From Publishers Weekly
In this lyrical look at rowing some of the world's most isolated and pristine coasts, Fredston focuses as much on her personal experience and her relationship with her husband, Doug Fesler, as she does on their actual journeys. The two avalanche experts, researchers and rescue trainers canoe the Arctic and sub-Arctic coastlines of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Norway and Sweden for three months out of each year. They travel together but in separate canoes: an apt metaphor for their marriage. An avid rower since childhood, Fredston ultimately landed in Alaska, drawn by its possibility and wildness. There she met Fesler, the state's leading avalanche authority. They worked and rowed together, and eventually fell in love. Fredston ably describes both the big picture the coastline, encounters with polar bears, the high-stakes game of second-guessing storms and tides and the details of their travels. Her description of the physical act of rowing is rapturous, even sensual: "Sculling is the closest I'll ever come to being a ballerina, to creating visual music." Fredston seems less at ease relating her mother's battle with cancer, near the book's end. Still, the book soars. "Wilderness rowing is far more than sport to me; it has been a conduit to know and trust myself," Fredston explains. "It is my way of being, of thinking, of seeing. In the process, rowing has evolved from something I do to some way that I am. Figuratively and literally I have spent years rowing to latitude." A must-read for armchair travelers, as well as a close and loving look at an intimate relationship. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Growing up in a house on the waters of Long Island, Fredston started rowing at the age of ten, when she got her first rowboat. She and her husband, Doug Fesler, are avalanche experts and codirectors of the Alaska Mountain Safety Center, but during the summer months they explore the desolate reaches of the North, traveling under their own power in oceangoing skulls and kayaks. This is the story of their 20,000-mile water journeys through Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Spitsbergen, and Norway. The pair sees the world pass by in reverse as they row, backwards, down remote rivers and along barren, rugged shorelines. They travel along many of the same routes that Jonathan Waterman detailed in Arctic Crossing (LJ 4/15/01), but Fredston focuses more on the trip and only respectfully mentions contacts with the indigenous people and their culture. Like Waterman, the couple encounters fierce storms, ever-present mosquitoes, and abundant wildlife, but Fredston maintains that it is worth facing all this adversity in order to see and experience the natural beauty of the North. Enjoyable and well written, this first book is sure to be popular in public libraries. John Kenny, San Francisco P.L. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Among the leading avalanche specialists in North America, Fredston and her husband, Doug Fesler, use the proceeds of their work to pursue their first love, rowing in a motorless bliss along the Arctic coastlines. This book started innocently enough--as an annual newsletter to the couple's friends. Often, the narrative flits from subject to subject with the disjointedness of a newsletter--but, then, adventures in the wilderness happen disjointedly. The author, no matter the trouble--bears pawing at her tent at night, storms causing her small boat to spin around in circles--seems to suffer from terminal optimism. The reader waits in vain for fear or terror to show its head. Consequently, some of the natural drama of these travels is lightened. For lives that are solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish, there are good reasons to make these treks. But for those who can't manage to do so, volumes such as this one are the next best things to being there. Allen Weakland
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"As with most trips, Rowing to Latitude rewards you when you finally get to where you're going. Fredston makes you see wilderness as a more precious commodity than you thought, and inspires you to stretch your limits physically and mentally."
--Lynne McNeil, The San Diego Union-Tribune

"An honest and self-aware woman's record of her unusual life...a shrewd analytical look at human existence as a balance of danger and joy."
--Judith Niemi, The Women's Review of Books

"Beguiling."
--Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

"The book is far more¿than an adventure travel narrative. It also is deeply personal memoir and love story."
--Brian Maffly, The Salt Lake Tribune

"[Fredston] sticks to telling good stories about battling, on primitive terms, the weather, the water, the land, the animals and some of the demons that haunt us all."
--Craig Medred, Anchorage Daily News

"[Fredston] provides armchair travelers with a vivid portrait of wilderness rowing...full of intriguing personal digressions and moments of high drama." --John Freeman, The Wall Street Journal



Review
"As with most trips, Rowing to Latitude rewards you when you finally get to where you're going. Fredston makes you see wilderness as a more precious commodity than you thought, and inspires you to stretch your limits physically and mentally."
--Lynne McNeil, The San Diego Union-Tribune

"An honest and self-aware woman's record of her unusual life...a shrewd analytical look at human existence as a balance of danger and joy."
--Judith Niemi, The Women's Review of Books

"Beguiling."
--Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

"The book is far more¿than an adventure travel narrative. It also is deeply personal memoir and love story."
--Brian Maffly, The Salt Lake Tribune

"[Fredston] sticks to telling good stories about battling, on primitive terms, the weather, the water, the land, the animals and some of the demons that haunt us all."
--Craig Medred, Anchorage Daily News

"[Fredston] provides armchair travelers with a vivid portrait of wilderness rowing...full of intriguing personal digressions and moments of high drama." --John Freeman, The Wall Street Journal



Book Description
Jill Fredston has traveled more than twenty thousand miles of the Arctic and sub-Arctic-backwards. With her ocean-going rowing shell and her husband, Doug Fesler, in a small boat of his own, she has disappeared every summer for years, exploring the rugged shorelines of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Spitsbergen, and Norway. Carrying what they need to be self-sufficient, the two of them have battled mountainous seas and hurricane-force winds, dragged their boats across jumbles of ice, fended off grizzlies and polar bears, been serenaded by humpback whales and scrutinized by puffins, and reveled in moments of calm.

As Fredston writes, these trips are "neither a vacation nor an escape, they are a way of life." Rowing to Latitude is a lyrical, vivid celebration of these northern journeys and the insights they inspired. It is a passionate testimonial to the extraordinary grace and fragility of wild places, the power of companionship, the harsh but liberating reality of risk, the lure of discovery, and the challenges and joys of living an unconventional life.



About the Author
Jill Fredston and her husband, Doug Fesler, are avalanche experts and co-directors of the Alaska Mountain Safety Center. When they are not rowing, they live near Anchorage.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
A scull seems an unlikely place for romance; but, after peeling back all the muscle-ripping, digit-freezing, grizzly-fearing drama that's inherent to rowing in the Arctic, that's exactly what you'll find at the heart of Rowing to Latitude. Faithful to that classic literary form, author Jill Fredston and her husband, Doug Fesler, are engaged in an ongoing quest to experience the earth's last remaining truly wild areas. Along the way, we share in their various entanglements -- being showered with the nearly-permanent stench of whale spout, watching innocuous snowdrifts morph rather too quickly into hungry polar bears -- all of which Fredston recounts in a vastly readable style marked by a plucky, self-deprecating wit and a feeling of inclusion for the less athletically/adventurously inclined among her readers.

Fredston's powers of observation are remarkable, concomitant with a gift for conveying them into resonant language: Sea swells are "boiling hydraulics," and a border of coastline on a map becomes a "swatch of decaying lace held to the sky." You can also sense the deep and genuine passion Fredston has for nature in, for example, her simple yet scathing indictment of timber clear-cutting practices or through the elevation to an art form of the simple yet infinitely loving act of carefully cleaning up each campsite to let whoever may follow experience the full thrill of discovering pure wild country. That passion is likewise present in the work's episodic structure.

Whether it's the exhilaration of Alaska's "Inside Passage" or another summer's exploration of the more domesticated Norwegian coast, you understand that for Fredston and Fesler, life may go on in the meantime, but that it is only truly lived with oars in hand. And that feeling, so wonderfully common to Rowing to Latitude as it is to any good romance, is something to be savored. (Janet Dudley)

A Discover Great New Writers Fall 2001 Selection

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Jill Fredston has traveled more than twenty thousand miles of the Arctic and sub-Arctic-backwards. With her ocean-going rowing shell and her husband, Doug Fesler, in a small boat of his own, she has disappeared every summer for years, exploring the rugged shorelines of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Spitsbergen, and Norway. Carrying what they need to be self-sufficient, the two of them have battled mountainous seas and hurricane-force winds, dragged their boats across jumbles of ice, fended off grizzlies and polar bears, been serenaded by humpback whales and scrutinized by puffins, and reveled in moments of calm.
As Fredston writes, these trips are "neither a vacation nor an escape, they are a way of life." Rowing to Latitude is a lyrical, vivid celebration of these northern journeys and the insights they inspired. It is a passionate testimonial to the extraordinary grace and fragility of wild places, the power of companionship, the harsh but liberating reality of risk, the lure of discovery, and the challenges and joys of living an unconventional life.

FROM THE CRITICS

John Freeman - The Wall Street Journal

[Fredston] provides armchair travelers with a vivid portrait of wilderness rowing . . . full of intriguing personal digressions and moments of high drama.

John Marshall - Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Vivid, even poetic . . . A celebration of wild northern places, but also an examination of the lessons gleaned along the way.

Claire Splan - San Francisco Chronicle

Fredston provides a captivating chronicle of her lifelong obsession with rowing and the wild, open spaces it takes her to.

Publishers Weekly

In this lyrical look at rowing some of the world's most isolated and pristine coasts, Fredston focuses as much on her personal experience and her relationship with her husband, Doug Fesler, as she does on their actual journeys. The two avalanche experts, researchers and rescue trainers canoe the Arctic and sub-Arctic coastlines of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Norway and Sweden for three months out of each year. They travel together but in separate canoes: an apt metaphor for their marriage. An avid rower since childhood, Fredston ultimately landed in Alaska, drawn by its possibility and wildness. There she met Fesler, the state's leading avalanche authority. They worked and rowed together, and eventually fell in love. Fredston ably describes both the big picture the coastline, encounters with polar bears, the high-stakes game of second-guessing storms and tides and the details of their travels. Her description of the physical act of rowing is rapturous, even sensual: "Sculling is the closest I'll ever come to being a ballerina, to creating visual music." Fredston seems less at ease relating her mother's battle with cancer, near the book's end. Still, the book soars. "Wilderness rowing is far more than sport to me; it has been a conduit to know and trust myself," Fredston explains. "It is my way of being, of thinking, of seeing. In the process, rowing has evolved from something I do to some way that I am. Figuratively and literally I have spent years rowing to latitude." A must-read for armchair travelers, as well as a close and loving look at an intimate relationship. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal