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Episode 3: The Great Northern Wilderness 

This week, Arthur Williams flies in to the vast untamed wilderness of northern Canada. It’s high summer and the Arctic ice has retreated – allowing him to discover the secrets of the land beneath…

First he takes a 1930s flying boat upriver to grizzly bear country – a temperate rainforest known as the Great Bear Rainforest. After landing his ten-tonne sea plane on the river, he discovers ancient rock art commemorating Native American chiefs of the local Kitasoo First Nations tribe, before getting up close to a grizzly bear with a team of scientists who live in the forests for six months at a time.

Next Arthur hitches a lift with a supply plane heading to Wekweeti – a Native American town lacking road access for most of the year. It was built in the sub-Arctic wilderness in the 1960s as a giant social experiment - to see if local First Nations people could be persuaded to live here, in their ancient hunting grounds, rather than moving to the cities. Now the town’s mayor, Johnny Arrowmaker, is trying to keep the residents here - by building a golf course in the wild. Out on lakes, Arthur joins a local family duck hunting by speedboat.

Finally Arthur tries his hand at gold prospecting on the edge of the Arctic Circle – by plane. He flies with ‘Klondike Carl’, a local man who tells Arthur made 3 millions dollars from the gold he’s found after flying for weeks on end across this stunningly beautiful and remote terrain.