There is so much to choose from on TV these days, some of the gems can be missed in the channel surfing. Although you can find a storyline in many unscripted TV shows, I haven’t seen one that’s as strong as the new APTN series, YUKON HARVEST. If you’re someone that enjoys the great outdoors that Canada has to offer, if you enjoy hunting or fishing, if you enjoy being moved by deep personal stories that resonate with most of us from people you wouldn’t expect… then Yukon Harvest is your show and can be found airing at 7 pm PT time on APTN every Saturday, but you should check your PVR Guide to ensure its at a different time because of a different province or different provider.
It’s co-produced and directed by Todd Forsbloom, Dan Minsky and Taylor Smith. The scenes are clear and threaded together much like a skilled artist connects colours and images in a painting together.
I spoke to both Todd Forsbloom and associate Producer/subject in the first two episodes, Dallas Harris. Todd lives in Duncan, BC and Dallas lives in Fort St. John, BC. Here’s how that amazing conversation went:
HNMAG “This is an amazing show and it’s very beautifully shot. The first two episodes told of a very personal story between Dallas and her late dad, then it also provided a window into Dallas and her widowed stepmom. Does the third episode continue with the story or is it a new story?”
TODD “It’s entirely different and will now shift gears to another family. On episode 13, we come back to Dallas and her stepmom and revisit the relationship from episode 2.”
HNMAG “How do you find your subjects for the series?
TODD “I’ve been lucky enough to have spent 8 years in the Yukon in a small town called Mayo, which is 4 hours from Whitehorse. You meet a lot of people over the years – I met Donny (Dallas’s dad) on a hunt in 2012. In the back of your mind, you’re thinking about how incredible some of these people are, and then… the light goes off and we talk. Other times, we’ll be out somewhere and stumble across someone that’s interesting and get talking to them, which leads to a fantastic story. It’s a bit of both searching them out and stumbling across them but there really wasn’t any shortage of stories we could have used. I believe we’ve only scratched the surface on this idea.”
HNMAG “I know this is a very personal story for you Dallas, thank you for sharing it. Was this footage from your dad a few years old?”
DALLAS “I believe it was in 2018.”
HNMAG “How is it that the footage of Don has surfaced, considering he passed in 2017?”
TODD “We had worked with Don Harris for years before shooting the series, so we had a lot of footage of him in the can. When I first met Donny, I wanted to make a show about First Nations People connecting and passing along tradition. We were going to build it around Donny because that’s what he believed and wanted. We had that footage of Donny from years past that I was able to magically fit in. With Yukon Harvest, we’re very happy that we have that footage of Donny because we were able to honour him in the show, even though he passed away before we got the green light.”
HNMAG “Now Dallas, when you were on that hunting trip and retracing your dad’s hunting steps, what did that feel like?”
DALLAS “I really can’t even explain it, it was a very personal experience. I had listened to my dad talking about this place for years and years and how he wanted to bring me there. He always wanted me and my stepmom to see it. The fact that we both went out there together and tried to reconcile old wounds – I’d do it over and over again in a heartbeat.”
HNMAG “Have you continued a good relationship with your stepmom?”
DALLAS “No, and it’s no fault of her own. I’ve been very busy trying to plan a wedding and have 2 kids. This Coronavirus has impacted my husband’s search for work and it’s been one big mess. I had a job but had to quite because of the stress, so I haven’t been working since June of last year.”
HNMAG “Todd, how did this idea of Yukon Harvest come together and get off the ground?”
TODD “I went on a hunting trip with my business partner Jim Shockey in 2012 and was filming him… and our hunting guide was Don Harris. It was one of those trips where you’re on horseback for 8 hrs a day and there’s a lot of time to talk and Donny… Well, there’s nobody else like him. He’s been in professional rodeo, he’s a musician and he’s preached the gospel across North America. His big passion was teaching young people to be hunting guides, to pack horses and he had a school that he was running. My business partner Jim Shockey and I wanted to film Donny as a core subject in a bigger story of people with experience, teaching people with no experience. We wanted to build the story around Donny because of who he was and how passionate he was about teaching. It’s how the idea came to be. We started working with Donny and got the green light from APTN. I was able to share the news with Donny and then he passed away a few months later. Although we had enough people to continue with the project… we weren’t sure if we wanted to. Thankfully, Dallas and Annette (stepmom) stepped forward to take the reins from Donny, which allowed us to share his story through them.”
HNMAG “As you retrace your dads hunting grounds, you actually found yourself shooting your first Cariboo. Have you continued to hunt?”
DALLAS “Yes, it was quite an experience, but no – I’ve been so caught up with personal stuff up here in Fort St. John that I haven’t had the time. My husband had gotten his hunting license and paperwork and really wants to go hunting. So we’d like to get the kids together and get out there. I much prefer the outdoors to being inside.”
HNMAG “What did that hunting trip mean to you?”
DALLAS “It did bring me a lot of closure and did a lot of good things for me. I struggle with a lot of things and I’ve lost every important person in my life that a person can lose… and my dad was the last one to go. Now my mom isn’t doing very well and I don’t know how much longer she will be with us. It was definitely a life changing experience and I can’t think of a better place to be, that makes me feel that close to my dad. I see him in my son, he’s the mirror image of my dad. I believe he could be the reincarnation.”
HNMAG “Now Todd, what size of a crew were you able to bring along on these hunting excursions?”
TODD “A pretty small one, for 2 reasons; one, because of the location you can’t have a big crew. In the case of Dallas and Annette, we had 2 talented camera operators – one being our director Dan Minsky and Taylor Smith, our DP. That’s as big as it had gotten because we didn’t want the cameras in everyone’s face with a big entourage of people. We wanted to leave a small footprint.”
HNMAG “The images are so clean. What types of cameras were used to capture the footage?”
TODD “We invested in a couple of Sony FS 7’s, which are industry standard. They’re not too big and relatively small so they’re easy to pack. You can get them into backpacks, you can go on Argos, you can go on hikes. If it were an 80 lb red dragon, it would really make it difficult to tell the story. The medium has to match where you are.”
HNMAG “I recall how difficult it looked for Dallas to climb the terrain and I had to wonder how difficult it would’ve been to capture the footage with bulky cameras.”
DALLAS “That was a struggle, I don’t lie about that. It was the hardest experience I’ve ever had and I’m a smoker to boot.”
HNMAG “What more did you learn about your dad on that trip?”
DALLAS “My dad was always a tough guy and I never got the chance to see my dad get emotional. Even though he’s gone, he still taught me how to… trigger my emotions, how to tap into them. I don’t know how to explain it, really… It was quite a journey. He left some big shoes to fill and those times that we did stuff together was when we connected the most. Out of his 2 daughters, I was the only one that followed in his footsteps and I’ll be passing it down to my kids now.”
HNMAG “Your dad must’ve had some incredible hunting stories. Did he have any bigfoot stories (laughing) ?”
DALLAS “Actually yes, this one time when they first started shooting for the series, my dad had gone up for spring bear time and had met up with a guide in McBride that had quite a bigfoot story. It was pretty funny.”
HNMAG “Do you still do some of the camera work too Todd?”
TODD “I used to and it’s something that I would do if it calls for it. I try to leave that for the younger guys and I’d rather help them on a higher level. I’m doing less and less of that and am in more of the director’s seat on this show. Everyone wears about 10 hats in here, so if you’re stuck at one job for too long, you never know what you might find yourself doing, but I don’t use the camera like I used to.”
HNMAG “Are you awaiting the tabulation of viewer numbers before you approach other networks for interest?”
TODD “We’ll see how it goes. I have full confidence that people will enjoy it. We’ll see where it goes from there to see if APTN wants to continue with it but I believe we’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do and what we’d love to do. We’ll see how the audience responds to it and go from there, as well as seeing how far around the world we can reach with it.”
HNMAG “Having been involved in the series, have you received any fan mail Dallas?”
DALLAS “It’s kind of funny, but yes. It’s not too much and my dad did this for a long time; it wasn’t about the fan mail for him either. The fact that so many are going to see this personal story means a lot. I never thought I’d be sharing that part of my life with anyone. I’m a very personal person and keep things locked up pretty good. It’s the first time I’ve done anything like that.”
HNMAG “Did you have any trepidation, being involved in this project?”
DALLAS “Oh yeah, when they asked me to do it, I said ‘No’. I told Dan that I wanted nothing to do with it. He said, “Are you sure?” I said “yep!”. A couple of days later I said ok, I’ll do it and I’m really glad that I did decide to go. Initially, there was a lot of resistance and I wasn’t sure if I got along with my stepmom. That’s stuff that I have to deal with myself though.”
HNMAG “Have you got enough footage to go for another season, Todd?”
TODD “No, we haven’t yet. We don’t want to put the cart before the horse, so we’re going to see how the first season goes. What we could do for the second season is to have a roster ready to go, there’s a lot of great stories out there. If it does get picked up for a second season, I don’t know what it would look like but I have full confidence that, in the assumption that APTN gets behind it, they will tell us to run with it and they won’t micromanage us. We’ll have to see what happens in the next few months, we should know something by then.”
HNMAG “How long does it take to put one episode together?”
TODD “It varies. I’m not there in Vancouver, I’m on Vancouver Island but it took a long time to get the show done in its entirety. It took 3 years from the point of approaching APTN to what we have now. That’s 13 episodes, so it takes a while and we learned a lot. If we get to do a second season, we’ve already laid down the roadwork, which would allow us to cut down on the production time.”
HNMAG “This show aired May 8th on APTN. Are there any other venues you’d like to mention?”
TODD “It also aired on LUMI in the US a couple days later. It’s APTN’s version of Netflix. It’s online and you can subscribe. They’re going to put it online a couple of days after it airs because not everyone has cable but everybody can have LUMI for 4.99/month. Each episode will come out 48 hours later on LUMI, which amounts to 1 per week. It will be available on there 24 hours a day and I believe that APTN will also start rerunning it at different time slots throughout the day eventually. Currently it’s airing every Saturday at 7 pm PT but people will need to check their PVR because it varies from province to province and the provider you have.”
Todd finished with the show’s true intention, which is, “to connect people once again with the land, especially young people given all the distractions of the cell phones, screens, games, they’re in front of the screen much more than I want them to be. I grew up hunting and fishing with my family and I’ve taken my boys but it’s hard to compete with what’s out there. We’re hoping that this show can help change the thinking of some young people. There’s a story coming up about a young 11 yr. old boy named Evan and he got his hunting license recently. My one son who’s 8 was watching me do the rough cut and he was mesmerized by him. When it was over, he asked me if he could get his hunting license and I said absolutely you can. He had it within 3 months and came with me on a hunting trip in November. That all happened within a span of seven months. It impacted/affected him and we’re hoping it will affect others that watch it too and change how they look at the land.”
Yukon Harvest is extremely good and you really need to tune in this Saturday. The storylines, the countryside, the rivers, lakes, trees and wildlife will keep you coming back and possibly inspire you to get out there, either for the first time or to re-engage again with the forest.
I was truly enjoying Yukon Harvest. Watched the first two and was looking forward to this Sunday’s and it wasn’t on. When will it be back?