"The stories are gripping in the way the best adventure writing is, with enough danger and discovery to keep the reader turning pages way past bedtime. ... Indeed, the real protagonist is Alaska itself, which 'makes everything ordinary impossible to bear.' Thanks to C.B. Bernard's assured storytelling and vibrant prose style, we understand that sentiment very well."

—Peter Geye, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Alaska makes everything ordinary impossible to bear.”

As a young writer, C.B. Bernard lashed his canoe to his truck and pointed the bow upstream, north and west, seeking a different life than the one he’d known in his native New England. He found it in Sitka, a small fishing town on an island where Southeast Alaska collides with the Pacific, working as a journalist and exploring the woods and waters of his new home. He’d leapt blindly and had landed on top of his own family’s history.

A century earlier, a distant relative, Captain Joe Bernard, had also left home for a new life in Alaska. For decades he’d sailed the Arctic in his schooner Teddy Bear, living among the Eskimo and Inuit “east of Barrow and north of everything.” His journals recount the shipwrecks and horrific winters he survived, his bouts with scurvy and starvation, and his observations about the land he came to love and the people who called it home.

As C.B. chased the legacy of his explorer relative up the family tree, he recovered those journals and used them to guide his own exploration of Alaska. The overlap of his stories and Joe’s form a landscape view of the remarkable place that lured them both, two men anchored beneath the Northern Lights separated only by time. Equal parts memoir, journalism, and historical adventure, Chasing Alaska is the author’s moving portrait of the Last Frontier then and now. Discover the wilds and wonders of Alaska through the eyes of two men a century apart in this critically acclaimed book.

Finalist for a 2014 Oregon Book Award

Publishers Weekly Top 10 Pick | National Geographic Top 10 Pick

North Shore Magazine Summer Read | Excerpted in the Utne Reader

Amazon.com Bestseller | Bask Magazine Top Pick

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