An announcement at the end of the closing credits reads "Coming Soon -Alistair MacLean's Goodbye California". This movie was intended as the first in a series of Alistair MacLean adaptations, which would have included "El Dorado", "Athabasca", "Night Without End", and "The Way to Dusty Death". The next intended movie in the series, "Goodbye, California", was to be shot with a budget of between $12-$13 million. However, due to this movie's disappointing box-office performance, "Goodbye, California", and the other titles were never made by producer Peter Snell, who had bought the rights to numerous MacLean works in 1975, including ones at the time that had not even been published or written yet. Snell, however, did get The Hostage Tower (1980) and Detonator II: Night Watch (1995) made for television.
This movie was the most expensive movie ever made in Canada at the time, according to the book "The Hollywood Hall of Shame" by Harry Medved and Michael Medved.
A fatal accident occurred on location during filming in Stewart, British Columbia, where a helicopter pilot was killed while delivering camera equipment, having missed the landing spot on top of a mountain.
During production, director Don Sharp and four crew members got trapped and stranded on a glacier in a sudden blizzard whiteout during a location scouting trip. According to the 3/11/79 edition of "The Los Angeles Times", the five men were left without sufficient food and warm clothing until a search and rescue squad found them three days later.
The real-life Bear Island is situated in Norway. Bear Island is the southernmost island in the Svalbard Archipelago, situated between the North Cape and Spitsbergen in the western section of the Barents Sea. On 6/10/1596, Bear Island was discovered by two Dutch explorers, Jacob van Heemskerk and Willem Barents. It was so named after a polar bear that was seen swimming near it. In 2002, Bear Island was declared a nature reserve, together with its neighboring waters. Bear Island is known as "Bjørnøya" in Norwegian.