Review: Couldn't get past the fact flaws.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 22, 2012
First I have to start out by stating my major bias, I was born and raised in Alaska and, like a lot of Alaskans, have a low tolerance for glaring inaccuracies concerning our state. It's a big state with a small population and sometimes we get the impression that writers don't care too much about getting the facts straight because there aren't enough people to know or care if they don't. It's really irritating.There are a lot of fact flaws, like describing the area around Fairbanks as mountainous. Fairbanks is a valley with the Brooks Range to the North and the Alaska Range to the South and East. If they were hiking in either of these ranges Fairbanks would no longer have been the closest town. There are still hills, but nothing an Alaskan would call a mountain.However, the two major things that drove me crazy while reading the book were first; People in Alaska do not call difficult to access wilderness areas The Outback, it's the Bush. Hence the term Bush Pilots. Perhaps the author was uncomfortable with the obvious sexual connotations associated with that term but if that was case she could have used something else like Great Outdoors or Wilderness. The Outback in a term associated with Australia, not Alaska. I no longer live in Alaska so I asked friends who still live there if people were now calling wilderness areas of Alaska The Outback. It wasn't anything they had ever heard, it's still the Bush.Second irritating thing is not specific to Alaska but to anyone who camps or hikes; you never, ever wear denim on a long wilderness hike, once denim gets wet it takes forever to dry. It's like begging for hypothermia! The fact that a person experienced with the outdoors would *specifically ask* someone to bring jeans on a two week hike blew my mind. If you take a flip through a magazine like Outdoors or Backpacker you will never, ever see anyone wearing jeans on a hiking trail, it's only done by inexperienced hikers who don't know better. Any half-way decent outdoor retail store such as Eddie Bauer, REI or North Face could have outfitted her better.Whether the book itself is any good I can't tell you because I was so distracted by the mistakes I couldn't give the writing style my full attention.