Alastair Scott

Tracks Across Alaska - A Dog Sled Journey (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

'A superb book ... Few can duplicate Mr Scott's ability to relate a provocative adventure.' The New York Times Book Review
'A polished, integrated work and a valuable portrait.' Sunday Telegraph
'Awed by the landscape and people he encountered, Scott does full justice to both in this engaging travel adventure.' Publishers Weekly

For years Alastair Scott had dreamed of driving a dog team through the snows of the north, but he had no practical experience when he arrived in Alaska determined to do so. He bought or borrowed his team, spent five months getting to know his dogs and learning the techniques on which his life would depend, and then drove 800 miles in mid-winter along the line of the Arctic Circle. He followed the frozen Yukon river and then travelled out over sea ice to Nome. This book is the story of that feat of self-reliance and endurance; and it has become a classic.
It is at the same time a portrait of the land - beautiful, rich, empty, sometimes murderous - and of the people who choose to make their lives there. Alaskans are the custodians of the spirit of adventure. They have to be, whether they belong among the dispossessed Aboriginals whose land is now the Fourth World, or whether they are pioneers, for whom Alaska is a state of mind, a bastion of enterprise and individuality.
In the course of the book the author's tracks become interwoven with those of vivid characters, past and present: beaver-trappers, F15 pilots, the melancholy Vitus Bering who perished on a fox-infested island; Archdeacon Hudson Stuck standing behind a sacramental cloth as he mushed across his parish - 300,000 square miles of forest and tundra; Ed Jesson cycling the roadless expanse between Dawson City and Nome in the winter of 1900; serum runners on a mercy dash; migrating tribes; the remotest Little Diomeders; legendary Iditarod champions Susan Butcher and Rick Swenson battling for the lead in 'the last great race' which overtakes the author on his trail.
And there are the dogs who become like a family for Alastair as together they cross the icy wilderness.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Alastair Scott
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. April 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781301328017
• Artikelnr.: 56803855

Autorenporträt

Alastair Scott is a writer, photographer, broadcaster and Yachtmaster Ocean sailing skipper. His work has been published in The NY Times Book Review, Time-Life, Readers Digest, Sunday Telegraph, The guardian, The Herald and The Scotsman, among others. He is the author of ten books. 'After leaving school and doing two useless degrees (German & Economics) I worked in a photographic studio in Edinburgh for eighteen months to learn the trade. Soon sickened of doing passport photos, weddings and portraits of children who delighted in throwing tantrums in revenge attacks on their parents and so set off to make my name as a travel photographer. Worked my way round the world on a five-year journey, mostly wearing a kilt (but abandoned it where it attracted hostile respones). On my return I set up my own photographic library, which I still run. Wrote a trilogy of books about my journey and this set up a lifestyle of travelling somewhere adventurous and writing a book about it. I got a dogteam and sled together and 'mushed' across Alaska, Tracks Across Alaska; cycled 5000 miles behind the Iron Curtain shortly before it fell (no book as yet!); learnt to sail and made a solo voyage round Ireland, Salt and Emerald; cycled round my homeland with a foreigner's eyes, Native Stranger...I also wrote a guidebook to Scotland and two novels. Am currently working on a children's novel.'