Setting off in an overloaded canoe, they journeyed down the Yukon River and walked upstream into the remote Brooks Range to build a cabin and live off the land. She was twenty-two, daughter of a famous woman adventurer. He was her childhood sweetheart. Four years later, they emerged from the Alaskan wilds. Now in her sixties, Jean Aspen updates her spellbinding tale of adventure in a harsh and beautiful land for a new generation. ARCTIC DAUGHTER is at once an extraordinary journey of self-discovery and a lyrical odyssey. A READER'S DIGEST book selection, this remarkable tale of survival and courage measures the value of dreams against the unforgiving realities of the natural world. First published in 1988 by Bergamot Books, Minneapolis, MN. “This stark, philosophical work chronicles Aspen, an artist and daughter of the author-adventurer Connie Helmer¬icks, who, at the age of 22, chose to sojourn into the wil¬derness of Alaska, above the Arctic Circle, and live off the land. Aspen was accompanied by her first husband-to-be Phil; her harsh, relentlessly honest journal depicts two stoics who ate salted and dried horse meat, berries, eve¬n under miserable circumstances raw, rubbery moose that contained ‘the wriggly pearl of a maggot.’ The couple encountered no other humans for almost a year, and in that time the author sought the ‘essence of experience . . . that elusive something that makes the world sparkle.’ Aspen believed that civilization snatches away more than it gives in return: ‘I’m not certain that all our toys are worth what we pay for them.’ Rather, she endured the brutal weather and exalted when the sun returned after a 60-day absence: ‘Life isn’t safe, no matter how carefully you plan. . . . You may as well enjoy the ride.’ Aspen’s journey isn’t pretty reading, but her voice is memorable and her endurance marvelous.” ―PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "Full of fine sense details . . . fascinating reading . . . joins that scant handful of good books by women about the challenge and hard-won joy of bush life lived to its fullest.” ―THE ANCHORAGE TIMES Daughter of Arctic explorer Constance Helmericks, Jean Aspen began life in the wilderness. Throughout six decades, the natural world has remained central to her. Jean is also the author of ARCTIC SON. She and her husband, Tom Irons, live in Alaska and spend much of each year in Alaskan wilds. Finding the old gold town put us at last on the map, and we carefully marked each day’s travel with little penciled lines. It was encouraging to see the daily change in the landscape that now marked our upstream progress. The river no longer rambled freely, but was often bounded on one side or the other by a two-hundred-foot cutbank, confining it to a broad glacial cut where it swung from side to side as if seeking escape. I tried to imagine what the land had looked like ten thousand years ago when a massive ice field capped the Brooks Range and a river of ice had carved this valley. A people very much like ourselves had hunted moose and bear in the Yukon flats, and fished the rivers washing out of the glaciers. In the fall, they picked cranberries and blueberries with their children, and in the spring they saw the ice go out and watched the birds return. They nursed their babies and cared for their old people and told stories around the night fires. One day the river swung abruptly, butting into the bare bones of a mountain mass. For some time it had paralleled the range as if undecided, then turned resolutely northward, wedging open a wide valley into its secret heart. Soon we were leaving our familiar gray crags behind for another set of landmarks. As the river began its climb in earnest, we developed a different method for surmounting rapids. These were now strewn with large boulders, “boat eaters” we called them, interspersed with deep holes. Water gushed over slippery rocks the size of basketballs and crumbling bluffs often dropped steeply into the river at a bend, affording no beach. In the past, we had grabbed the bow and muscled the canoe up the watery stairs together. Now one of us braced against a boulder, holding the craft in the turbulence of its wake, while the other worked the rope upstream. Finding secure footing, the one with the rope would haul the canoe (and the person guiding it) hand-over-hand up the racing chute. Already behind us lay nearly a thousand feet of elevation. We were approaching another fork in the river when we pitched camp on a sandy, white beach late one afternoon. It was a clear, still day and the low-hanging sun gave the country that peculiar golden quality that outlines every detail in color. A few yards upstream a sandspit protruded into the current in graduating shades of blue, sheltering the canoe from the main stream. There were few mosquitoes on the bar. Their numbers naturally diminish by midsummer. We stripped off our clothes and hung them on small willow bushes to dry. A slight breeze tickled the naked hairs on my back and legs as