The powerful and affirming story of a father's journey with his
teenage daughter to the far reaches of Alaska
Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, home to only a handful of
people, is a harsh and lonely place. So when James Campbell's cousin
Heimo Korth asked him to spend a summer building a cabin in the rugged
Interior, Campbell hesitated about inviting his fifteen-year-old
daughter, Aidan, to join him: Would she be able to withstand clouds of
mosquitoes, the threat of grizzlies, bathing in an ice-cold river, and
hours of grueling labor peeling and hauling logs?
But once there, Aidan embraced the wild. She even agreed to return a few
months later to help the Korths work their traplines and hunt for
caribou and moose. Despite windchills of 50 degrees below zero, father
and daughter ventured out daily to track, hunt, and trap. Under the
supervision of Edna, Heimo's Yupik Eskimo wife, Aidan grew more
confident in the woods.
Campbell knew that in traditional Eskimo cultures, some daughters earned
a rite of passage usually reserved for young men. So he decided to take
Aidan back to Alaska one final time before she left home. It would be
their third and most ambitious trip, backpacking over Alaska's Brooks
Range to the headwaters of the mighty Hulahula River, where they would
assemble a folding canoe and paddle to the Arctic Ocean. The journey
would test them, and their relationship, in one of the planet's most
remote places: a land of wolves, musk oxen, Dall sheep, golden eagles,
and polar bears.
At turns poignant and humorous, Braving It is an ode to America's
disappearing wilderness and a profound meditation on what it means for a
child to grow up--and a parent to finally, fully let go.
