Thursday, March 29, 2012

BLOG: It's so cold in Alaska

Joshua Ligairi » 03.29.12 »


I've recently returned from my 2nd of 4-5 trips that I'll be making up North this year for an upcoming documentary project and I'm nearly thawed out.

Despite the injury mentioned in a previous post below and a bit of a rocky start, we ended up having a great time shooting in Alaska and I think we got some pretty great stuff in the villages of Tanana, Ruby, and Huslia (as well as the city of Fairbanks).

And we actually really lucked out with the weather. Though it was often in the -20 Degrees Fahrenheit range much of the trip, I had originally planned to shoot in January or February when temperatures were down in the -40 to -60 range and reached -70 if I'm not mistaken. Truthfully, I can't wait to go back.


My DP for the project, Rod Santiano (pictured above, shooting on the Yukon River), is a much more dedicated blogger than me and wrote a fun post about our first few days in the wild. If you think you might enjoy a comedy of errors with a deep-seeded, if unwarranted, underlying fear and fascination from The Edge, The Grey, and Northern Exposure...it's definitely worth a read.

The next trip is planned for the end of June, start of July. It probably won't be as epic as this trip was with trapping, hunting, dogsleds, snowmobiles, etc, but I'm looking forward to it too, despite having to replace the hand warmers in my pack with lots and lots of mosquito repellant.