Lifelong Long Island friends Haley Lindell, Natalie Michaels, Karly Sauve team in 'Extracted,' new Fox survivalist  competition

Three lifelong Long Island friends make up a “family” team competing against 11 others in the new Fox survivalist competition “Extracted,” set to premiere Feb. 10.

One member of each team — in this case Haley Lindell, originally of Shoreham — is dropped alone into the seemingly endless forests of British Columbia. The other two teammates — here Natalie Michaels, originally of Mount Sinai, and Karly Sauve, of Centereach — monitor them from a specially constructed headquarters miles away that resembles a war room, all giant screens, command desks and table-size lightboxes illuminating terrain maps.

The HQ team members compete with other teams in various tasks, with one of the rewards being the ability to drone-drop supplies to their loved ones in the woods. They can decide at any time to hit a big red “Extraction” button to retrieve their survivalist via helicopter or boat. But with a $250,000 grand prize at stake, the HQ people may or may not accede if and when the survivalist wishes to leave.

“Haley was out there toughing it out and surviving,” says Michaels, 25, a cardiac intensive care unit nurse at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, during a Zoom call with all three. “Karly and I had 24-hour surveillance of her and could strategize to be able to get Haley things. And we had our own living quarters where we got to mingle with the other contestants.”

“It was very, very wild,” recalls Lindell, 26, a whitewater-rafting guide in Maine part of the year and a bartender in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, when she isn’t living the nomad life in her van. “It was so incredibly beautiful,” she says of the mountainous forest where the show filmed in late summer and early autumn. “Absolutely spectacular. But it was harsh. It was incredibly difficult and definitely not forgiving.”

The three women have known each other since Lindell and Michaels attended preschool together. Sauve, 26, a kickboxing instructor, is Michaels’ cousin. “We would see each other at family things and holidays,” says Lindell, “and we also would go camping together with Girl Scouts,” albeit in different troops.

Lindell, in fact, rose up the ranks to receive that organization’s Gold Award, its highest honor. Then-New York State Sen. Kenneth P. LaValle, of Port Jefferson, in 2018 introduced a resolution commemorating her achievement that the chamber passed.

The three teamed up for the show via Lindell, who was contacted roughly a year and a half ago, she says, by a casting director for the USA Network series “Race to Survive.” She interviewed for a spot on an upcoming season, “and about a week later, the casting director called and said, ‘Hey, that's kind of on hold right now, but there's this new project I'm working on and I thought of you. I really liked your energy. What do you think?’ ” From there things progressed and Lindell recruited her two friends.

They were like-minded, says Sauve, in that “a big theme for us is to just say yes, like we did with this adventure and with things we've done in our lives beforehand and hopefully moving forward. Because the worst that could happen is you say, ‘Yeah, I'm never doing that again.’ But there's so much that comes with saying yes.”

And you didn’t have to be the one in the woods to have had an experience Michaels calls “truly life-changing in every single way possible. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever done. I've never met such amazing people in my entire life,” she says, mentioning both the production crew and the other competitors.

“We were put in such an odd, crazy, bizarre and scary situation and lived with 12 other families 24/7, people from all across the United States,” she says. “You learn so much about people and how they work and what makes them tick. And it's really inspiring being surrounded by them for extended periods of time, and it just kind of opens up your world and makes it feel endless.”