Adventure Survival Epics

Barliona: a virtual world jam-packed with monsters, battles - and, predictably, players. Millions of them come to Barliona, looking forward to the things they can't get in real life: elves and magic, dragons and princesses, and unforgettable combat. The game has become so popular that players now choose to spend months online without returning home. In Barliona, anything goes: You can assault fellow players, level up, become a mythical hero, a wizard, or a legendary thief.

"Epic" is a mountaineering term that evokes a sense of treacherous disaster. The climb that went wrong: fighting blinding snowstorms and horrific avalanches; days spent tentbound running low on food, water, and oxygen; surviving broken bones and shattered spirits. This program offers a collection of the most memorable accounts of legend-making expeditions to the world's most famous peaks, often in the worst possible conditions.

Sir Edmund Hilary called it the greatest survival story of all time. In 1916, just months into Ernest Shackleton's third expedition to the South Pole, his ship, the Endurance, became trapped in pack ice and sank. Almost a century later, explorer and environmental scientist Tim Jarvis set out with a crew of five to replicate Shackleton's journey, using the same equipment, eating the same unpalatable food and facing the same hostile ocean conditions.

In 2036, a rapidly destabilizing climate culminated in a worldwide snowstorm that froze the entire planet. Billions are now dead due to starvation, disease, civil unrest, and the plummeting temperatures. What remains of humanity now live in small settlements or isolated makeshift villages, carving out miserable lives in this grim new reality.

Faced with an empty nest, stagnant jobs, and an economy in freefall, Kim Brown Seely and her husband decided to embark on a grand adventure. On an impulse, they purchased a sailboat, learned to sail, and set off toward untamed wilderness in search of the elusive blonde Kermode bear that only lives in a secluded forest in the Pacific Northwest.

By the 1930s, no one had yet crossed Antarctica, and its vast interior remained a mystery frozen in time. Hoping to write his name in the history books, wealthy American Lincoln Ellsworth announced he would fly across the unexplored continent, and to honor his hero, Wyatt Earp, he would carry his gun belt on the flight. The obstacles to Ellsworth’s ambition were numerous: He didn’t like the cold, he avoided physical work, and he couldn’t navigate. Consequently, he hired the experienced Australian explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins to organize the expedition on his behalf.

Since its inception, however, America’s public land system has been embroiled in controversy - caught in the push and pull between the desire to develop the valuable resources the land holds or conserve them. Alarmed by rising tensions over the use of these lands, hunter, angler, and outdoor enthusiast Mark Kenyon set out to explore the spaces involved in this heated debate, and learn firsthand how they came to be and what their future might hold.

All her life, Katherine Keith has hungered for remote, wild places that fill her soul with freedom and peace. Her travels take her across America, but it is in the vast and rugged landscape of Alaska that she finds her true home. Alaska is known as a place where people disappear - at least a couple thousand go missing each year. But the same vast and rugged landscape that contributed to so many people being lost is precisely what has gotten her found.

Wilderness survival? With nothing but a knife and hatchet? When you're alone, and the wilderness is Earth at the end of the ice age? Not all the dangers come from predatory animals.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in the High Sierras. But Smoke Jensen and his children, Louis and Denise, won't let a little snow stop them from heading to Reno for the holidays. There are two ways for them to get there: the long way, going around the Sierra Nevada Mountains, or the short way, going right through them. Smoke decides to take a gamble. They'll follow the trail that, decades earlier, brought the legendary Donner Party to a gruesome, tragic end....