Alaska

Erin McKittrick and her husband traveled 4,000 miles from Seattle to the Aleutian Islands by human power — hiking, packrafting, and skiing through some of the wildest country in North America. A young couple's journey through a landscape most people will never see.

James Glover's biography of the man who founded the Wilderness Society and walked more miles in wild country than anyone of his generation. Marshall was a forester, a civil libertarian, and an indefatigable hiker who once walked 70 miles in a single day. The original wilderness advocate.

John Kauffmann's portrait of the Brooks Range — the most remote mountain chain in North America. Part natural history, part elegy for a wilderness that was, at the time of writing, still essentially untouched.

McPhee's book about Alaska is really three books: urban Alaska, rural Alaska, and the bush. The third section — about people who chose to live far from everything — is the most powerful. Nobody writes about place and the people who inhabit it like McPhee.

Mike Fenner's account of climbing Denali as a regular person — not a professional climber, not a sponsored athlete. The honesty about fear, exhaustion, and self-doubt makes it more relatable than most summit narratives.

Bill Sherwonit's collection of writing about North America's highest peak — from indigenous accounts to modern expeditions. The mountain through many eyes.

Peter Cherici investigates Frederick Cook's fraudulent claim to have climbed Denali in 1906. A detective story about lies, ego, and the early days of American mountaineering, when the summit was less important than the story you told about it.

Hank Lentfer's memoir of raising a family in a remote Alaskan community, told through the rhythm of sandhill crane migrations. Quiet, lyrical, and grounded in the conviction that paying attention to wild things is a form of faith.

The story of Chris McCandless, a young man who gave away his savings, abandoned his car, and walked into the Alaska backcountry with a bag of rice and a .22 caliber rifle. Krakauer traces McCandless's journey from suburban Virginia to the Stampede Trail with a mix of admiration and dread, and in doing so raises the question every outdoor person has had to answer: where's the line between freedom and recklessness?

Debbie Miller's portrait of the Arctic Refuge — its caribou, its wolves, its vast tundra silence. Miller lived near the refuge for years, and her book is both a natural history and an argument for leaving the last great American wilderness alone.

Art Davidson's account of the first winter ascent of Denali in 1967 — when temperatures dropped to minus 148 degrees with wind chill. Three climbers survived a storm that should have killed them. The cold is a character in this book.

Terris Moore's history of the early attempts on Denali — from Cook's fraud to the first true ascent. Authoritative and well-researched.

Erin McKittrick's journey around Cook Inlet by foot and packraft — tidal flats, bear country, and the wild edges of Alaska's most populated region.

“Why, Yellow-Hair Boy, you looked mad as a wolverine in a trap.” Like a sled dog nose down on the trail, Ordinary Wolves pulls you without hesitation into a life different from what most will ever know—sub-freezing “no-sun winters,” the smell of seal oil at dinner, worrying about whether a moose could crash through the ground-level skylight of your sod igloo. But this wild world is the only one young Cutuk Hawcly has ever known. Raised on the Alaskan tundra with his brother, sister, and idealistic father a day’s sled-drive from neighbors, Cutuk has grown up fishing, hunting, and everyday living on the remote Kuguruk River. He aspires to the on-the-land intuition of hunter Enuk Wolfglove, yet when 12-year-old Cutuk visits the closest village—with its snowmobiles and bright nylon jackets—the native kids choke him in a headlock because he is white and “hideously uncool bundled in our caribou parkas and mukluks, black bear and wolf ruffs, down overpants, beaver hats, wolverine mittens, fox mitten liners…” As Cutuk grows up, the Arctic old ways and the modern world clash over and over. Which path to follow? Ordinary Wolves is fiction, but author Seth Kantner is no tenderfoot. His parents moved to the northern Alaska wilderness in the 1950s and his dad apprenticed to an Iñupiaq couple in Arctic survival, decades earlier than today’s many reality show survivalists (and yes, even before Dick Proenneke got fish-hungry). Cutuk’s story is at times funny and other times brutally raw, inspired by real people and real emotions in a landscape often overly romanticized. It shines firelight on the true, unapologetic Last Frontier we’ve been seeking since Jack London was just a wolf pup. The book earned some moose-sized praise when first published, yet many don’t know Ordinary Wolves outside of the Northwest. It’s up for statewide Alaska Reads programming this year, and we’ve heard from friends who’ve read it six-plus times and counting. A tenth anniversary edition is now out—it’s howling to be rediscovered.

A solo kayak journey up Alaska's Inside Passage at age 60-something. No support boat, no satellite phone, no concessions to age. Pure competence and joy.

A solo sailing journey from Seattle to Juneau through the Inside Passage, reading the water and the history simultaneously. The sea as text — tides, currents, and the layers of meaning left by the people who navigated these waters before engines existed.

Growing up Iñupiat in the Alaska bush — subsistence hunting, snowmachines, and a childhood measured in seasons rather than school years. A memoir of a life lived closer to the land than almost anyone in modern America.

Raising children in remote Alaska — packrafting with toddlers, bears in the yard, and the daily logistics of a life that most people would consider impossible. The sequel to A Long Trek Home, now with kids.

A solo kayak journey through Alaska's Inside Passage — tides, bears, weather, and the particular solitude of traveling by paddle. Quieter and less known than it should be.

Life in bush Alaska — subsistence hunting, extreme cold, and the slow encroachment of the modern world on a place that resists it. Kantner grew up in the Arctic and writes about it with the authority of someone who never left.

Dial's son went missing in the jungles of Borneo. This is the story of the search — a father using every skill from a lifetime of wilderness travel to find his child in the most difficult terrain on earth. The ending is not what you want.

London's novel about Buck, a domesticated dog stolen from California and thrown into the Yukon gold rush, where he gradually reverts to wildness. Written in 1903, it remains the most visceral exploration of the animal self buried inside domestication.

Belmore Browne's account of three attempts on Denali in the early 1900s — including the expedition that came within 200 feet of the summit before a storm turned them back. The heartbreak of almost.

London's Yukon stories — gold rush desperation, Arctic cold, and the brutal Darwinism of the frontier. The raw material that became The Call of the Wild.

Washburn pioneered aerial mountain photography and made first ascents across Alaska. Roberts's biography captures a man whose ambition was matched only by his photographic eye.

Two early Roberts expeditions to Alaska — the first ascent of Mount Huntington and the attempt on Deborah. Young men on big mountains, learning what mountains can take from you.

The true story of the 1913 first ascent of Denali — not from the famous leader's perspective but from Harry Karstens, the frontier guide who actually got the expedition to the summit. A correction to the historical record.

This Pulitzer Prize finalist feels like winter—wet snowflakes on eyelashes, the smell of a woodstove, fear of long, dark nights. Inspired by an old Russian folk tale, it’s a fictional story about a novice homesteading couple in 1920s Alaska who are unprepared for the frontier’s harsh demands. One day on a whim they build a childlike snowman; overnight the snowman vanishes, and a mysterious little girl appears from the woods. She is skittish around people yet sure-footed as a mountain goat in the snow, trapping animals for food with a wily red fox as her hunting companion. Named after alpenglow, she is fearlessly at home in the very wilderness that threatens the homesteaders. Where is she from, and why does she disappear at night? Is she a fairy tale come to life? The Snow Child shifts between the fantastical and the real, an immersive, haunting fable about finding hope in wildness that stays wild.

A 4,000-mile human-powered journey from the Pacific Northwest to the Arctic, by bike, ski, foot, and packraft. Van Hemert is a biologist, and the journey is also an act of attention to the ecosystems she crosses.

Two winters back, over a lunch of dried caribou along the Arctic’s Noatak River, Alaskan writer Seth Kantner told me I had to read Sherry Simpson’s The Way Winter Comes. First published a decade ago and awarded the Chinook Literary Prize, this little-known collection of essays immerses readers in short scenes of northern wilderness, animals, and people. Juneau-born Simpson’s journalistic accounts of everyday Alaska—“I ride behind a North Pole trapper named Phil on his Tabasco-red snowmachine”—intertwine with graceful lyricism—“In winter the flat, frozen surface of the upper Chena River becomes a boulevard for wildlife, where tracks inscribe a calligraphy of motion in the snow. Everything is going somewhere.” Seth was right. If this book had a spirit animal, it would be the wolverine: small in stature and surprisingly badass. Get the original hardcover if you can, or wait for the forthcoming version from Shorefast Editions.

In 1885, shortly after the Alaska Purchase from Russia and before the gold rush, the U.S. Army’s Lieutenant Henry T. Allen was ordered on a 1,200-mile expedition to map the Copper and Tanana rivers of Alaska’s interior. Little was known about the uncharted region at the time, other than frightening legends and a few true tales of previous adventurers who never returned. To the Bright Edge of the World, a novel by Pulitzer Prize finalist Eowyn Ivey, reimagines the journey through fictionalized newspaper clippings, letters, and vintage art and photos, navigating the reader back and forth from actual history to the realm of magical realism. As she carefully reconstructs the wilderness of the late 19th century northern frontier, Ivey also twists the usual Western expedition narrative with a leading female character and an emphasis on First Nations culture. Suspenseful, absorbing, and at times darkly mythical, this is a book made for winter cabin reading.

During a harsh winter, a nomadic tribe makes the difficult decision to leave two elderly women behind. At first the women are devastated, but they come to realize they don’t have to give up on life without a fight. To read Two Old Women is to stumble in the snowdrifts of Arctic Alaska, smell the sweet scent of birch woodsmoke, and fear the sharp twinges of starvation. Based on an oral Athabaskan legend, it’s a story rooted in Gwich’in culture, handed down to author Velma Wallis by her mother. And Wallis, who grew up in the six-hundred-fifty-person village of Fort Yukon, knows a thing or two about survival. As a teenager in the 1970s, she moved into her father’s remote trapping cabin, where she spent nearly a dozen years living off traditional subsistence skills. This short novel is a vital and classic tale, carrying embers from an ancient campfire onward into the night.

A tiny outpost in the Norwegian Arctic and a dogsled camp fixed on a remote slab of Alaskan ice serve as frigid twin sirens for Braverman, who spends several years cycling through both places in an effort to harden her exterior and untangle her insides with equal measures of cold, isolation, and manual labor. In the process, she discovers a valuable truth—that sometimes it’s the suffering you choose that helps you work through the trauma you didn’t.

The inverse of The Call of the Wild — a wolf-dog hybrid moves from wilderness to domestication. London exploring the same territory from the other direction.