Alaskan Bush People

You know, brown luck is more of a curse than anything.

It's just irony and tragedy.

On the season finale of "alaskan bush people"...

They said that it's gotten worse.

There's no telling what this fire's gonna do right now.

The browns face.

The worst catastrophe of their lives.

We don't know what structures have been burned.

Or what's still standing.

Follow them. Go, go, go, go, go.

Everybody into the trailer. Come on, guys.

Come on, get over. Go, go, go.

But the wolf pack is no stranger to tragedy.

Coast guard, I am going down.

I'm going down.

We've lost everything.

Everything that my family and I have gone through in my life,

It's just made my family stronger.

We've always stuck together no matter what.

But now, with a 10,000-acre wildfire.

Engulfing the mountain...

We're gonna try and save the animals that we can,

'cause we have a window.

Could the dream be lost forever?

Babies!

Captions paid for by discovery communications.

- We don't have time for this. - We need to go.

Tell me everybody's coming.

The suburban wouldn't move.

And it's broken, and so I didn't know what to do.

And I got the stuff that I've had since I was a toddler,

And I couldn't grab anything else.

You need to get your cat.

This is the scariest thing that I've ever had to do.

It's okay.

That smoke barreling from a portion of our mountain.

We have too many animals up there,

The whole family's up there.

We got barns and chicken coops.

And everything we've been working towards and building.

Is really in jeopardy right now.

We have our entire lives up there.

Everybody is safe. The animals are loose.

Everybody made it.

And in the end, I mean, that's the most important thing.

I am worried that this could be.

The biggest loss that we've ever faced.

I'm hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.

Because I know that, no matter what happens,

God will be behind me.

I trust god's plan, even as horrible as this all is.

Everyone got down right.

I've always tried to be positive, you know,

And be the one that's like,

"no, it's not as bad as it seems."

But watching the mountain actually burning,

I don't know that there's gonna be much to go back to.

It's like, we've had boats sink,

Houses burn.

Now the mountain's on fire.

We've had loss before.

You know, we've lost our homes many times.

It doesn't get easy.

But I feel like this is one of the worst ones we've had,

To be honest.

For the brown family,

Their fight for a life of freedom.

Has always been a struggle.

As they battle through one adversity to the next.

I'm pushing a button, and nothing's happening.

Well, "brown luck" is a term coined for.

Things just always seeming to go wrong.

The browns, you can pretty much set your clock to it.

- There's a fire. - There's a fire?

Whenever something good is happening,

Brown luck will strike in...

Time to kite!

Completely shift to just something terrible.

They're frozen? Yep.

I admit, sometimes it feels like.

We have harder times than other people living in the bush,

'cause we're like, "wait. A tree didn't fall.

On your place?"

Don't stop.

And it showed us that there isn't really adversities...

Yeah!

- Totally awesome. - Yeah.

I definitely feel like the wolf pack has been forged.

In the fires of adversity.

We always persevere.

You know, we always make it through the other side,

Usually better than we started.

From father billy's early days,

Marred by the tragic loss of his family,

The search for a permanent home has always been an elusive goal.

- Your mom. - I'll be darned.

And another great picture of your dad.

My sister.

That's the memorial service for your mom and dad and kathy.

I've got that picture in my head,

But I've never seen it as a picture.

I lost my family when I was 16.

They died in a plane crash, my mom, dad, and sister.

Basically, I went to bed one night.

A well-kept, little, spoiled kid,

And I woke up the next day in the road.

Lost everything, basically.

In overcoming something like that,

It prepared for one thing...

Don't ever plan on tomorrow,

'cause you don't have tomorrow, folks.

But the last memory I have of my parents...

They put on a dean martin.

And were slow dancing in front of the fireplace.

You know how some great memories.

Become the most awful things you can think about?

- Yeah. - It's one of those.

The realities and the harshness of life.

That aren't really the bad things of life,

They're just the way life is, and you have to face them.

Are we there yet?

- We're almost there. - Yay!

Really? We really are.

You're not toying with us, right?

I mean, we actually are?

After a fire burns down their cabin in 2012,

The family is determined to rebuild a new home in chitina,

One of the most remote parts of alaska.

Well, just like normal,

We're on our way to, like, this great place.

You know, a new start for the browns.

Everything was going fine.

We were cruising along pretty good there.

And then, wouldn't you know it, all of a sudden, the tire pops.

What was that? What was that?

What's going on, bear?

You know, you could look at brown luck.

As a positive thing,

Because if you look at.

The things that have happened throughout our life.

And the fact that we're all still alive,

That's pretty good luck, in my opinion.

After several weeks in the copper river valley,

It becomes clear the area is not for outsiders,

And the browns are run off their land.

We had just gotten the frame of the house up,

So we were getting ready to just make it comfy.

And settle in for a long, hard winter.

Keep it down.

- They're shooting at us. - Yeah, fall back.

Get back to the cabin.

There were some people that weren't happy we were there.

We'd ended up rubbing some people the wrong way.

When people started shooting at us,

It was like, "okay, guys, time to go."

I was overcome with sadness at first,

Like, "aw, bummer. We just got here and now we have to go."

But to be honest, the joy of the adventure.

And the excitement of going somewhere new overwhelms me.

So I was almost more excited than I was unexcited.

The browns decide to return to their roots.

As a fishing family,

Staking their entire future on the opal,

An acquired fishing vessel.

I need a few minutes to get everything up and going.

I don't have pressure yet.

We were ecstatic when we lucked into the opal,

Working on the old boat and making it into our new home.

Are we all secure?

Buoys, everything up?

I always have high hopes for a boat.

No matter what the boat is,

I'm like, "this one could be great."

We need to get more people on the starboard,

The port side, making the tomatoes, still.

Going along, and everything is just fine.

And then, in a split second, it's not.

It all went down really, really fast.

I could tell pretty much immediately.

This was... something went wrong.

I couldn't see. I was still trying to try.

And get in the harbor.

Noah's in there stuffing everything the girls own.

In this hole about this big.

We've lost everything.

Standing on the dock, watching her sink,

You know, everybody was crying.

Everyone was heartbroken, completely devastated.

We had nowhere to go.

Why don't you pull something out worth having, like, you know?

Even thinking back on it, like, it was just horrible.

You know, it was one of the worst things.

That we've been through.

But then again, like, you look around.

They were the familiar faces of the people you love,

And it makes it easier.

We'll just build back. You know, we'll just restart.

We'll just get another boat.

Determined to get back to the wild,

The family takes odd jobs and saves up what they can.