What a place.
This is completely epic.
I'm in Alaska and I'm starting a huge journey,
the biggest I've ever done through the two continents
that, together, form more than a quarter
of Earth's land surface.
I am travelling the length of the Americas.
Starting at the top,
heading to the toe.
I'm beginning my Americas journey in this series
by travelling down through North and Central America.
It's a journey of 5,000 miles,
through some of the biggest landscapes on Earth.
It'll take me to places of myth and wonder...
It was like stumbling upon a secret kingdom.
THEY SPEAK SPANISH
..through regions torn apart by gangs and violence...
Gangs have lookouts everywhere.
MAN SPEAKS SPANISH
..and our changing climate.
The speed at which the flames can move is astonishing.
I'm travelling to some of the world's great cities.
Oh, this is completely breathtaking.
Then on into the beautiful and blighted tropics...
We're with armed conservationists.
..to the heart of the battle to save the planet.
GUNSHOT RINGS OUT
GUNSHOTS
Mind your head.
Very... Very good idea!
And it needs to be in a sleeping bag? Yeah.
You don't want any chunks of ice on the propellor.
Shall I unhook them? I mean... You can take the whole thing off.
That would help me greatly.
I was beginning my epic journey in the beautiful heart of Alaska.
OK. Thank you for that.
Wow!
There she is! Leighan Falley's an elite pilot
able to take me into a remote corner of America's largest state
with the help of a rather special old plane.
What's that noise inside?
That's the hair dryers, our hi tech of heating
the avionics in the airplane.
No, you haven't! Yeah. That's just perfectly normal, is it?
It's a tried and true method of heating the airplane.
It's a 1954 de Havilland, if you're wondering.
We are just about to cross the boundary into Denali National Park.
That is Mt Denali right ahead of us, I think.
It is, yeah. The tallest, most obvious one.
The biggest peak in the whole of North America?
Yes. 20,310 feet.
SIMON CHUCKLES
Isn't this amazing?
It's complete breathtaking.
A landscape like you see in few places on this planet.
It's definitely a world treasure.
Do you still feel that every time you fly?
Are you kidding me? Do you even have to ask that question?
LAUGHS: Yes!
SHE LAUGHS
Denali National Park is known as the roof of the continent.
It's six million acres of wilderness, largely without trails
let alone roads.
As well as the highest mountain,
it's home to wolves, moose, grizzly bears
and hundreds and hundreds of glaciers.
So we're over the glacier now? We are.
This is the vast Ruth Glacier.
The Ruth Glacier is about 35 miles long and about two miles wide.
I'm close to tears here.
This is... SHE CHUCKLES
..breathtakingly beautiful.
I started flying here 15 years ago
and I've seen a lot of change.
That glacier this is really taking a beating right now.
But it looks untouchable.
And things are changing.
For instance, we're coming up on a lake.
This lake did not exist about three years ago.
It's because the glacier's melted.
This is all water that has melted off the glacier?
Exactly, yeah.
These three big holes in the glacier in front of us
did not exist 15 years ago.
The glacier has peeled back, revealing all this bedrock below it.
My God! Three clear scars there, aren't they?
It's overwhelmingly beautiful but it's like looking at
an injured wild animal, really.
The north of our planet is heating almost twice as fast
as the rest of the world.
Temperatures at the North Pole have surged above freezing
in the dead of winter, stunning scientists.
Ice that's thousands of years old is dripping and pouring away.
Globally, glaciers have lost nine trillion tonnes of ice
in half a century.
I think of the United States as being a major cause
of climate change.
Here, I was starting to see it's also experiencing the consequences.
It feels like you're perhaps witnessing, more than most of us do,
a time of extraordinary change.
I can't believe that people don't see that things are warming up.
Every year I see recession.
And, to me, when people say that climate change isn't real,
I don't know what they can be thinking.
SHE RELAYS INSTRUCTIONS OVER RADIO
So we're, we're going to attempt something...
..pretty tricky.
We're going to try and land on the glacier here.
Seat belts on for landing.
More people have been to the International Space Station
than have licenses to land a plane on a glacier.
No more talking.
All right, here goes.
All right. Welcome!
Leighan, that was... that was extraordinary.
That was a very, very smooth landing.
Oh, my God!
Welcome to Alaska.
You're going to leave us here in the middle of bloody nowhere.
I love it. Thank you! You're welcome.
Thank you for leaving us in the middle of nowhere.
All right, good luck. We'll wave you off. OK.
Bye! Bye-bye, Leighan!
This is just astonishing.
It looks as though humans couldn't possibly affect it,
but...
HE SIGHS HEAVILY
..evidence is all around.
It's really frightening to hear a pilot who flies here all the time
but has only been doing it for less than a couple of decades
say, "I can see clearly the changes."
Somewhere up there...
..is somewhere to stay.
Bloody hope we're going the right way!
All right. Now, THAT is properly bonkers.
Hello.
I really, really hope you're expecting us.
I think I am. Are you Simon?
Yeah. Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you, too. Welcome!
If you're doing something a little bit bonkers and magnificent
like travelling the length of the Americas,
then Sheldon Chalet's
an appropriately epic place to overnight.
This must surely be one of the most remote lodges on this planet.
It is. We are the northernmost latitude
at this elevation of anywhere
you can stay on the planet, and you know those two things
together make us the best place to see the aurora, too.
WHISPERS: It's astonishing.
The light comes dancing across the sky.
It's like we're up in the heavens.
It's completely magical.
Oh!
Bloody hell!
So, look at this.
In the 1950s,
the glacier here came up almost to the level
of the small mountain hut just over there.
And now it has shrunk and melted away
so the glacier is now,
what, 300 maybe, feet lower?
It's an astonishing change.
That is millions of tonnes of water that has melted away.
It is an indicator of profound environmental change.
Bodes badly for the rest of us.
The whole planet.
The journey ahead of me down through the Americas
felt huge and daunting.
If all goes to plan, over the next two years
I'll spend six months on the road.
Like so many of us, I'll often be relying on vehicles
and fossil fuels,
especially here in Alaska
still known as America's Last Frontier.
We've just seen a sign that says "pipeline viewpoint".
Think we better take a look.
So, this is the Alaska Pipeline.
This is taking millions of barrels of oil from oil fields
off the northern coast of Alaska, across Alaska to...
Well, there's a helpful map here.
So, from Prudhoe Bay...
..Northern Alaska, all the way down
to a, well, the Valdez Marine Terminal, where it doesn't freeze,
so the oil can be shipped out of here to the rest
of the United States and around the world.
For more than 40 years, a veritable sea of oil has been flushed down
this 800-mile pipeline,
fuelling America and the world.
"Please don't climb on the pipeline!"
There wass huge controversy, of course,
when this pipeline was built
because it was being pushed through pristine wilderness...
..and it's pumping out dirty oil.
And now there are plans to drill for more.
Hello, Miles. Hi.
Permission to come aboard. Sure! Thank you.
My travels were taking me to the frozen and isolated
north coast of Alaska...
..and to one of the largest areas of wilderness
in the whole of the United States.
I'm now flying over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,
known as ANWR.
ANWR is the size of Scotland.
No roads lead into the refuge.
It's a critical habitat for an abundance of wildlife,
including polar bears.
Conservationists want to protect it and many other Americans
just love the idea of keeping it as a wilderness, with its promise
and lure of adventure - a reminder perhaps of the frontier spirit
of their ancestors.
But ANWR's at the centre of a battle.
I headed inside the Arctic Circle.
The US Government is talking about opening a portion
of this for oil and gas development.
Many activists regard the refuge as an environmentally sacred site.
If this holiest of holies is open for development,
so the argument goes,
then no protected site anywhere is safe.
Supporters claim drilling could create tens of thousands
of jobs and generate billions of dollars in government revenue.
Estimates suggest there could be ten billion barrels of oil
in the refuge but nobody knows for sure.
The small coastal town of Kaktovik is the only settlement within ANWR.
One of the most remote communities on the continent,
Kaktovik is home to the indigenous Inupiat people.
I was met by community leader Matthew Rexford.
Matthew, thank you so much for taking us on a tour.
Oh, yes. How many people live here?
Approximately 300.
You can see a lot of these dogs.
They alert the community when there's bears around.
The dogs help to keep polar bears out of the community. Mm-hm.
Oh, my goodness!
What is that ahead of us?
There's a lot of flat, open ground out there.
Yeah, that's the Arctic Ocean.
That is the sea? Yes.
For sustenance, we are allowed
a quota of three whales annually.
So... Three whales per year?
Three bowhead whales a year, and that can sustain
the entire community for the whole year.
Look, an Arctic fox.
HE GASPS
There's an Arctic fox!
So, Thursday night is bingo night in Kaktovik...
..and we're just on our way to play bingo. Mm-hm.
O-75.
G-48.
You need to cover all four corners of one of your blocks
and have a block of nine.
B-15.
G-15. G-15.
G-15... B-15.
B-15? Yes. Thank you. That's extremely helpful.
I-19.
Gosh! I'm getting behind already.
Yeah. I-16.
You missed it.
She's doing three at once!
Marie? Can you give a bit of advice?
Keep up with the caller.
That is the advice.
N-37. Is he speeding up?
Bingo! Bingo.
So, you don't have a bar or a pub here, do you? Oh, no.
This is a dry community, no alcohol?
Yes. Alcohol is prohibited.
Without a bar to coalesce around, this community centre
then becomes absolutely vital.
Oh, yes. And each community, rural community on the North Slope
does have a community centre. So, yeah.
Very similar.
And as a result, bingo is big. Yes.
Many indigenous communities in Alaska have had a turbulent,
often difficult time in recent decades.
Some have banned alcohol after long periods
when it was abused and misused.
Keeping out alcohol is one way the Kaktovik community has tried
to turn things around.
They've also taken advantage of revenue from the existing
Arctic oil industry.
For years, there's been drilling just along the coast at Prudhoe Bay.
All the infrastructure has come
from taxation of oil development
in Prudhoe Bay.
Gravel roads, modern houses,
power generation,
water and sewer treatment
which was built around the year 2000.
So, prior to that we didn't have any running water services
for the whole community. No flush toilets at all.
So, water had to be hauled into each house,
into a tank for each home.
Did you do a bit of that when you were a kid? Oh, yes.
I grew up with that.
And where are we going now?
Now we're going to the new community ice cellar.
Oh, my goodness me!
What we're seeing here is the cavern which is dug down
and it goes down 18 to 20 feet into the permafrost.
So it's a huge, not just walk-in but climb-in freezer...
Yes. ..to store whale meat...
Yes. ..from the three whales that you're allowed
to catch per year, is that right? Yes.
We built this with assistance and funding from the ExxonMobil
because they provided funding to our community foundation
and we identified this as a priority to the community.
So this community cellar was funded by the oil industry?
Yes.
Right.
Most families here used to have their own ice cellars
in the permanently frozen ground under their homes.
But almost all have now melted because of the warming climate
in the Arctic.
The new freezer's become a lifeline for the community
with the added irony that it was provided by an oil industry giant.
Many Kaktovik residents now support opening ANWR,
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for drilling.
The refuge is 19 million acres
and if it's going to be 2,000 acres
for any development that would occur,
we see that that can work and can coexist with the wildlife.
Oil generates the funding to grow our communities.
Prior to development of Prudhoe Bay...
..the life expectancy of the Inupiat people were ten years shorter
than it is today.
Really? Yes.
That's...
That's pretty frightening. Mm-hm.
I feel torn.
My instinct is definitely...
..wild areas should be left wild.
But I start to see that your community needs development.
It's such a complicated...
..situation, isn't it?
We're just here trying to survive and...
..we have a lot of bad experiences with folks coming in and telling us
what we can and can't do.
Yet the plans to drill in the Arctic Refuge could have consequences
well beyond this community.
Evidence of the climate emergency we're all facing
had been all around me on my journey.
A powerful argument, surely,
for leaving the oil in the ground.
The weather's not looking great up there.
They're trying to find a way through the mountain pass
in a helicopter.
Researchers still depend on fossil fuels to monitor the remote areas
of North America.
Campaigners argue opening the Arctic Refuge for oil drilling
could send shock waves through a delicate ecosystem.
Wolves!
Well, if the wolves are here, the caribou are here.
At the centre of the ecosystem is the caribou, or reindeer.
Yes, look! Just below.
Many of them depend on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
as a critical part of their habitat.
Oh, it's wonderful to see them.
We flew across the starkly beautiful far north of the Americas.
Below, an enormous 200,000-strong herd of caribou
were undertaking the longest land migration on the planet.
They cover a distance of 3,000 miles,
cutting across a huge swathe of Canada and Alaska
to get to the Arctic Refuge
where they give birth each year right in the land
designated for oil drilling.
They migrate such an astonishing distance.
Look at them!
They withstand temperatures
of as low as minus 60 degrees.
The caribou is a completely incredible creature.
And up here, it's not just the wolves who depend
on the caribou to survive.
Ah! Careful, crazy dog.
DOG BARKS
Brennan, I think that dog really likes you.
150 miles south from Kaktovik,
at the southern edge of the wildlife refuge
is Arctic Village.
So we're just coming into Arctic Village school.
It's a remote community. This is where we're going to be staying.
A primary school isn't where I'd usually bed down,
but at least I had time for geography revision.
We're right up here in Alaska.
Look at it...
Ah, this looks completely mad, this journey,
when I look at it like this.
Am I really going to make it?
Arctic Village is a home to the Gwich'in people -
another of Alaska's ancient indigenous groups.
They live off the caribou,
and many here fear the drilling in the Arctic Refuge will disturb
the herd and threaten their way of life.
So we're heading out with a group of hunters from the village.
They're going out to hunt caribou.
Charlie. Good morning. Good morning.
Thank you very much for taking us with you.
You know, you get a chance to see what we do to put meat on our table.
Over the years, things have changed -
the internet, stuff like that -
but one part of life that's never changed for us here
is the way we live off the land.
That's never changed.
All right. Yeah.
So, where are we heading to, Charlie?
The mountain over there?
OK, wow.
No? Yeah.
Well, you're looking good for it.
That's a wolf track.
So you're saying a wolf has just come through here?
Yeah. When the caribou show up, they're everywhere.
So there are caribou nearby?
Yep, they're around.
You can see their tracks. Caribou tracks just going across
down here, in fact. Mm-hm. We're close.
We're very close.
They're just ahead. Yeah.
Are you going to go on foot?
No, no, no.
We go on the other side over there.
GUNSHOT RINGS OUT
Gah! Yo.
SHOTS CONTINUE TO RING OUT
It's a hell of a thing to see.
What's the plan now, Charlie?
We're going to skin 'em, gut 'em, cut 'em up.
How old do you think you were
when you butchered your first caribou?
About eight years old.
That's how I was raised.
This is how we live.
This is how we live. Yeah.
And do you worry about the future for the caribou?
You know, if they opened up ANWR to drilling up there
and it turned out where they...they have their young,
I know they're going to go somewhere else.
They're sensitive.
They don't want that sound
when they're giving birth to their young.
And what would that mean for you and the community?
We won't see them no more.
Who knows?
There are experts who say oil drilling in ANWR
won't harm the herd.
But the Gwich'in aren't alone in fearing the future.
There are scientists who say drilling
could have profound effects on the caribou.
Could you survive without them?
It's virtually impossible right now, living in Arctic Village.
You've got to eat.
No matter what, you got to eat.
So this is what we eat. Yeah.
It's tough to see.
They're majestic creatures
and their lives ended pretty quickly.
But this is...this is life up here in the Arctic.
Hunting makes living out here viable.
It's time for me to leave Alaska
and head on east to Canada.
I headed to the Yukon,
a vast Canadian province
twice the size of the UK but with a population of just 35,000.
That's less than Merthyr Tydfil!
First stop - Dawson City.
A remote frontier town that was
at the heart of the 19th century Klondike gold rush.
Now it's become something of a draw for Canadians quitting the rat race
and choosing a more off-grid way of life.
What is it to be Canadian?
I think of Canadians as being outdoorsy types,
very environmentally friendly and politically correct
and generally very nice.
Bill?
Bill Donaldson lives just across the river from Dawson...
Bill? Yes. Good to meet you.
..in a cave, which might just be why he's known
as Caveman Bill.
So you've put a building on the front of the cave? Yeah.
Cos it does get very cold.
It does get a little bit chilly.
And the coldest I've seen it is around 56 below Celsius.
Yeah. I mean you're heading towards Antarctic temperatures there.
Oh, yeah. There has been instances of people leaving parties in town
a little bit drunk... And not making it home.
..and not making it home, yeah. My goodness.
You've got sandals on.
Well, yeah. It's only 14, 15 below right now, which is pretty warm
for Dawson standard.
Bill's life as a troglodyte started 20 years ago
when he swapped daily grind in the city of Vancouver
for the hippier lifestyle of Dawson.
Tell us about this place.
The cave was dug, I believe, by a guy who came here in 1902
looking for gold, and the only gold they found is right up here. Yeah.
Unfortunately, that gold is of the fool's variety.
Fool's gold. Fool's gold.
Have you ever been tempted to chip away?
I'm not...
..really...
..money oriented.
You know, as humans, we always
have our schedules and calendars,
and everything fits into these artificial conceptual constructs.
Well, the environment here says, "To hell with your construct.
"The river is going to break and the river is going to freeze
"when it damn well feels like it."
It's not going to do it on a schedule, and I really like that.
That's what you're here fighting against.
It's conventionality,
and the hamster wheel of life, really. Yeah. Yeah.
So, over here... Yeah.
..we've got some of the projects I've been working on this winter.
Oh, Bill. This is a beehive here.
Yeah. And you've made these over here as well?
Look at the work! The stuff I make,
you know, it's kind of a repudiation of that view of life
where you just buy an entire set of furniture
and then five years later it's all fallen apart.
Bill, you've been described as the ultimate Canadian man.
BILL LAUGHS
I remember that article, it's kind of funny.
It is a good bragging point!
All right, this way.
Head across the river.
So, we're walking on the mighty Yukon River now. Yeah.
Is there never just one little bit that's melted through?
Um, well, there are spots.
The river has killed a fair number of people.
I know at least five or six people personally that have...
..disappeared into the river.
I'm glad you told us that after we crossed it.
Life in Dawson was starting to sound a trifle risky
but at least they have a few good bars.
Hello. Bill said I had to come and have a Sourtoe Cocktail.
Oh, yeah. There's the toe right there!
No! That is a sour toe.
There's the toenail. No!
SIMON EXCLAIMS IN DISGUST
This is a real human toe?!
Real human toe, yeah. Where has this come from?
A foot. Yeah.
THEY LAUGH
So somebody has donated their toe and you sick puppies here
have decided to turn this into the world's weirdest cocktail.
God, you've got to be a different
sort of type of person up here, haven't you?
You're all completely psycho.
THEY LAUGH
How did I get into a situation like this?
How do we get OUT of a situation like this?!
Only one way - bottoms up.
Bottoms up.
Don't open your mouth too wide. Don't open too wide. OK. OK.
Oh, yeah!
HE GROANS Definite lip contact.
Well done, Simon.
Now one more for good luck.
I can't believe I let you do that. Why did I let you do that?
Well done. Took it like a champ. Congratulations.
Canada is the second biggest country in the world...
..home to a quarter of the Earth's wetlands,
thousands of rivers,
more than two million lakes.
Much of it is unpopulated and untouched.
This is the boreal forest.
Canada's boreal forest is enormous.
Hundreds of millions of acres inside.
The boreal forest, or taiga,
stretches around the north of the globe,
through Russia, northern Europe as well as North America.
It's a crucial regulator of the world's climate
and a vast store of carbon.
Look at this! Looks like something's on fire.
Canada has this reputation for being clean, green
and very, very nice.
Canada also has a very dirty little secret.
Not so little, actually.
This is the Alberta oil sands complex.
A large area of the boreal forest is being cleared to allow excavators
to get at the world's third biggest oil deposits.
My God.
It's a vast mining area,
hundreds of square miles in size.
Let's have a look.
Bloody hell!
Look at that.
All of this...
..is to claw and mine out from the ground, a bitumen tar
that can be turned into oil
and then can be turned into petrol and fuel.
Separating the oil from the sandy ground requires huge amounts
of energy and water.
The result is enormous carbon emissions
and huge lakes of toxic sludge known as tailings ponds.
Some activists have levelled a horrific charge
against the project.
The tar sands or oil sands area is said to be
the largest and most destructive industrial project in human history.
The Canadian parliament has declared a national climate emergency.
Then the very next day, the government approved a new pipeline
for Alberta's dirty oil,
allowing production here to nearly triple.
It's claimed the revenue will power Canada's transition to clean energy.
A tricky compromise or outright hypocrisy?
Quite a few expensive places here.
So this is Fort McMurray.
A lot of money has been made here in recent years, recent decades.
Fortunes have been made.
The State of Alberta's oil is a cash cow for Canada.
In the next decade it's been estimated it could contribute
an eye-watering trillion pounds to the Canadian economy.
Peter? Simon. How are you?
Peter Fortner is a social activist worried about the oil sands
especially the industry's toxic waste.
I think the environmental impacts from the oil sands are staggering
whether it's the liability from the tailings ponds
that are sitting there and are a giant science experiment,
to the social impact.
What do you mean by a giant science experiment?
There's these huge settling ponds where they're hoping
that the by-product settles out,
and some people think it'll be, you know, 20, 30 years,
other people estimate it'll be 300 years and nobody's quite clear
on what toxic legacy my children and my grandchildren
might someday have to deal with.
You've described the province of Alberta as a petro-state.
Yeah. Alberta has grown dependent on its revenue that it derives
from...from the oil sands.
And as a result, decisions get made based on that and there becomes
an increasing dependence on it.
Of course, companies would say, I'm sure, that the benefits include
employment for lots of Canadians, lots of taxes being paid.
I would argue not enough of those benefits are coming back
to those communities.
Thousands of Canadians have found employment here.
Some of Alberta's indigenous groups
have done well out of the oil industry,
including through land compensation schemes.
But Peter believes some communities have been left out or left behind.
So we're just coming into the little community of Conklin.
It's primarily indigenous Metis community.
Some of the houses I can see have got trailers
or RVs, I think you call them in North America, wouldn't you?
Those units are more often than not used to live in year round.
Because of all the industrial development in or around Conklin,
local people can't afford to buy land.
So as a result, more and more people have to build temporary structures
and that's how people live.
Some people in the village are living in freezing flimsy homes
lacking water, electricity even heating.
Hello. Hi. Grace?
Peter took me to meet 55-year-old grandmother Grace Richards.
Come on in. Thank you very much indeed.
Shall we take our boots off? No. No.
This is my home. This is a trailer.
It was a camper trailer. Right.
The home belongs to me but the property I'm sitting on is not mine.
This is the bathroom area.
If you'd like to come and check out the bathroom.
This is what I use.
I don't have running water,
so this is what I use.
I wash here.
As you can see, I put some insulation
on the inside of my camper as well
just to help with the...
..with the cold, keeping the cold out.
The curtains, I will close this to make sure that there's...
..less cold coming in.
And I sleep on the couch.
This is what I use for heat.
That's it? Yep. In a part of the world
where it can get to, how cold?
This winter, it's got down to minus 40, I believe,
minus 48 with the wind-chill.
Grace, this is a... this is a tricky situation to see.
How long have you been in here?
I've been living in this now for five years.
You've been here five years? Yes. Goodness.
Yeah.
What work did you do?
I was a heavy equipment operator but unfortunately right now
there is not as much work here any more.
They're not forced to hire people from the community.
It's quite shocking for me to hear all this.
Out of the 300 people roughly in the community,
we found there's at least 92
that are living in substandard housing.
A third of the people in this community are living
in substandard accommodation?
And that's putting it mildly.
Something's wrong, something's wrong with the system.
We're surrounded by billions of dollars of industry
using money that comes from this region.
That money isn't coming to Conklin.
You know, that's not right. That's not my Canada.
That's not a community, that's not a country that I want to live in.
Flipping heck. Grace, you're a sturdy one to be putting up
with this, you really are. I try.
And some days I feel like throwing in the towel but something just
keeps...keeps getting me to keep... keep pushing and keep pushing.
You know? Give us a bit of a hug, can you?
Oh, jeez. Yes.
Oh, so nice to have you here.
Good luck, Grace. Yes. Thank you very much.
I left the indigenous community in Conklin.
Nationally and for many decades
Canada's treatment of its indigenous people has often been shameful.
There's been a catalogue of scandals, racism, poverty.
Hundreds of thousands of indigenous children removed from their families
and placed into abusive residential schools.
Still today, indigenous Canadians are some of the poorest
people in society.
Women in particular are often the most vulnerable.
In recent years, hundreds and hundreds of women in Canada,
mainly indigenous women, have gone missing and are presumed
to have been murdered.
It's a shocking tragedy but it's also a scandal
because for a long time many feel the authorities didn't take
the situation seriously.
We're on our way now to a community to meet the family
of a lady who is missing.
In the province of Alberta alone
dozens of women have simply vanished.
Betty Ann Deltess was one of the most recent.
She went missing just under a year ago.
Her 19-year-old son, Ian, bravely agreed to meet me.
Do you know where she was last seen last seen? Last seen, for me,
would be right here, at the end of the road.
Just randomly disappeared.
Just...random.
Knowing my mother, she wouldn't have left us like this.
She wouldn't have not contacted us
to let us know she's OK.
What did the police say?
I wouldn't even know.
They haven't talked to me personally about it.
Are you saying the police haven't come to talk to you?
No. And it's on my mind daily.
I never forget about my mom.
Can you tell us a bit about her?
My mother's a good woman.
My mother's a good woman...
She's a hard worker. I don't know.
Just...
She's a nice woman. I don't know.
Estimates vary wildly
of the number of indigenous women and girls in Canada
who've gone missing.
Some suggest the figure since the 1970s is as high as 4,000.
An official inquiry has described what's happening to Canada's
indigenous peoples as a genocide.
I hadn't realised, until my mother's disappearance, that women
and children all over the place are going missing daily.
Doesn't seem like much people know why or what for.
People's communities should pay attention to this kind of thing.
I can't get over this fact
that the police haven't talked to you.
No. Sorry, I'm getting really shaky.
Emotion or cold?
No.
Yeah. No, emotionally, when I speak about it...
I don't really speak about it
so my body's kind of like stopping me. Shall we take you home?
Er, yeah.
Come on.
All right. All right. It's OK.
I think you're stronger than you think you are.
I really do.
But you don't have to be.
You've been through hell.
You're still going through hell. Yeah. OK?
Hey. Appreciate it.
Very moving and upsetting, as well, to hear.
I think what's particularly shocking is that although there's been
a government inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women,
still, today, there is no real way of telling
how many indigenous women and girls are going missing every year.
I headed on towards the last stop on this leg of my journey.
We're in British Columbia,
flying towards the Pacific Ocean.
What a journey this is.
I was on my way to the largest city on Canada's Pacific Coast.
Vancouver.
Look at that! Can you see the city down there?
The backdrop for Vancouver,
I think, is what instantly makes it very, very special.
I've never seen a landscape quite like this
so close to a major city.
It's...
It's astonishing.
This is completely breathtaking.
We're coming in to land in a sea plane.
Welcome to Vancouver.
Thank you. That was fantastic.
Thank you very much, indeed.
Vancouver regularly tops lists
of the best cities to live in in the world.
Wealthy, cosmopolitan and with water, mountains
and trendiness at every turn.
But not for everyone.
And not so much in Downtown Eastside,
described as the roughest neighbourhood in Canada.
It's not where the tourists go.
But I wasn't here on a holiday.
So we're just a short distance from the fancy shops
and the skyscrapers, but we're coming into an area called
Downtown Eastside, which is known as an area with a huge amount
of social problems and issues with drug abuse and crime.
Hey, what's up girl?
I met up with Trey Helton - a community activist who used
to be an addict himself.
How long were you out here?
I was homeless on this sidewalk here, here, here,
for three and a half years.
And now you're clean?
Yeah. How many years?
Three years, one month and 20 days.
But who's counting, right?
What's going on over here?
So this is your typical, er, morning.
Around 9 in the morning, the police and the city workers
show up and, er... Hey, guys, what's up? Morning.
And they're shovelling up everyone's stuff and putting it in the dump.
And, er, taking all their worldly possessions and throwing it out.
SIRENS BLARE
This is not what I imagined Vancouver to be.
Constant sirens.
Very rarely seen anywhere like this.
Ooh, ooh.
How normal is this?
It's every morning and all day long.
Every morning and all day long. Yeah.
A housing crisis,
historically low funding for mental health projects in Canada,
and a huge, continent-wide problem with addiction
are driving homelessness in Vancouver.
I was stunned to see this in wealthy, healthy, green Canada.
There's needles all along the street here. Yeah, yeah.
Open. Yeah.
Vancouver is facing an unprecedented drugs epidemic
driven largely by an opioid painkiller called fentanyl.
It's a synthetic form of heroin,
but up to 50 times stronger.
Bloody hell.
Oh. Some hardcore using going on here.
Hey guys, we got a camera crew with me.
Just want to give you a heads-up.
I got a camera crew with me.
It's going to be filming the wall here, all right?
If you don't want to be on camera, I'm just warning you right now.
Point down, point down. All right.
So I want to show you the memorial to all the people that we've lost
in the fentanyl crisis.
My God, there's a lot of names on this memorial.
It's kind of cut a swathe through the community, hasn't it?
Yeah.
This is a massacre.
Fentanyl-related fatalities have pushed the annual death toll
from drug overdoses, just in British Columbia,
to more than 1,500.
It's a crisis that's affecting the whole of North America.
In the USA, the annual death toll from drug overdoses
is now much higher than that for car accident deaths,
or even gun deaths.
It's a health emergency, but it's sometimes been left
to volunteers to fight the fire.
Where are we going now? We're going to Ops.
What is Ops? Overdose Prevention Society.
It's a peer-run safe injection site.
Morning. What's up, Robbie? Good to see you, bro.
Trey now works in one of Vancouver's pioneering safe injection sites.
This one was set up by Sarah Blyth after she kept seeing so many people
overdosing in this community.
So we have an injection site in here.
They're injecting drugs and, if there's an overdose,
we can deal with it immediately.
We have people on site monitoring people, making sure
that if they are having any signs of overdose that they get oxygen.
If it gets any worse, then we can give them the naloxone.
What does naloxone do? This is a life-saver.
You get this... If someone's having an overdose, you get
this in. It blocks the fentanyl,
and for half-an-hour to two hours...
So just that can save a life? Yeah.
How many lives have you saved?
Over 1,000 lives here.
You've...you've saved 1,000 lives here?
Yeah, we've saved... Yeah, we've saved a lot of lives here.
You know, I'm supposed to look for the other side,
the other point of view in so many situations like this and give some
sense of balance to a situation, but I really struggle here.
I mean, you're doing something that some people see as controversial,
but, basically, you're in the middle of a wildfire
and you had access to water. Yeah.
I'm not going to watch someone die in front of me.
Places like this need to be here,
so that we can help people get into housing.
We're the first part of recovery.
You can't do any kind of rehab to a dead person.
OK, er...
Should we stay over this side rather than...? Yeah.
Are you OK?
Just give him some oxygen.
Yeah, he's OK.
I think it's really easy to imagine, or believe,
that people on the other side of the divide there are...
Fine, it's fine.
..are the other, that you could never be on the other side
of that red screen, but...
..it's not that hard to take the wrong turn in life.
And it's not that hard to end up there,
quite frankly. And...
..personally, I feel like it wouldn't have been
impossible, personally, for me to have been there.
So this is Trey's mug shots from the beginning of
a spiral down - is that fair to say? 19 onward.
I mean, you can see your face bears the pockmarks and the scars.
Don't do drugs.
I'm just so grateful that I was kept alive long enough to change, right?
So, there's hope.
It's emotional hearing that from you. Oh, mate!
Well done.
Thanks, Simon.
Well done. Thanks, man.
Cities across North America
are struggling to cope with this opioid crisis.
When poisoned drugs are on the streets, keeping people alive
has to be the first priority.
The work being done in Vancouver by Trey, Sarah and others
to save and then turn around lives was humbling and inspiring.
As Trey said, there is hope.
I'm nearly at the end of this first leg of my journey.
We're heading south towards the United States.
Should just be up ahead.
It's just here!
The border's just here.
That's astonishing.
This ditch must, basically, be the border
between the United States and Canada.
And it was devised as the friendliest border in the world.
Or so we're told.
It's the police keeping an eye.
How are you doing? Good, how are you?
Are we still in Canada here. You're still in Canada, my friend.
If we cross the ditch? You'll get in trouble.
I wouldn't do that. With you or with them? With them.
OK. In all seriousness, the camera's right there
and US Border Patrol will attend.
We won't go further than this. Promise. OK. Take care, my friend.
Thank you very much, indeed.
Hello. Hello.
You're in the United States? I am.
You can't come across here?
No. No, I'm not allowed to.
Where do you get to mow your grass to?
Have you ever accidentally mowed a bit of Canada?
Well, I'll come down there with the weed eater.
I'll call the Border Patrol first and tell them I'm coming down.
You have to tell Border Patrol when you're going to cut the grass?
Well, down there. I'm going to go and go through the legal border,
I think! I think that'd be a good idea. I think you're right.
Cheers! You're welcome. Good luck, guys.
I think this is the perfect place, actually,
to end this first leg of my journey
down through the Americas.
Next time, in Montana,
I find an extraordinary project
to re-wild a vast area of the prairie.
There's a golden eagle.
A golden eagle!