Tracks across Alaska

– A Dog Sled Journey –

“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.

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 Senson battling for the lead in ‘the last great race’ which overtakes the author on his trail.

And there are dogs who become like a family for Alastair as together they cross the icy wilderness.”