For the past two decades, Alaska has become one of the favorite places for reality TV producers to film their shows. The documentary show “Life Below Zero” is one of those shows which have found great success throughout the years, not only for its high-quality photography and format, but also for the interesting, and often mind-blowing, stories of its cast members.
At the front of the show, there is Sue Aikens, a woman who has spent a good part of her life making it out in the Alaskan wilderness, facing frostbitingly-dangerous temperatures, and its often less-than-friendly wildlife. Nonetheless, her lifestyle has recently changed somewhat after buying a cabin which isn’t as far away from civilization as we’ve become used to seeing from Sue.
So what’s the reason behind Sue’s move? What about the show and her beginnings as a survivalist? How much is she earning through her TV appearances? Keep watching to find out!
Did She Buy A Property?
Ever since “Life Below Zero” premiered in 2013, audiences have seen Sue Atkins’ isolated lifestyle in the Alaskan mountains up close. Her Kavik River Camp is not only her business but her home as well, spending several months a year alone in that place located 500 miles away from any other civilization.
Spending years living closer to the Arctic Ocean and the National Wildlife Refuge than to any city is something that not anyone can endure, even less to choose willfully. Though Sue is built differently than most people, and loves her survivalist camp up on the Alaskan mountains, she’s also learned to be cautious about the future, and because of this eventually buying a cabin in Chena, on the outskirts of the capital city of Fairbanks.
As it happens, the property that the Kavik River Camp is built on doesn’t belong to her but to the Alaskan government. Aware of the possibility of having her house and business taken away at any time, Sue purchased a previously abandoned property which has two cabins which she’s steadily improved by herself, as seen in the show.
As Sue also affirmed in the show, her age played a huge factor in her decision to move to the new cabin, making things easier for her future self.
Who Is Sue Aikens?
Despite her impressive ability to live all year long in an isolated Alaskan location, Sue Aikens is surprisingly not a native of the ‘The Last Frontier’ state. She was born on 1 July 1963 in Mount Prospect, a village north of Chicago, Illinois. She lived in Palatine during her early childhood until the late 1960s, when her mother separated from her father and took Sue and her siblings to Alaska, establishing the family there for some time before returning home and then to Alaska again in 1975.
That last move was a permanent one, allowing Sue to explore and become acquainted with her new environment. Just as Sue told the Chicago Tribune in 2013, she didn’t blame her mother for her decision to move the family so far away, despite the difficulties it entailed. Sue also recalled a sourdough, who gave her a rifle and bullets, letting her figure out how to hunt and find food.
According to Sue, she did quite well at school back in Chicago, yet Alaska made her realize that the abilities she needed in life weren’t learned in a classroom, but somewhere else away from the city. With that being said, a common life with a 9-to-5 job isn’t what Sue wanted anyway, as she instead loves the freedom that life in the wilderness provides her.
Path In The Show
Her appearances in “Life Below Zero” are undeniably the reason behind Sue Aikens’ popularity, yet the show wasn’t her first rodeo on TV. Back in 2010, she appeared in an episode of TLC’s “Sarah Palin’s Alaska”, in which she guided Palin as the politician hunted for caribou.
In 2011 Sue appeared in a couple of episodes of “Flying Wild Alaska”, including the first season’s premiere “Meet the Twetos”. This put Sue on the radar of TV producers, who came up with the idea for “Life Below Zero” around 2012. It didn’t take long before the show aired, and Sue was pushed into stardom, helped by her fearless attitude and hands-on approach to every challenge put her way, including surviving the attack of a grizzly bear.
By the time Sue starred in “Life Below Zero”, she’d been living in the Kavik River Camp for over 16 years, but had been in Alaska for around three decades.
While it seems unusual for a person who had lived in isolation for so long to want to appear in a TV show, Sue didn’t mind much. Her only worry was that the show would be ‘tastefully done’, in the sense of not forcing situations for the sake of ratings, as she told the Chicago Tribune.
Her Future
So far, “Life Below Zero” has aired over 20 seasons and Sue Aikens has starred in all of them, with still lots of other stories to tell us all.
Sue has recently dealt with some difficult health issues, when her old bear bite injury seemingly ‘chimed in’ becoming infected again, besides undergoing a surgical procedure to fuse her vertebrae, as she revealed in a Facebook post from early 2024. Fortunately, she’s reportedly recovered well from these issues, yet it’s for sure that the situation brought up not-so-good memories for Sue, who in 2017 also underwent various surgical ops after being forced to perform risky scenes for the show, as a lawsuit she filed at the time stated.
POV: When your bestie comes over for breakfast 🦊🧇🥰#Screwball pic.twitter.com/oD58guVFmg
— Susan Aikens (@SueAikens) May 22, 2024
Sue’s relationship with the show’s producers has improved since that unfortunate situation happened though, to the point where she has attended the Emmy Awards ceremony a couple of times in representation of “Life Below Zero”, with the most recent being in 2023.
While it’s unclear whether a 24th season of the show is in the works, these days Sue splits her time between her cabin in Alaska’s mountains and the Kavik River Camp, doing what she loves the most. That is exactly what makes her so amazing!