Season 1

It's summer solstice in Siberia, a time of endless daylight and extraordinary festivals. Bruce Parry journeys to meet the Sakha horse people and a remote encampment of Eveny reindeer herders in the wild Verkhoyansk Mountains, where he finds out how they are embracing the challenges of a post-Soviet Arctic. For Bruce, it's also a journey of personal discovery as he goes in search of the ancient shamanic religion of these wild northern lands.

Bruce Parry journeys to the far north of Greenland, home to the last traditional Inuit hunters. Bruce experiences the realities of life - and death - on a seal hunt, and learns how climate change is threatening their ancient way of life. But while global warming is causing problems for the hunters, it is providing others with new opportunities. As the vast Greenland ice sheet melts, new mineral riches are being revealed. Bruce works with a mining team who are about to strike it big. Greenland is changing fast - but will there still be a place for hunters in the Arctic of the twenty-first Century?

Bruce travels to Alaska, America's last great wilderness, where modern-day pioneers are harvesting the vast natural wealth of the seas. Bruce learns the ropes onboard a salmon-fishing boat, and dives to the bottom of the Bering Sea to look for gold. In the far north Bruce witnesses the annual whale hunt of the Inupiak people whose ancient tradition is now at odds with the modern world and questions what is more important: the life of a whale or the death of a culture?

Bruce travels to the far north of Canada to live with the Caribou people and witness their annual spring hunt. The Gwitchin tribe has hunted migrating caribou in the Arctic wilderness for thousands of years, but this tradition is now under threat from oil exploration. Bruce then heads south to the tar sands of Alberta, home to the second largest oil reserves in the world, to discover how native people cope when the oil industry moves into their territory.

The final stage of Bruce Parry's six-month journey is through Arctic Europe. He travels to a remote Russian village, deep within the vast Boreal forest that stretches for thousands of miles across the top of the world. Life here has changed little for hundreds of years, and people still depend on the food they gather from the woods that surround them. Bruce then travels north into Norway, where he lives with the Saami, reindeer herders who use snow machines, boats and even helicopters to move their animals. Bruce's last stop is a remote scientific community in the Svalbard archipelago, where he learns about the fragility of Arctic ecosystem. As the long winter night draws in, Bruce is treated to an iconic Arctic spectacle as the aurora borealis light up the night sky.