Up North In Winter

When Grandpa misses the train, he must walk home. Only a chance encounter saves him from the bitter winter chill, getting him to safety--and allowing him to share his story with future generations.

A passionate skier since he was a child, Anders Morley dreamed of going on a significant adventure, something bold and of his own design. And so one year in his early thirties, he decided to strap on cross-country skis to travel across Canada in the winter alone. This Land of Snow is about that journey and a man who must come to terms with what he has left behind, as well as how he wants to continue living after his trip is over. It is an honest, thoughtful, and humorous reckoning of an adventure filled with adrenalin and exuberance, as well as mistakes and danger. Along the way readers gain insight, both charming and fascinating, into Northern outdoor culture and modern-day wilderness living, the history of northern exploration and Nordic skiing, the right to roam movement, winter ecology, and more. Throughout, Morley’s clear, subtle, and self-deprecating voice speaks to a backwoods-genteel aesthetic that explores the dichotomy between wildness and refinement, language and personal story, journey and home.

After a fifteen-year career as a sled dog racer, musher Dave Olesen turned his focus away from competition and set out to fulfill a lifelong dream. Over the course of four successive winters he steered his dogs and sled on long trips away from his remote Northwest Territories homestead, setting out in turn to the four cardinal compass points—south, east, north, and west—and home again to Hoarfrost River. His narrative ranges from the personal and poignant musings of a dogsled driver to loftier planes of introspection and contemplation. Olesen describes his journeys day by day, but this book is not merely an account of his travels. Neither is it yet another offering in the genre of “wide-eyed southerner meets the Arctic,” because Olesen is a firmly rooted northerner, having lived and travelled in the boreal outback for over thirty years. Olesen’s life story colours his writing: educated immigrant, husband and father, professional dog musher, working bush pilot, and denizen of log cabins far off the grid. He and his dogs feel at home in country lying miles back of beyond. This book demolishes many of the clichés that imbue writings about bush life, the Far North, and dogsledding. It is a unique blend of armchair adventure, personal memoir, and thoughtful, down-to-earth reflection.

This book showcases photographs taken from John Scurlock's home-built airplane, a Van's Aircraft RV6. In 2002, John embarked on a nine-year quest to fly to and photograph every corner of the North Cascade Range in the winter. The images he captured provide a breathaking vision of one of America's most magnificent mountain ranges in its most beautiful, dramatic, and savage season.

Northern Michigan is a place, like all places, in change. Over the past half century, its landscape has been bulldozed, subdivided, and built upon. Climate change warms the water of the Great Lakes at an alarming rate—Lake Superior is now the fastest-warming large body of freshwater on the planet—creating increasingly frequent and severe storm events, altering aquatic and shoreline ecosystems, and contributing to further invasions by non-native plants and animals. And yet the essence of this region, known to many as simply “Up North,” has proved remarkably perennial. Millions of acres of state and national forests and other public lands remain intact. Small towns peppered across the rural countryside have changed little over the decades, pushing back the machinery of progress with the help of dedicated land conservancies, conservation organizations, and other advocacy groups. Up North in Michigan, the new collection from celebrated nature writer Jerry Dennis, captures its author’s lifelong journey to better know this place he calls home by exploring it in every season, in every kind of weather, on foot, on bicycle, in canoes and cars. The essays in this book are more than an homage to a particular region, its people, and its natural wonders. They are a reflection on the Up North that can only be experienced through your feet and fingertips, through your ears, mouth, and nose—the Up North that makes its way into your bones as surely as sand makes its way into wood grain.