Chevie Roach: The “Life Below Zero” Star Who Puts the Village Before Himself

TLDR: Chevie Roach joined Life Below Zero: Next Generation in 2022 after a National Geographic camera crew spotted him helping reintroduce Woodland bison to the Innoko River.

He lives with his wife Sonta and their six children in Shageluk, a roadless village of about 100 people in western Alaska. When he harvests a moose, he distributes it to village elders before stocking his own household.

Life Below Zero was cancelled in February 2025. He is now documenting his life on YouTube.

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Most of the cast members on Life Below Zero came to Alaska from somewhere else and built a solitary existence against a hostile landscape. The show was largely built on that archetype.

Chevie Roach does not fit it. He lives in a village. He distributes his harvest to community elders. His wife is an Alaska Native professor. When the cameras came, he stepped aside on cultural matters to let Sonta speak for herself.

He is one of the more quietly distinctive figures the franchise ever produced.

From Tok to Shageluk

Chevie Roach was born in Fairbanks and raised in Tok, Alaska, a small community in the eastern interior near the Canadian border.

His family’s roots in the state trace back to the late 1960s, when homesteading and resource development brought a new wave of settlers north.

His maternal grandparents migrated from Nevada, his grandfather establishing himself as a commercial fisherman.

His paternal grandparents came from Northern California, his grandmother working as an educator and his grandfather employed by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, using dog teams for wilderness patrol.

His maternal grandmother was fully Hispanic, making Chevie one-quarter Hispanic by descent.

He does not have Alaska Native ancestry. His wilderness skills developed organically through his family’s outdoor life in Tok rather than through formal training or indigenous apprenticeship.

He came to Shageluk for Sonta. They met in the village after she returned from her freshman year of college, bonded over basketball games in the community gym, maintained a long-distance connection, lived together in Fairbanks for a period, and then chose to return to Shageluk permanently to raise their family.

He has been there ever since.

Sonta Roach and the Deg Hit’an Foundation

Sonta Hamilton Roach is a member of the Deg Hit’an Athabascan people, the indigenous group native to the Innoko and lower Yukon River drainage basins.

She grew up in Shageluk and has spent her professional life working to preserve and transmit the culture of that place.

She spent a decade as a classroom teacher at the Innoko River School in Shageluk, teaching a student body of 25 to 30 children and weaving the local Athabascan language, Deg Xinag, into daily instruction.

She used physical artifacts including traditional drums, locally harvested grasses, and animal track representations to ground students in their heritage. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Alaska Native Studies and Rural Development at the University of Alaska, conducting her research and teaching remotely from Shageluk.

She was also a principal author of the Shageluk Native Village 2025-2028 Community Plan, a document coordinating municipal development and educational sovereignty with the Tanana Chiefs Conference.

On the show, Chevie was consistent about one thing: cultural matters belonged to Sonta. He does not perform traditional Athabascan songs, dances, or oral histories on camera.

He steps aside so that she and their children remain the authentic voices for that part of their life. In a genre that sometimes blurs these lines carelessly, that distinction was worth noting.

Life in Shageluk

Shageluk is a roadless village of approximately 100 residents along the Innoko River in the western Alaskan interior. There is no road connection to the state highway system.

All travel and cargo move by small aircraft, riverboat in summer, and snow machine or dog team in winter. There are no commercial grocery stores.

To help fill that gap, the Roach family owns and operates a small local retail store, providing processed foodstuffs, emergency dry goods, and occasional specialty items like pizza and ice cream to residents and overland travelers. It functions as a community hub as much as a commercial operation.

The household consists of Chevie, Sonta, and their six children: Ryder, Sydney, Emry, Callen, Chevelle, and an infant son.

Heat comes from wood stoves. Water is hauled manually. Household chores are structured to teach the children self-reliance from an early age. Temperatures in winter regularly drop below minus forty degrees Fahrenheit.

The late winter and early spring period is the most valued season. Extended daylight returns, temperatures stabilize around zero, and conditions become optimal for long-distance travel, ice fishing, and maintaining the trapline.

How He Got on Television

Chevie was not looking for a television career. He was helping state wildlife biologists reintroduce Woodland bison to the Innoko River region when a National Geographic camera crew documenting the conservation project interviewed him. Producers noticed his communication skills and the authenticity of his lifestyle.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, casting directors from BBC Studios contacted the family. Chevie and Sonta agreed to participate because they wanted to share authentic family dynamics and positive outdoor values with a national audience. They joined Life Below Zero: Next Generation for its fourth season, which premiered in January 2022.

The 17-Mile Trapline and What It Actually Involves

The centerpiece of Chevie’s winter operations on the show was his 17-mile backcountry trapline. Managing a line of that length in the sub-Arctic is not a casual endeavor.

It begins each season with trail-breaking: using snow machines to pack down routes through dense willow corridors and across frozen waterways. Those trails require constant maintenance to clear fallen timber and fresh drifts.

Checking the traps means monitoring for marten, lynx, and wolverine, tracking predator movements when wolf sign crosses the trail, and teaching his children the patience and safety discipline required to navigate remote winter environments over long distances.

The trapline was the primary classroom for that education.

To support extended trapping and hunting expeditions, Chevie also restored an abandoned trapping cabin deep in the Shageluk backcountry.

Operating miles from the village in winter conditions, he hauled building materials and tools over packed snow trails, structurally reinforced the compromised shelter, and installed a wood stove to make it habitable as a safety outpost and operational base.

The Blizzard Moose Hunt and the Blackfish Tradition

One of the most significant episodes from his time on Next Generation documented a winter moose hunt with his daughter Sydney conducted under whiteout blizzard conditions.

Securing large game is critical for winter food security in Shageluk, but hunting during a blizzard dramatically complicates tracking and increases cold injury risk.

The hunt required navigating low-visibility willow bottoms, continuous firearm maintenance to prevent freezing, and advanced tracking to locate moose sheltering from the wind.

They were successful. The harvest secured protein for both the Roach household and the broader community.

A culturally significant storyline focused on the family harvesting Alaskan blackfish from under-ice waterways near Shageluk. Blackfish are small, oil-rich fish capable of surviving in oxygen-depleted water beneath thick river ice, historically serving as a critical backup resource for Athabascan communities when larger game is scarce.

The harvest involves cutting holes through river ice and submerging traditional funnel traps into the slow current. After several unsuccessful attempts the family located a major concentration and brought them in.

For the younger children it was both a practical food acquisition skill and a direct connection to the subsistence traditions Sonta’s family has practiced for generations.

Promoted to the Main Show for the Final Season

Following several seasons on Next Generation, the production team moved the Roach family to the primary cast of Life Below Zero for its 23rd and final season in late 2024.

The move aligned them with other village-based cast members on the main show, including the Hailstones in Kotzebue and Ricko DeWilde in Huslia.

The format is anthological rather than ensemble. Chevie and his family did not share screen time with Chip Hailstone or Sue Aikens.

Their storylines ran concurrently with those of the other families rather than intersecting. Chevie said publicly that the main show’s focus on village life was a better fit for how they actually live than the more individualistic framing of Next Generation.

The Community Elder Sharing Tradition

The detail that most distinguishes the Roach family from other cast members in the franchise is not their trapline or their cabin. It is what they do when a hunt is successful.

Under the Athabascan community elder sharing tradition, successful hunters distribute their harvest to the village’s elderly residents before provisioning their own household.

The distribution is organized through local networks to ensure that vulnerable community members receive fresh wild game first. Chevie and Sonta practice this consistently and have spoken about it publicly, with Sonta promoting the broader values framework through the hashtag #AthabascanValues on social media.

Most Life Below Zero cast members are depicted as individuals stockpiling resources against a hostile wilderness. The Roach family’s model is structurally different: survival understood as collective rather than solitary, rooted in obligation to the community rather than self-sufficiency as an end in itself.

After the Cancellation

Life Below Zero was cancelled in February 2025 after 23 seasons when Disney declined to renew BBC Studios’ production contract.

The cancellation had direct financial implications for the family.

Principal cast members earned between $2,000 and $4,500 per episode, and BBC Studios had also rented snow machines and boats directly from the Roach family during production, injecting additional capital into their operations.

The production’s chartered flights to Shageluk had also provided emergency transport for local residents during medical situations, a practical benefit that extended beyond the family themselves.

When asked about the end of the show, Sonta observed that in the Deg Xinag language there is no direct translation for the word “goodbye.” There is only “we will see you later.”

Practically, the end of filming gave Chevie uninterrupted time to do what he had been doing between camera calls anyway.

He has focused on teaching his son Ryder, who preferred to stay off-camera throughout the show’s run, mechanical repair skills including rebuilding snow machine engines.

He runs his YouTube channel “Roots in Alaska” documenting traditional longbow hunting, winter camping, fire-starting, and daily homesteading in long-form unedited videos.

In late 2025 he collaborated with traditional bow-builder Clay Hayes to construct a timber smokehouse at his off-grid cabin, expanding the family’s capacity for processing and preserving salmon from summer river runs.

Sonta continues her university research and teaching remotely from Shageluk. The retail store is still running. The trapline still needs checking. The elders still eat first.