Jill Fredston · 2001 · survival

Jill Fredston's 2001 memoir of rowing more than twenty thousand miles along the coasts and rivers of the far north. Over many summers she and her husband Doug Fesler explored the shorelines of Alaska, Arctic Canada, Labrador, Greenland, Svalbard and Norway in small open boats, self-sufficient and alone with the ice, the storms and the bears. This route stitches those separate expeditions into a single sweep across the Arctic's edge.

1. 1
   Seattle

   Jill Fredston and her husband Doug Fesler begin their decades of northern rowing on the Pacific coast, setting out in 1986 for Alaska.

2. 2
   Skagway

   They row the thousand-mile Inside Passage to Skagway, the first of the long summer journeys that will become a way of life.

3. 3
   The Chukchi Sea

   In other years they trace the Alaskan shore and the great rivers north to the Chukchi Sea, rowing backwards along the edge of the continent under the midnight sun.

4. 4
   The Mackenzie Delta

   Down the Mackenzie and along the Beaufort coast they go, dragging their boats over jumbled ice and watching warily for grizzlies and polar bears.

5. 5
   Labrador

   Far to the east they row the iron coast of Labrador, feeling their way through fog so thick that water and air become one.

6. 6
   Greenland

   Among the icebergs and fjords of Greenland they round headland after headland, small boats against an immense and fragile wilderness.

7. 7
   Svalbard

   North again to Svalbard, deep in the high Arctic, where the ice and the bears and the endless daylight press close.

8. 8
   Nordkapp

   And along the Norwegian coast to the North Cape, twenty thousand miles of shoreline gathered, oar-stroke by oar-stroke, into one life lived at the edge.