How Glenn Villeneuve Came to Be on Life Below Zero | Joe Roga

For people who don't know where to live, life below zero, it's this crazy show where people live in this very rugged terrain. And you, you had the most interesting life. Because you, when you would live up at the cabin, you would live by yourself. Just you in a very small room, just hunting all your food and hiking around. You didn't use any vehicles and you just kind of had a rifle and a frying pan and a pot and a place to sleep. You seemed really happy up there. Oh yeah. I'm having a good time. I just wanted to strip everything away that I could dispense with. I got the idea. I wanted to go back to living like a hunter gatherer. Back in 97, I just got this idea. I was actually living in a tent in the woods down in Vermont, having such a good time. I thought, where could I go with this? What could I do with this kind of lifestyle? And I decided to move to the Brooks Range of Alaska. What was it like, so you, what made you go live in a tent in the first place? I just always liked the outdoors. I just love nature. And, you know, I was doing other things too, but there was this one summer when I was in my twenties, when I found this really cool spot in the woods and I thought, hey, I'll set up a teepee over there and I'll just hang out there this summer as much as I can. And I just had a great time. So I started thinking more about, you know, instead of just living in the woods kind of as a recreational thing, I started thinking about, hey, how could you actually make a life living like this? You know, get up every morning with the animals around the sky, the water. I started thinking about, I started reading anthropological stuff about hunter gatherers that summer. And I started getting ideas and it took me seven years to make it to the Brooks Range and to get out to that lake that you've seen on TV and to actually start living that way. It took me a few years just to organize my life enough to move up to Alaska. And then once I got to Alaska, I was kind of in Fairbanks for about four years before I could really spend long periods of time in the wilderness. But once I got it all arranged, I just drove up the Hall Road, which is this industrial road that goes up to the North Slope oil fields. It's very, very unimproved in areas, just gravel road for hundreds of miles. I drove about 300 miles north of Fairbanks. I parked my van and I walked 60 miles off of that road by myself out into the wilderness and started figuring out how to live off the land. How did you know where to go? Oh, I had found the spot a few years before. I had actually found that lake flying around in a little bush plane because part of my plan originally, when I formulated this idea back in Vermont, I thought I'll become a bush pilot. That'll be a thing I can do in Alaska. So I was thinking about starting an air taxi service. I had been studying flying for a few years. As soon as I got my private license, I jumped in the plane and flew to Alaska. But then when I got up there, I was getting my commercial and all that. And in the meantime, as much as I could, I'd go out and explore, look around. And I discovered this lake one day when I was flying across part of the Brooks Range. And I set up a little tent camp there that summer, 2000. But it took me another four years before I could actually walk out there and start living. 60 miles walking. That's a long fucking way. Hey, I walked the length of Vermont when I was 13 years old. I walked, you know, from Massachusetts to Canada. But the difference is when you're 13. Yeah, I actually started when I was 12, gave up. I was with my uncle. We went for about a week. And then the next summer, I convinced my mom to drive me back down and drop me off alone where we had given up the year before. Just you by yourself? Yeah, when I was 13, I was alone. But that's a trail. That's called the long trail. And it's marked. There's a little paint mark, you know, on the trees up ahead of you telling you where to go. Yeah, but still, you were 13. Yeah. That's a little kid. Yeah. And your mom's like, go, go ahead. It was amazing. I was given a lot of freedom. I guess so. I mean, I'd already quit school by the time I was 13, you know? Really? I've been in the class a few times, but yeah, I mean, I never finished the fourth grade, to tell you the truth. Wow. But I went back. I went to one year of high school. Eventually, I was curious about what was going on over there. Did you ever get a GED or any of that jazz? No, I never needed a GED for anything I did. But I went to ninth grade and, you know, I did my own thing after that. But you seem like an educated guy. Are you self-educated? If I got any education, it's self-educated. Yeah. I like to be learning all the time. Whatever I'm doing, I like to learn. But if I'm making a TV show, I want to learn everything I can about it, you know? If I'm flying airplanes, I want to learn a lot more than I need to know to do what I'm doing. And it's the same thing with going out there and living, just learning as much as I could. There's so much to learn out there. Now, how long did it take you when you were 13? And like, what did you do for food? Oh, well, that was easy. Bite at the store and carry it on your back. I never hunted when I was a kid. Oh, okay. I mean, I remember going once or twice with some uncles of mine. We never got anything. I never, I didn't have any real hunting experience until that summer I walked out to the lake. Really? Yeah. So you really just had a rifle and didn't quite know what you were doing? I read a lot about what to do. The biggest thing, Joe, I got out there, I had two months food. I left two months worth of food at the lake, okay, to get me started. And I walked out there in July. Can I pause you for a second? Can you say two months food? Like, what did you bring? Oh, I had left basic stuff, grains, some beans, some rice. Stuff that you knew you could survive off of. A jug of oil, you know, basic, some flour was out there. And I left that the year before when I had a plane. My whole plan to become an air taxi and do the bush flying, at that time I realized this doesn't go together with living off the land in the wilderness. So I actually sold that plane that summer and drove up the road and walked out to where I had left these supplies the year before and decided that's where I really wanted to just go live off the land. I don't need an airplane anymore. I don't need to fly. So when I got out there, there was a 55-gallon barrel and it had some food in it, it had a few supplies. I had a tent, you know, it was insulated, but it hadn't really become a cabin yet. It's the same place that you've seen, but it was just a little less solid back then. And the cabin has the stands you built. Yeah. Well, I flew in the plywood and stuff and then when I got out there, I put, I had a wall tent originally. I'd had a tent camp out there since 2000. I built a plywood cabin under the wall tent basically, that's what I did. But when I got out there, I had some food, I had my rifle, I had fishing equipment, I started living, I started improving that little cabin, you know, and by September I ran out of food, like complete, I had one bag of flour, this little plastic bag of flour. It was all I had left when it got cold enough that I figured I could start moose hunting. So that was my plan. I got to get a moose. Why'd you have to wait till it got cold? Just regulations? Bugs. You got to preserve the meat. I've got no freezer. Right. I had, you know, I had to wait until, like I still do when I hunt moose. My moose hunting season starts the day I can leave a piece, a scrap of meat out on the ground all afternoon and go look at it, there's no fly eggs on it. Mmm. That makes sense. Wow. That's crazy. So you have to, other than the rifle aspect of it, do you mean you're really living like a primitive hunter gatherer? I would have used a bow and arrow if I thought I could have survived. There's your spot right there. There it is. Hey. Well, if you only want to gather meat, the rifle's the way to go. You know, I was always trying to just let go of everything I could do without, but I never got to the point where I thought I could make it with just a bow and arrow myself. You know, people used to survive out there before they even had archery. They survived out there with spears, but there were groups of people. They would build a fence, they would corral animals, they would put nooses up between trees to get a moose, things like that. There's also probably a lot more animals. I don't know that to be the case. Maybe not Alaska. Alaska, probably not too much different, but throughout North America, like if you listen to, or you read rather, the tales of Boone and Crockett, not Boone and Crockett, Lewis and Clark, when they made their way across the country, they found a lot of game. There was a lot of animals. I mean, it was just an abundance of animals. And then of course, if they ran into buffalo, obviously, there was millions and millions of buffalo. Unbelievable. That's the difference between Alaska and down here. Down here, we've modified everything. Yeah. We've paved everything over. Alaska's still wild. Northern Alaska is the most wild place left in this country. That's why I went there. It's barely this country, too. I mean, it's not even attached. Yeah, some people don't really think of Alaska as the United States. It's not. But it's not. It's a frozen Puerto Rico. It's way up there. It's not even connected to us. It's one of those weird ones. But it is wild. And you see, actually, that's what drew me to it. The first time I ever saw the Brooks Range was years before I moved to Alaska. I was on a flight. I used to get jobs as a courier. When I was in my 20s, I was real interested in traveling. And I found out this way, I could travel all over the world as a courier. So I would go to New York City. I'd get these jobs as a freelance courier and take off to wherever they needed me to go. And one time, I got this flight to Tokyo. And I'm flying right across the whole length of the Brooks Range. Great circle route. New York, Tokyo takes you right across it. 600 miles of mountains from the Canadian border over to the Chukchi Sea across from Siberia. And there's one road across it in 600 miles. When I was just glued to the window the whole flight, looking at that. Wow. I thought someday I'm going to go check that place out on the ground. I mean, it's incredible. When you see those mountains, they're big mountains. They're up to 9,000 feet high. And that one road is the Hall Road? Yeah. The Hall Road, also known as the Dalton Highway, that was built in 1974 just to construct the Alaska pipeline to get to the oil up at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope. The oil field's up there. They built that road in one summer. It's an amazing story in itself. Wow. They started in April, and they had the whole thing done in one summer from the Yukon River all the way up to the Arctic Ocean. So when you got down to one bag of flour, was there a part in your head where you're like, what am I doing here? No, I never wondered what I was doing there. No? No. It always felt right for you. Oh yeah. What I was doing there was looking for a moose. Yeah. And you already had that whole shed built for meat? Oh, there's no shed for meat. What's that thing that you do where you have everything covered up? The sod house? Yeah. No, that came like four years later. Oh. Yeah. No, no, I didn't have that yet. I didn't even have a meat pole. Really? No, I built the meat pole after I got the moose. The same meat pole that's still there that you've seen is 20 feet high, and I built that with a piece of parachute cord and a little block and tackle that you can fit in the palm of your hand that just had parachute cord around it. And I had to get, well, that big, I'm actually talking about that platform that's right beside the meat pole. Right. The meat pole's 20 feet high. The platform's 50 feet high. Let's explain to people what a meat pole is so that they know. That's like my freezer. I don't have a freezer out there, so I just hang meat up and I live in the freezer. The Arctic's your freezer from September until usually sometime in May I can keep meat without anything other than the open air around it. That's a long time. Yeah. It's most of the year. The lake's only thawed out from June until most years around the first of October it freezes over. So you get about four months open water, about eight months of ice. So you're basically living off of fish for those months? No. There was one year when I caught a lot of fish there because I stayed there one time 15 months without going to town. Just by yourself? No. I was only there for four months totally by myself, but I'm not totally crazy. I went back out and I got my woman to come in there with me after. She's totally crazy. Well, that may be true. I got divorced from her later, but actually, no, most of the time I've been out there, I've had a family with me most of the time. I went out there, I actually was, I got married before I went out there. I went out there for four months. I went back, I got Sylvia, my ex-wife, and we were out there for years. We would go back and forth. We would go to Fairbanks for six months or sometimes a year. We'd go out there for a year. We would go back and forth. And then what happened was after we split up, I was out there one winter totally alone, and that's when I got on the show right after that. It all just, the timing was perfect. I'm up there by myself. I'm living real close to the land. I mean, I'm sleeping under caribou hides that winter and I'm eating just caribou like I had a little tiny bit of store-bought food with me, hardly anything. And I hadn't seen a human being in four and a half months. And the executive producer of the show flies from LA all the way up there to meet me in lands. How'd they know you were there? The summer before I was in Fairbanks. And for a few years, I was trying to figure out how can I share this stuff I'm experiencing because it's incredible. I'm realizing that this is not ordinary life anymore. And there are a lot of people that don't even realize what's going on out here in the middle of the wilderness. So I'm talking to people. I'm trying to find some kind of a filmmaker or somebody, and I don't know anything about it, but I'm trying to find somebody to help me do something like a documentary or something like this. So my friends know this. Somebody handed me an email address. They said, you should write to this person. They're looking for people like you. They told me it was a filmmaker. I didn't know what it was. I sent off an email. I said, hi, you know, I live in the wilderness. I'd like to talk to you about if you're interested in making a documentary. And a few days later, I started walking from the road again to get back to my camp. So I left them a satellite phone number. I said, this is my only means of communication. It's a satellite phone. I don't keep it turned on because it runs on a battery. You can send a message to it. I check it once in a while. It's basically for emergencies only, but you can communicate with me this way. And I put that in the email how to do it. Well, that whole winter went by. Eight months went by. I hadn't heard from them. I'd forgotten about that person. I'd sent emails to a lot of people. And then one day I turn on my phone. There's this message there. They want to talk to me. So I called them up and we start talking. And they tell me it's a reality TV show. And I had literally never seen a reality TV show in my life. I hadn't watched TV for many, many years. And so you had no idea what that even meant? Not really. I talked to them about that. But they mostly didn't, they mostly wanted to talk about me, not about them. And I kept trying to get information. Like, what is this? Exactly. Right. You know? And because I kept, I remember I kept saying what I really want to do, I want to talk about nature out here. And they're like, well, we don't want to make a show about nature. We want to make a show about you. But in any case, I learned what reality TV was over the next few months. Because after we talked for two weeks, the executive producer flew all the way up from LA. He flew from Fairbanks on a little ski plane out there to meet me. And he landed and met me to make sure that I wasn't the biggest bullshitter they'd ever talked to. They had no idea. I mean, they're just talking to me on a satellite phone. And I was telling them, OK, you know, right now I'm living off these two caribou I killed last month. And they came out there and they saw that it was real. And they were like, yeah, we want you in the show. Wow. And a few weeks later, we were making TV. So they had to come out just to check to see if your story was legit. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't give them. I couldn't give them. Actually, like, yeah, the actual lake where you living. I couldn't give them references. I mean, I was all alone out there. Wow. That must have been very surreal for you. The guy lands out there, some Hollywood jack off, comes out to visit you. It was great. It was like getting out of solitary. I hadn't seen anybody four and a half months. That's a long time. But I say jack off. I mean, with all due respect, I just mean a Hollywood person, you know, like an LA television producer flies out to meet you when you're doing your wilderness thing. Like, what a convergence of worlds. There's no world that's more removed from the world of living by yourself in the woods than Hollywood. That's like the most opposite of it. In some ways, but we're all human. Yes, we're all human. And we had a great afternoon together. We had an awesome afternoon together. So did you take them and show them your routes and all the places where you go? It was in April. I had a packed trail on the snow. That's still winter where I am. And I took him out for a walk up onto a mountain side so he could get a view of the whole country there. It just happened that the first grizzly track I'd seen that spring that had come out of hibernation was right there in front of us. The bear had hit my trail and was walking down my packed trail right in front of us. It was that day, totally fresh track. So that was exciting. Did you see the bear? No, we didn't see the bear. It had headed up the mountain. It was walking a lot faster than we were. We saw a lot of beautiful things that day and he shot a sizzle reel and he brought it back for the network to see and everything. Wow. So what were you thinking when the guy left? I was thinking that was fun. That was cool. I got to show somebody around out here because other than my immediate family that had been there with me, my wife, and we had two kids by then that they hadn't been there since the year before. But nobody had ever seen it with me. I never had had anybody out there to walk anywhere. All these years, by the time this happened, I'd been out there for nine years off and on. I'd had my camp out there since 2000 actually. And I'd been living there at least half the time for nine years. I'd gotten to know that country so well. All the mountains. I'd walked some days 20, 25 miles over 5,000 foot mountains and everything, hunting sheep, hunting caribou, and just looking around, trapping sometimes. But always alone. Why was this life so appealing to you from such a young age? The fact that you're 13 years old, you make that walk all the way across Vermont. I mean, that's a long ass walk. I grew up in a small town right near the base of the highest mountain in Vermont, Mount Mansfield. Some of my earliest memories are looking at that mountain wanting to go up there. And I got to the top of the mountain by the time I was nine, but it took me nine years to get up there. Things take time. It's like I want- So this has always been something that you're drawn to for some reason. You're drawn to being in the wilderness. I'm drawn to a lot of things, but the wilderness is definitely one of them. When you get there, do you feel like everything's right? When you finally got to your place and you finally started, when you walked 60 miles out there and started living, did you finally feel like I'm in my spot? This is where I'm supposed to be? Oh yeah. Like you knew. I had literally been planning to do exactly that in the Brooks Range for seven years. Like that's what I was doing every day was preparing to do that. Wow. But what was it about it that was so compelling? Like why was that a thing that you were so drawn to? Because when I was living in the woods before that, when I was in the teepee in Vermont, every single day I'd wake up with a smile on my face. I'd just be excited what was going on. Get up, look out, see the fog coming up off the water on the lake. You know, oh wow, there's something over there. There's a loon, whatever it is. I was just excited about what was going on out there and I just felt really connected to it. And there are a lot of really positive aspects to being out in the woods. I mean, just the physical part, like I like to stay in shape, I like to be active and you can't help but be active out there. You can't help but stay in shape. I like the diet. I mean, once I started eating animals, I killed myself and food that I collected myself, you know, plant food too. It was, that was the best food I ever ate in my life. When I ate that first moose I killed, I mean, I never had anything better. That's a crazy way to live, man. It's interesting because most people would tell you, hey, you got to get a job. You got to be a normal person. You can't just go out there and live. Yeah, yeah. Well, and that's what I told them. I said, I'm going to make a career out of this. I didn't know exactly how it was going to play out, but I was always confident that it was a valuable thing to do and that it would not only benefit me, but in the long run that I would be able to share this with people and that it would pay off. And it did. It just took time.