Why am I passionate about this?
I wanted to visit Alaska since high school. It took me a couple of decades to make good on the urge, but I have made numerous trips. Alaska has everything I have always loved about Colorado, but in superlatives. From a historical standpoint, Alaska means mountains, mining, and railroads, exactly what I have written about in the lower forty-eight. Outdoors, there has never been any place that makes me happier than climbing mountains or rafting rivers. Spend two weeks in the Brooks Range with just one buddy without seeing another human and one comes to understand the land—and appreciate stories from people who do, too!
Walter's book list on Alaska first-person accounts
Why did Walter love this book?
Before “Mardie” Murie became the guardian of America’s conservation conscience, she was a young bride traveling halfway across Alaska to marry a man she barely knew. Together Olaus and Mardie Murie lived a wilderness life always awed by the landscape and its wild inhabitants. Did things “change with children?” she was once asked. “No," Mardie smiled sweetly, “we just took them with us.”
This is the Muries’ story from those early years through their travels in the Arctic National Wildlife Area (ANWR) and support for the Wilderness Act. I first read this book long before I battled mosquitoes on the Koyukuk River, as they had on their honeymoon, and hiked up Double Mountain above their 1956 camp on the Sheenjak. Hosting Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas that summer, their joint efforts led to the creation of ANWR.
1 author picked Two in the Far North as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award
A Northern classic and beloved favorite, Two in the Far North chronicles the incredible story of Margaret "Mardy" Murie, called the Grandmother of the Conservation Movement, and how she became one of the first women to embrace and champion wilderness conservation in America.
At the age of nine, Margaret Murie moved from Seattle to Fairbanks, not realizing the trajectory life would take her from there. This moving testimonial to the preservation of the Arctic wilderness comes straight from her heart as she writes about growing up in Fairbanks, becoming the first woman graduate…