大象传媒

For the Alaska series, director Tuppence Stone, camera assistant Jonathan Fiely and I headed north… way north… all the way north!

And we drove. It was magical. We headed up the famed ice trucker road from Fairbanks to Deadhorse. It took two solid days and all of it was on ice. We had vast trucks hurtling past us the whole way. We headed through forests of pines until we travelled into the Arctic Circle and the trees gradually stopped and in fact, we past a sign claiming the last tree.

We climbed a pass onto the top of the world, and the snow and wind was howling. We stopped to film and very quickly I realised that this wasn’t playing; within minutes my fingers had gone, my face had frozen and I sat in the vehicle rocking in pain as the blood slowly crept back into frozen extremities.

We learnt that up here you really had very little time to film before things start shutting down.

We broke our journey in Coldfoot, a truck station, motel and restaurant. Full of huge truckers, eating huge pies. This was the last habitation before or destination Deadhorse, a town in the far north. The next day we dropped onto the great North Slope and the views became truly epic and almost brought on vertigo; there was literally nothing to stop you until the North Pole. We glimpsed musk ox out beyond the oil pipeline, that endless silver line snaking its way from oil field to Anchorage.

Deadhorse emerged from the low cold blue light. Hulks of drill rigs, storage containers, blocks of accommodation, flames burning bright from the drilling sites, the endless horizon broken with clumps of man’s tenacious ingenuity. It was both beautiful and disconcerting in equal measure.

We were here to try and find the Arctic fox. That ghost, that talisman of the far North. He lived on the fringes of habitation and snuck in for easy pickings discarded by man. The problem was that the red fox was here too, bolder, bigger and more powerful.

Like the camp followers of the old armies, the Rat, the Fox and Crow followed man as he blazed his way into the wildernesses and now they were here as far north as it is possible for them to go. When the red fox finds the smaller Arctic fox, he chases, catches and kills it. We didn’t realise how rare the Arctic fox had become around Deadhorse until we got here.

We were here for two weeks and were out for 14 hours a day, nothing. We talked to everyone, we put out calls over the radio network to enlist the help of the truckers and workers up here. The little white ghosts had vanished…

We were able to film a little with the red foxes, the beautiful, larger cousins. Occasionally there would be a report of an Arctic, and we would bomb over to the other side of town. But to no avail. We found the odd track, we sat up at night at the back of the hotel by the bins. Nothing.

It was demoralising and tough. The temperature dropped to around -50. Operating at that temperature was brutal. Cables just snapped, batteries lasted minutes, fingers stuck to metal tripods. It’s a uniquely difficult life up here that attracts strange and wonderful people. We met a few. There was little to break up our day, apart from the one coffee shop and comparing ‘snoticles’ on our beards.

With a day to go we got our sighting; a stunning white bundle of fur. I think we got about two hours with him as he scurried under buildings and ducked behind snow ploughs. He stopped at a digger and spent time defrosting some morsel of frozen food with his warm little tongue. He allowed me to get within four or five metres. I felt humbled and privileged.

We didn’t get a lot with him but we did manage to tell a little of the story of this incredible mammal and his travails trying to cohabit with his larger lethal red brethren.

A tricky, arduous, difficult, frustrating shoot but I feel blessed to have seen the far north and spend a little time with the incredible Arctic fox.