distant cliffs, softened by snow drifts, the bleached whale bones scattered under puffy clouds the colour of wet slate. My toes were steadily turning into blocks of ice, but I ignored the cold and just sat and soaked in the spirit of this land on the edge of the world.

I leave in 12 days.

Much has changed since the previous week’s substantial snowfall. At first, the snow wouldn’t stop coming; fat flakes falling from an angry grey sky, driven by powerful winds. After this came yet stronger winds, carving the white carpet into sharp edges and soft piles. The consistent wind direction created drifts which stretched out like long white shadows from every building in the village. Previously-safe roads became deadly as temperatures see-sawed around zero degrees; thawing then re-freezing the white carpet with slick patches of ice.

Having never experienced such deep snow before, I became entranced by the way in which drifts crept up to buildings, then formed sheer faces just inches away, as the wind carried the powder up and over the roofs like smoke, coating rooftops with a foot-thick layer of insulation. The incredible curves and edges fascinated me – many times I reached out to touch the pinnacle of a drift, excited to explore its brutal shape with bare fingers.

Walking to work became a problem – the 50 or so metres between the hotel and my house consists mainly of a swathe of tundra, on which drifts up to thigh height have gradually formed. This morning I crashed through a solid drift which filled my wellies with the cold, wet snow I had displaced. Cursing my misfortune, I hobbled the rest of the way with soggy socks, emptying out a pint of snow from each boot in the porch at the hotel. Outside, drifts lean against the thin plywood walls – each day I’ve watched them grow, until, over a week after the first snowfall, they have outgrown even me.

Getting out onto the tundra has become less an escape from work, more of a chore in itself. Furthermore, with the small ponds – and even the large reservoir – covered by drifts up to three feet thick, it is downright dangerous to plough a path through the virgin snow. Despite (or maybe because of) this, I took it upon myself to explore the wilderness beyond the village earlier today. I chose to walk out towards the reservoir on a road which had been in regular use only a few days previously. Now though, even this track is deep in drifts; people have no reason to travel out in such conditions on a road to nowhere. However, I discovered that, with ski pants worn over the tops of wellies, I could safely enter snow up to waist deep without worrying about soggy socks.

Once I had reached the end of the road (itself almost unrecognisable due to the drifts), I ploughed on across the tundra. Here, I found the tracks of a vole, which had ventured up from its network of tunnels beneath the snow, only to disappear seconds later into a hole. Scattered randomly across the tundra, I could see these blue holes, marking the entrances and exits to the labyrinth which lay beneath me. A few days previously, I watched as a dark vole ran across the white carpet just yards from a hunting short-eared owl (see photo, right). The owl was caught unawares, and missed its prey – a relief for the rodent (and myself), but a costly mistake for the predator, which had ventured right into the heart of the village in search of its prey.

Keeping to the edge of the reservoir, I knew that no ponds lay in my way, and so I was able to plunge deep into drifts, safe in the knowledge that a watery demise did not lie beneath. At points, I came across snow too deep to walk through – here, the only way to carry on was to shuffle along on my knees, using my tripod as a blind man uses his cane. After 20 minutes more walking, I reached the end of the reservoir and continued on towards the dump on the east side of the island.

Crossing a lone snowmachine track, I plunged forward too fast and, before I even had time to think where I was going, my left foot crashed through a foot of snow and dropped a further foot into icy cold water. Panicking, I thrust my right foot down – this also crashed through the thin ice covering the pond and sunk to the bottom. Backing slowly out, I chose, unwisely, to continue across the low-lying plain between the reservoir and the dump. Within 20 seconds I had again hit a pond, and, as black water seeped into my white footprints, I reconsidered my path. From walking across the tundra during the previous two months, I knew that at least one lake lay ahead – this one would be more than a metre deep, and I would not be likely to escape without breaking through into freezing, stagnant water. Preferring to return to the UK in an airline seat than a cargo hold, I decided to head back the way I had come.

As I walked back through the snow, glass-like ice crystals across the tundra caught the sun and twinkled like a galaxy of tiny stars. Out here in the Arctic Circle, the light changes dramatically from second to second, minute to minute; revealing subtle nuances in a landscape of white, before cloaking them again just as swiftly. I returned home, surrounded by a blaze of crisp orange light, as the dying sun neared the horizon.

This blog is dedicated to Kate Macdonald; thanks for the support!