In the summer of 1973 Dr. William Forgey began construction on a log cabin along the bank of the Little Beaver River in the subarctic of Northern Manitoba. Accessible only by bush plane, the location was 120 miles from the nearest town (Churchill, Manitoba aka The Polar Bear Capital of the World) and in some directions a thousand miles from the nearest human. Built just within the fringe of treeline where tundra and taiga meet, it is home to both polar and black bears, arctic and timber wolves, caribou and moose. It is a place where temperatures have a range of 140º on the thermometer - with 20 hrs of sunlight during the summer and 20 hrs of darkness in the winter. Until 1950 maps of the area were unmarked.

With no running water, no electricity and no contact with the outside world, the cabin was every bit as rustic as it was remote. To be dropped off was to be cut off. The fastest possible route to Churchill would be 5 days by canoe, weeks on snowshoe and impossible during freeze-up. The bugs, muskeg, cold, isolation and silence have a way of coaxing out ones true charact. The bugs and muskeg test your physical strength in the summer while the cold, isolation and silence test your mental strength in the winter.