The Accidental Explorer

Alaska is a place of great adventure and exploration. After having lived in the Great Land for nearly all of her life, Sherry Simpson realized that she had not scaled mountains, trekked across wild tundra, or blazed trails through virgin forests. Did that fact make her less of an Alaskan? In the series of essays that comprise The Accidental Explorer, Sherry Simpson recounts the experiences of an ordinary woman confronting the great expanses of water and untracked land in Alaska, as she makes her best efforts to map her sense of place and her sense of self in a land that seems to require exploration of its inhabitants. While undertaking arduous treks into the backcountry, she falls into a glacial river and nearly drowns. On an archetypal epic solo hike, she ruminates constantly on when and whether she should abandon that folly. She writes with both humor and humility, harnessing great powers of observation of the natural world. In a downright scary encounter with a mildly aggressive bear, Simpson shrinks from any supposed Alaskan larger-than-life persona to assume her place on the food chain: an urbanized human who is appropriately afraid of big bears. Simpson also offers up the (less reverent) Alaskan view of Chris McCandles, the wanderer who perished in an abandoned bus near Denali, subject of Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. Can an ordinary, not especially heroic, person be an adventurer? If she sets out, in a wild place like Alaska, what will she find out there, and what will she learn about the place back home? Throughout this compelling and probing book, Sherry Simpson illuminates the act of exploration as both a feat of extraordinary effort and as an everyday experience.

Simpson, a freelance journalist, asks the question of whether or not an ordinary person can become a true adventurer. A lifelong Alaskan native, the author realized she had not truly explored the land around her and finally undertook an expedition through the back country, encountering aggressive bears, dangerous glacial rivers and her own mounting fears. She also examines the life of Christopher McCandless, subject of the recent film Into the Wild, providing an even larger context for the riskiness of her endeavor. Her prose is at times poetic and abstract, but the more practical points should be of note to anyone who desires a little more adventure in their lives. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Sherry Simpson's first book, The Way Winter Comes, won the Chinook Literary Award. She teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where she lives.