Jim Rearden's Alaska: Fifty Years of Frontier Adventure

For half a century, Jim Rearden has fulfilled a dream-traveling throughout the Far North in search of interesting people, places, and events and writing about them. In Jim Rearden's Alaska, this longtime former outdoors editor for Alaska magazine has combined twenty-two previously published pieces into a single collection. Articles are interspersed with fresh personal insights into a changing Alaska and are illustrated by many of the black-and-white photographs that appeared with the original articles. Rearden shares his favorite stories of early sourdoughs who challenged Alaska's wilderness in the 1920s and '30s; of encounters with wolves, wolverines, and huge brown bears; of the Alaska Scouts who played a key role in the brutal Aleutian Campaign of World War II; of lighthearted and hair-raising adventures of Alaska's early bush pilots; of narrow escapes from death on Mount McKinley and in the Gulf of Alaska; and of a humorous look at Hollywood's attempt to make a "genuine Alaskan" film. "These articles represent my ideal Alaska," Rearden says.