Finally he starts to grasp what inspired Park – the power of the hope that a tiger would appear. In his last week, he retraces his steps, collecting the ten he has put out.

Copying the Korean’s methods he uses a hot spring as bait for his own camera traps. He stays there without Park to really sense what the lone cameraman went through. To relive Park’s encounters, Chris builds a tree stand deep in the forest. And throughout his final winter, Park was able to film Hansel and Gretel repeatedly as the cubs learned and grew. The cameraman obtained shots of a tiger scanning the Pacific Coast that had never been seen before. Following tracks to the farthest border of the tigers’ domain, Park even got to the Pacific Ocean, where he captured them stalking the cliff-top ridges. He got to know individuals and even gave them names: Snow White, her cubs Hansel and Gretel. They could have killed him, but their mother led her young away: she let Park live. With three tigers on the roof, the planks broke. One tigress and her cubs attacked his hide. They gave him his greatest moments – and most chilling encounters. Park followed three generations of one tiger family. And even though his cameras were primitive, his footage of a mother and cubs just inches away is unparalleled. His muscles wasted until he could barely walk. Park never left his hide for months at a time, even to go to the bathroom. He sometimes sat for weeks on end before the first tiger even showed up, and endured temperatures that can freeze eyelids shut. Over the five years he watched and waited, existing on three packs of rice a day. He found the valleys with the most prey and dug a four-foot hole in the ground.

The cameraman left his wife and children behind in Korea. To succeed, Park went to astonishing extremes. Now Chris reveals an amazing story of endurance as Park takes him to search for the elusive big cats. Biologist Chris Morgan knows North American carnivores, but the tigers inhabit a lawless land of bears and poachers. Yet filmmaker Sooyong Park emerged from the frozen forests of Russia’s Far East with a unique record of over one thousand hours of tiger life. The terrain is tough and their territories are vast, over a thousand square miles. Finding a Siberian tiger in the wild is a huge challenge. Over five years of loneliness and danger one man waited to glimpse Siberian Tigers, whose intimate private lives had never been filmed before.

The Tiger And The Snow Torrent