Remote

"I was frantically running down to the river and digging trenches…" says Lucie Levesque who was stuck in the remote wilderness in north central British Columbia when an underground fire began surrounding her wooden cabin and no one was there to rescue her.

If you were asked to ditch your cell phone, social media, the latest news and even contact with friends and family for the adventure of a lifetime, would you do it?

Avid-adventurer Lucie Levesque launches into a life changing experience in this episode of Only Human - a podcast about the human experience in its raw, and sometimes unexpected form.

Today, the idea of going 'off grid' and taking a breather from the multidimensional online 'connected' world that we live in seems like a distant and unattainable dream. But for Lucie Levesque, being stuck in an isolated no-man's land offered the chance to learn more about herself and bring her closer to nature.

Often described as the life of the party, Levesque jumped at the chance to do a three month stint living and working out of a remote lodge in the Spatsizi Plateau in north-central British Columbia.

The plateau is so isolated that goods can only be brought in via float plane and there is no running water or electricity. The only sign of civilization is an 8-day trek by horseback on a dirt road.

Blogs and travel articles describe the Spatsizi terrain as a kind of brutal face-off with nature - a place that tests the limits of the human capacity to survive.

With very minimal human interaction is wasn't long before Lucie began losing her ability to speak, followed swiftly by a sequence of challenging and life-threatening events that nothing could ever prepare her for.

"One day I was by myself with the horses and there was a grizzly bear rubbing his back near my little cabin," says Levesque who simply froze on the spot.

What happened next is almost beyond belief...

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details