While she missed the comforts of home and the feeling of being connected to friends and family, she began to see that disconnecting from technology and truly immersing herself in nature inspired her in a way she never could have imagined. With windchills dipping to 50 degrees below zero, Aidan and Edna ventured out each day to hunt, giving Aidan a hands-on lesson in skinning, butchering and handling a gun - even sticking her hands inside the warm carcass of a caribou to thaw out her frozen fingers. But after several weeks, Campbell started noticing a change in Aidan - she was becoming more self-sufficient, confident and capable, so much so that they returned a few months later to help Heimo secure food for the winter. It is an ode to America’s disappearing wilderness and a profound meditation on the role of nature in a child’s development.Īt first, Campbell hovered over Aidan as she fished for Arctic grayling in grizzly country, limbed and peeled logs with an axe and drawknife and tried to impress Heimo.
“Braving It: A Father, a Daughter, and an Unforgettable Journey into the Alaskan Wild,” chronicles the three transformative trips that Campbell and Aidan made to Alaska. Aidan decided she was up for the challenge and for the time with her father, and so began a unique father-daughter adventure. But, as Campbell reminded his daughter, there would also be beauty: rivers with crystal-clear water, rugged mountains and meadows filled with blueberries. There would be 12–hour days, mosquitoes, bears and only an ice-cold creek to wash in. The trip would not be easy: Heimo and his wife Edna, a Siberian Yupik Eskimo, spend 10 months of every year in the refuge, where they survive on their skills as hunter-trapper-gatherers, 80 miles from the nearest neighbor, and 300 from the closest hospital. She was a good student and athlete, but he felt she lacked the life skills she would need once she left home. So when James Campbell’s cousin Heimo Korth (featured on The Last Alaskans on Discovery Channel and in Campbell’s book, “The Final Frontiersman,” which New York Times bestselling author Bill Bryson called “inspiring, unnerving, and never less than wholly absorbing”) asked him to spend a summer building a cabin on the remote Alaskan tundra, Campbell hesitated to extend the invitation to his fifteen-year-old daughter, Aidan. Don’t miss it!Īlaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to only a handful of people, is a stark and lonely place. Theirs is a powerful and affirming adventure narrative about a father-daughter bond and the wilderness as a stage for personal growth. for a book talk and slide show with James Campbell and his daughter, Aidan, as they recount their incredible adventures together in Alaska.
Join us at the library on Wednesday, Aug.
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