Writer and fisherman Joe Upton recounts the riveting stories of explorers of the past and seafarers of the present in JOURNEYS THROUGH THE INSIDE PASSAGE. His chronicle offers events vivid in their telling: the journey of widow Muriel Blanchet, who solo navigated a small vessel in the 1930s with her five children; the failed meeting of explorers Alexander Mackenzie and George Vancouver in 1793; countless sinkings; and tales from the author's own experiences plying this legendary waterway.
“This book is about an idea that rests at the junction of what we call wilderness and civilization. Simply, it is a call for rethinking, and more importantly, reconstructing, our relationship with nature.” --from Inside PassageProtecting land in parks, safe from human encroachment, has been a primary strategy of conservationists for the past century and a half. Yet drawing lines around an area and calling it wilderness does little to solve larger environmental problems. As author Richard Manning puts it in a knowingly provocative way: “Wilderness designation is not a victory, but acknowledgement of defeat.”In Inside Passage, Manning takes us on a thought-provoking tour of the lands along the Pacific Northwest's Inside Passage -- from southeast Alaska down through Puget Sound, and then on to the northern Oregon coast and the Columbia River system -- as he explores the dichotomy between “wilderness” and “civilization” and the often disastrous effects of industrialization.Through vivid description and conversations with people in the region, Manning brings new insights to the area's most pressing environmental concerns -- the salmon crisis, deforestation, hydroelectric dams, urban sprawl -- and examines various innovative ways they are being addressed. He details efforts to restore degraded ecosystems and to integrate economic development with environmental protection, and looks at powerful new tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that are increasingly being used to further conservation efforts.Throughout, Manning focuses on the hopeful possibility that we can redesign the human enterprise to a scale more appropriate to the nature that holds it, that rather than drawing borders around nature, we might instead start placing borders on human behavior. Perhaps, he suggests, we can begin to behave in all places as if all places matter to us as much as wilderness, and, in the process, claim all of nature as our own.Inside Passage is a wide-ranging and thoughtful exploration by a gifted writer, and an important work for anyone interested in the Pacific Northwest, or concerned about the future of our relationship to the natural world.
In the spring of 2010, with her world scaled down to an 18-foot sea kayak and the 1,200-mile ribbon of water called the Inside Passage, Susan Conrad launched a journey that took her north to Alaska. On the way, she forged friendships, lived her dream, and discovered the depths of her own strength and courage.
Young readers will thrill to this breathless story of courage and determination set in the Alaska wilderness. Abandoned by their mother in Seattle, thirteen year old twins Annie and David Ross enlist the help of Lars Hansen, an elderly commercial fisherman, to find their father in Alaska. In late November, when most fishing vessels are decommissioned for the winter, the trio sets out from Puget Sound in a forty foot salmon troller for an eight hundred mile journey along the Inside Passage. Pursued by the authorities as runaways, and with Lars's health failing, the three experience one adventure after another as they inch their way North, through terrifying winter storms and frightening encounters with strangers. In the process, Annie and David also make new, lasting friendships and kindle personal reserves of strength that they didn't know existed.
Discover the rich landscape and scenic beauty of Alaska's Inside Passage, including Skagway, Haines, Juneau, Sitka, Petersburg, Wrangell, and Ketchikan. Alaska's Southeast details the region's history, culture, geography, and flora and fauna. It also provides extensive information on when to go, what to bring, how to get there and how to get around, where to eat, and where to stay. With more than 10 million acres of forest, 1,000 islands, 10,000 miles of shoreline, 50 to 70 major glaciers, and thousands of brown bears and eagles, Alaska's Southeast offers much to be explored.
The bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land takes us along the Inside Passage, 1,000 miles of often treacherous water, which he navigates solo in a 35-foot sailboat, offering captivating discourses on art, philosophy, and navigation and an unsparing narrative of personal loss. "A work of great beauty and inexhaustible fervor." —The Washington Post Book World With the same rigorous observation (natural and social), invigorating stylishness, and encyclopedic learning that he brought to his National Book Award-winning Bad Land, Jonathan Raban conducts readers along the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau. But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and cultures: the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers—between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class.
Before Alaska became a mining bonanza, it was a scenic bonanza, a place larger in the American imagination than in its actual borders. Prior to the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, thousands of scenic adventurers journeyed along the Inside Passage, the nearly thousand-mile sea-lane that snakes up the Pacific coast from Puget Sound to Icy Strait. Both the famous—including wilderness advocate John Muir, landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, and photographers Eadweard Muybridge and Edward Curtis—and the long forgotten—a gay ex-sailor, a former society reporter, an African explorer, and a neurasthenic Methodist minister—returned with fascinating accounts of their Alaskan journeys, becoming advance men and women for an expanding United States. In Darkest Alaska explores the popular images conjured by these travelers' tales, as well as their influence on the broader society. Drawing on lively firsthand accounts, archival photographs, maps, and other ephemera of the day, historian Robert Campbell chronicles how Gilded Age sightseers were inspired by Alaska's bounty of evolutionary treasures, tribal artifacts, geological riches, and novel thrills to produce a wealth of highly imaginative reportage about the territory. By portraying the territory as a "Last West" ripe for American conquest, tourists helped pave the way for settlement and exploitation.
In a tale remarkable for its quiet confidence and acute natural observation, the author of Paddling Hawaii begins with her decision, at age 60, to undertake a solo, summer-long voyage along the southeast coast of Alaska in an inflatable kayak. Paddling North is a compilation of Sutherland’s first two (of over 20) such annual trips and her day-by-day travels through the Inside Passage from Ketchikan to Skagway. With illustrations and the author’s recipes.
