Adventure — on her own terms

"The Accidental Explorer: Wayfinding in Alaska"

by Sherry Simpson

Sasquatch, 240 pp., $23.95

In "The Accidental Explorer," Sherry Simpson writes about a secret book in the Denali National Park hotel where clerks recorded the bizarre questions asked by the tourists.

A friend showed Simpson the book: What struck her most was a question by an older man who wrote in the book: "How far do I have to go before I can say I've been there?"

Simpson grew up in Alaska. But, as she grew older, she realized she hadn't really been there: "I never became the sort of Alaskan who flies planes, kills wild animals, fishes open seas, climbs mountains or treks through the backcountry as if it were no more troublesome than driving to the local 7-Eleven for a newspaper," she writes in "The Accidental Explorer: Wayfinding in Alaska," a collection of essays about life in the Far North.

It wasn't until her mid-30s that Simpson took a demanding backpacking trip after developing an obsessive passion for collecting old Alaskan maps. "For my birthday one year," she writes, "I begged my husband to buy me an edition of the 'Compilation of Narratives of Explorations in Alaska,' published by the government in 1900." It was time to discover Alaska herself, tracing the routes of the explorers whose adventures she devoured. "How would I ever recognize home unless I could find my way there through a wilderness?" she wrote.

The book is filled with stories of early Alaska explorers and authors: conservationist John Muir; T.A. Richard, who wrote about the Klondike Gold Rush; Lt. Joseph Castner, who walked 500 miles from the southern coast of Alaska to the Tanana River; Judge James Wickersham, the first climber to attempt a summit of Mount McKinley in 1903; and even Christopher McCandless, whose body was found in an old school bus outside of Fairbanks and became the subject of a best-selling book, Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild."

She tells of a sailing trip around Admiralty Island near Juneau, where she grew up. She hikes miles to the foot of Mount McKinley, or Denali as she calls it, tracing the steps of Judge Wickersham. She writes of walking down a dirt path in Gustavus, the entry to Glacier Bay, and sees a for-sale sign tacked to a house. "I photographed it from the road and sent the film to my husband with instructions to develop the photographs, fall in love and then visit the bank and ask for money," she writes. "He finally agreed, solving for X in one of those marital quadratic equations: He loves me, and I love the house and though he does not love the house yet, someday he will."

In explaining the book's title, Simpson writes, "I will never climb any mountains, never appear in any record books, never make the cover of Outside magazine. Never will I be a professional adventurer or even a half-assed adventurer. At most, I can hope to become an accidental explorer whose only wish is to bust away the maddening brittle Styrofoam of daily life, to be creative through the simple act of pulling on my boots and walking out the door."