Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled

The Alaskan interior in winter is a place that wants to kill you. Hudson Stuck went there anyway, again and again, for years, covering ten thousand miles by dog sled through a landscape so vast and empty it makes the rest of America feel small. This is his account of those journeys: the frozen rivers and mountain passes, the weeks-long stretches between human contacts, the bone-deep cold and the unexpected warmth of remote missions and Athabascan villages. Stuck was no mere tourist. As an Episcopal bishop stationed in Fairbanks, he traveled the interior to minister to isolated communities, and what he found there transformed him. He introduces us to the hardiest white men in the territory and, more memorably, to the Indigenous peoples whose knowledge of this brutal country made his own expertise look like guesswork. A century later, this book survives as an intimate portrait of a Alaska that no longer exists, when the only way through was by sled and patience.