Description

Winner of the 2020 National Outdoor Book Award for Outdoor Classic

In this comingofmiddleage memoir Kim Heacox writing in the tradition of Abbey McPhee and Thoreau discovers an Alaska reborn from beneath a massive glacier where flowers emerge from boulders moose swim fjords and bears cross crevasses with Homeric resolve In such a place Heacox finds that people are reborn too and their lives begin anew with incredible journeys epiphanies and successes All in an America free of crass commercialism and overdevelopment

Braided through the larger story are tales of gold prospectors and the cabin they built sixty years ago John Muir and his intrepid terrier Stickeen and a dynamic geology professor who teaches earth science as if every day were a geological epoch

Nearly two million people come to Alaska every summer some on large cruise ships some in single kayaksall in search of the last great wilderness the Africa of America It is exactly the America Heacox finds in this story of paradox love and loss