Erik and Martha Mae Salitan Left “Life Below Zero” and Built Something Better

TLDR: Erik and Martha Mae Salitan were part of the original Life Below Zero cast from 2013 to 2016, living north of the Arctic Circle in Wiseman while operating one of Alaska’s most respected guiding businesses.

Their departure had more to it than privacy concerns, and what they built afterward is considerably more interesting than anything that aired on National Geographic.

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On the day Erik Salitan graduated from high school, he did not attend any parties. He boarded a plane to Alaska and did not look back.

That single fact tells you most of what you need to know about him. He grew up in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, near Naples, in a culture of hunting and outdoor life.

Whatever ambitions his peers had for college and careers and suburban adulthood, Salitan had already made his decision. Alaska was the plan.

Everything else was just a delay.

How Erik Built One of Alaska’s Premier Guiding Operations From Nothing

Arriving in Alaska at eighteen with minimal resources and no professional connections in the state, Salitan understood that reputation in the guiding world is built slowly and lost quickly.

He enrolled in college and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Resources Conservation, giving himself a scientific foundation in wildlife biology and habitat management to work alongside his practical fieldwork.

He spent years working as an assistant guide in some of Alaska’s most demanding terrain, accumulating the thousands of field hours the state requires before it licenses independent operators.

He trained as a commercial pilot and acquired a bush plane, recognizing that the true wilderness is entirely roadless and that a guide who cannot fly is a guide who cannot reach his clients’ quarry. In 2008, at just twenty-four years old, he achieved the rank of licensed registered guide-outfitter, making him one of the youngest in Alaska’s history.

To find clients for his newly founded Bushwhack Alaska Guiding and Outfitting, he traveled to major hunting trade shows in the Lower 48, including Safari Club International expos in Dallas and Las Vegas, booking multi-thousand-dollar hunts directly with wealthy sportsmen who had no idea the person selling them was barely old enough to rent a car.

He also became a co-owner of the Blanchard Family Funeral Home in Fairbanks, a pragmatic business move that demonstrated a financial mindset extending well beyond the tree line.

Martha Mae and the Iliamna Lake Legacy

Martha Mae Salitan, born Martha Mae Baechler, grew up in Iliamna, a remote community in southwest Alaska on the shores of the largest freshwater lake in the state.

Her father, John Baechler Jr., owned and operated multiple commercial fishing lodges in the region for nearly forty years, and Martha Mae’s childhood was structured around the practical demands of that world.

She learned to grease jet units, change engine oil, and operate custom Bentz inboard jet boats built to navigate shallow, rocky riverbeds without damage. The outdoors was not a hobby for her. It was infrastructure.

When she and Erik met, their alignment was immediate. He proposed by baiting an ice-fishing hook with an engagement ring and pulling it up through a frozen surface.

It was the kind of proposal that works only if you know exactly who you are asking.

Within their business, Martha Mae became the administrative and hospitality anchor. While Erik managed aviation and field guiding, she coordinated the complex logistics of their lodge operations, prepared high-end cuisine, and managed guest relations with the same meticulous standards her father had applied to everything he built.

Five Seasons on Life Below Zero

The Salitans joined the original cast of Life Below Zero when the series premiered on May 19, 2013. For five seasons, their segments focused on their off-grid winter life in Wiseman, Alaska, a historic settlement of fewer than two dozen full-time residents located 67 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Cameras captured them hauling drinking water from frozen creeks, splitting cordwood, hunting caribou, and maintaining a two-mile trap line to harvest lynx and wolf furs.

The logistics of life in Wiseman are unforgiving in ways that are difficult to convey. Standard parcel services refuse to ship firearms, ammunition, and bulk heating fuel to the deep Arctic. Every supply has to be planned months in advance.

Every resource is rationed. There is no margin.

Their presence on the show occasionally divided viewers. Unlike other cast members who emphasized ancestral subsistence lifestyles, Erik was a commercial operator running a licensed outfitting business.

Some audiences respected his technical mastery and efficiency. Others were uncomfortable with the commercial hunting dimension.

The tension became most visible in Season 5, when Erik dispatched a wounded caribou with a hand knife after exhausting his rifle ammunition, a segment that generated significant debate about the ethics and aesthetics of commercial versus subsistence hunting.

The Real Reason They Left in 2016

The official explanation for the Salitans’ 2016 departure was privacy and the disruption that production crews caused to their commercial guiding work. Both of those things were true. They were not the complete picture.

Behind the scenes, Erik was fighting a serious regulatory battle with Alaska’s Division of Corporations, Business, and Professional Licensing.

The state had brought a multi-count accusation against him stemming from a Dall sheep hunt in the fall of 2012, in which two clients from Minnesota became stranded in severe weather east of No Name Creek when unpredictable mountain thermals prevented bush pilots from landing.

The clients ran out of food, survived on boiled sheep meat, and their harvested trophies suffered damage from lack of salt preservation. The state accused Salitan of failing to extract his clients in a timely manner and failing to preserve the harvested meat and capes.

A three-day administrative hearing was held in Juneau in March 2016, precisely the period during which the Salitans finalized their decision to leave the show. The board initially fined and reprimanded Salitan.

He appealed aggressively. The Superior Court ultimately reversed the disciplinary action, ruling that a board member had exhibited personal bias and participated in off-the-record proceedings, ordering a new trial.

The mathematics of the situation were straightforward. Television episodes paid between $2,000 and $4,500 per appearance. A single high-end guiding client could pay tens of thousands of dollars for a multi-day wilderness hunt.

Having BBC Studios production crews disrupting the silence of those hunts was commercially untenable, quite apart from any legal proceedings.

Faced with a choice between a television paycheck and a one-million-acre commercial guiding concession, Salitan chose the concession without hesitation.

Talarik Creek Lodge and What They Built After Television

In 2014, while still filming the show, the Salitans purchased Talarik Creek Lodge on Iliamna Lake. The timing was deliberate. They were already planning their exit from television and building toward something more durable.

Iliamna Lake is the largest freshwater lake in Alaska and sits at the heart of the Bristol Bay watershed, the premier sockeye and king salmon fishery on earth.

The lake’s tributary, Lower Talarik Creek, is world-renowned among serious fly fishermen for hosting the largest and most aggressive wild rainbow trout in North America. Guests who know where to look will find fish over twenty inches on every productive day.

The lodge is not a rustic outpost. It offers private rooms, clean private bathrooms, a wrap-around deck with panoramic views of the lake, and gourmet cuisine including fresh local catches and Alaskan king crab brought directly from Kodiak.

The Bentz inboard jet boats Martha Mae grew up operating become the primary transportation on the water, navigating the shallow creek systems that hold the trophy fish.

The Salitans have since expanded the operation. Mae Lake Lodge, located at a remote backcountry lake, offers wilderness fly-fishing for lake trout, grayling, and northern pike, with Starlink satellite internet, a personal in-camp cook, and professional guides.

The Rock at Talarik Creek is a more intimate exclusive property on the banks of the lower creek, capped at four guests, offering cast-and-blast packages combining trophy rainbow trout fishing with ptarmigan and waterfowl hunting at $6,800 per week.

The Under Armour Connection and Life Today

Since leaving television, the Salitans’ business has undergone a significant structural change.

Kip Fulks, the billionaire co-founder and former Chief Operating Officer of Under Armour, acquired Bushwhack Alaska Guiding and Outfitting. Fulks, an avid backcountry hunter, purchased the business with the intention of operating the one-million-acre hunting concession while training to become a licensed registered guide himself.

The hunting operations are now managed by Fulks and his team.

Talarik Creek Lodge remains a family-run operation, managed directly by Martha Mae and her family, rooted in the same Iliamna Lake traditions her father established across four decades of sportfishing hospitality.

The Salitans continue to split their calendar between Iliamna and Wiseman. They have two sons, Lucas and Sterling, and Lucas has already grown into an accomplished fly fisherman, landing trophy rainbow trout over twenty inches on fly tackle, featured in regional fishing publications.

They maintain no personal social media presence, allowing their business reputation to spread through word-of-mouth in elite sporting circles.

When Life Below Zero was officially cancelled in February 2025 after 23 seasons, the Salitans declined to participate in any retrospective or reunion content. They had made their choice nine years earlier and never reconsidered it.

Erik Salitan left upstate New York at eighteen to build something in Alaska that was entirely his own. By any reasonable measure, that is exactly what happened.