"An engaging and beautifully written book" "Highly recommended and rewarding reading and so much more than a travel journal" "Trevor, not only did you entertain me with your adventure, you also shared your misery, happiness, frustrations and honesty with me. Honesty I have not found in other cycle logs" Ever since I cycled down the West Coast of Canada and the United States as a means of saving the bus fare on a round-the-world trip, I dreamed of cycling the whole length of that landmass, from the southern tip of South America all the way up to the Arctic Ocean. Returning home to a job I didn't enjoy, that dream burned at my mind until, as a mature student in 1999, I was given the opportunity to take a year out and decided now was my time. This was at a time of huge advances in communication technology but I chose to journey without a mobile phone or any other means of communicating with the outside world - something we might struggle to comprehend these days. If I got into trouble, if I got injured, if I became lost, it was up to me to sort myself out. No close friends were willing to leave the comforts of home, so the fledgling internet did at least prove useful in finding a travel companion. But within nine days of the start of my journey I found myself alone, close to the bottom of the world and with many thousands of miles of the unknown still ahead. This book tells how the desire to fulfil a burning ten-year dream helped me overcome illness, injury, exhaustion, loneliness and so much more; how I, a normal guy from a working-class family in Leeds - among many other adventures - found myself singing to bears to keep them at bay, ran out of water crossing the driest desert in the world, had a volcano rain ash down on me and found myself hiding out from bandits most nights while pedalling through Mexico.

Now available in paperback, Bijaboji is a BC bestseller and a classic of boating literature.

This book is a comprehensive guide to the natural history of the North Slope, the only arctic tundra in the United States. The first section provides detailed information on climate, geology, landforms, and ecology. The second provides a guide to the identification and natural history of the common animals and plants and a primer on the human prehistory of the region from the Pleistocene through the mid-twentieth century. The appendix provides the framework for a tour of the natural history features along the Dalton Highway, a road connecting the crest of the Brooks Range with Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean, and includes mile markers where travelers may safely pull off to view geologic formations, plants, birds, mammals, and fish. Featuring hundreds of illustrations that support the clear, authoritative text, Land of Extremes reveals the arctic tundra as an ecosystem teeming with life.

In her debut collection, Melinda Moustakis brings to life a rough-and-tumble family of Alaskan homesteaders through a series of linked stories. Born in Alaska herself to a family with a homesteading legacy, Moustakis examines the near-mythological accounts of the Alaskan wilderness that are her inheritance and probes the question of what it means to live up to larger-than-life expectations for toughness and survival. The characters in Bear Down, Bear North are salt-tongued fishermen, fisherwomen, and hunters, scrappy storytellers who put themselves in the path of destruction—sometimes a harsh snowstorm, sometimes each other—and live to tell the tale. While backtrolling for kings on the Kenai River or filleting the catch of the Halibut Hellion with marvelous speed, these characters recount the gamble they took that didn't pay off, or they expound on how not only does Uncle Too-Soon need a girlfriend, the whole state of Alaska needs a girlfriend. A story like “The Mannequin at Soldotna” takes snapshots: a doctor tends to an injured fisherman, a man covets another man's green fishing lure, a girl is found in the river with a bullet in her head. Another story offers an easy moment with a difficult mother, when she reaches out to touch a breaching whale. This is a book about taking a fishhook in the eye, about drinking cranberry lick and Jippers and smoking Big-Z cigars. This is a book about the one good joke, or the one night lit up with stars, that might get you through the winter.

James W. Brooks packed several lifetimes of adventure into his sixty-five years in Alaska - working as a fisherman, trapper, musher, miner, wartime flyer, bush pilot, and whale biologist. In a beautifully written memoir, Brooks tells of being drawn to the North, where he lived off the land in the final years of the Territory of Alaska. Later, he served as commissioner of fish and game under two governors. Literally, Brooks lived and worked among the creatures of Alaska, from the walrus and seal habitats of the Bering Sea to the commercial fisheries in the Panhandle, and from the vast waterfowl nesting grounds of the Southwest river deltas to the harsh Arctic home of the polar bear. Brooks balanced politics and science in dealing with battles over wildlife management including controversial aerial wolf hunting intended to conserve moose populations that feed many two-legged creatures of Alaska.

In spite of the obstacles the Alaska truckers were presented with they never weakened in their determination to get the job done. These pioneer drivers never conquered or tamed Alaska's roads and weather, but they learned to operate on the back trails and paths--always making their way to the trip's end. In spite of all the challenges, they never quit. The following from Teddy Roosevelt is an appropriate salute to Alaskan truckers: "It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that high place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." Eighteen Wheels North to Alaska: A History of Trucking in Alaska is the story of Alaskan drivers who guided, coaxed, pushed, pulled, plowed, and somehow made it to the end of the road--and beyond--over high mountain passes, whiteout conditions, seventy below zero temperature, through mud, muck, and tundra terrain--even onto the Arctic Ocean ice beyond the shore.

North to the future! That Wintry Feeling She's not in Kansas anymore! Cathy Thompson was hurt by the man she loved, a betrayal that sends her running to a new teaching job and a brand-new life. Now she's fallen in love with the grandeur of Alaska--and is falling for a bush pilot named Grady Jones. Then the single dad offers Cathy a proposal that, for him, isn't about love. Being part of a family helps Cathy forget her past, but a marriage of convenience isn't what she expected for her future. Will Grady see that they're both ready for the real thing? Borrowed Dreams Carly Grieves leaves Seattle for Anchorage looking for a more adventurous life. She's accepted a job with a shipping company--a job that comes with plenty of challenges, including pilot Brand St. Clair... Despite her best intentions, she can't stop thinking about him. But Brand's a widower, and Carly fears he's simply looking for a replacement wife. She's too afraid to hope that he might fall in love with her, too...