Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzle Bears' Trail

by Karsten Heuer

Book Overview

* Karsten Heuer walks with North American mammals from Yellowstone to the Yukon (Y2Y) to document the animals that use this natural corridor and learn its importance * Preserving the Y2Y corridor has become one of the most critical environmental issues of our day * Winner of the Banff Book Award for Mountain Literature * Grants will fund a multi-city author tour for lectures and presentations related to the Y2Y initiative Walking the Big Wild is the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0898869838
• ISBN13: 9780898869835
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Mountaineers Books
• Length: 258 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Read!

I've read a lot of non-fiction wilderness books and this is in the top 10 of my list. It's written very well and entertaining. I never heard of the Y2Y project until I read this book. Fascinating! I have driven through the Yukon, been to Yellowstone and BC. I think it's a great project and I hope that it continues to receive a more positive response. I highly recommend this book.

So well written I felt I was there

This is a great book. A must read if you care about the wilderness,wildlife & people you will enjoy reading this. If you don't know how you feel about the wilderness,wildlife & humans, you must read this. It was wonderful to see how he got people to pay attention that thought they knew how they felt.

Read it!

An easy, entertaining read and a nice snapshot of the good and bad elements currently effecting the Yellowstone to Yukon region. Through a personal story Karsten makes both his huge trek and the region's biological challenges seem relatively easy to face. This is an important feat conssidering he and others hope to engage and mobilize thousands in a pioneering international conservation initiative. As a PS, I was surprised to learn the Canadians were doing as much, if not more, damage to the environment then we 'mericans. And I thought they were so innocent up there.

Trying to make Y2Y real, and problems on BOTH sides of the border

Y2Y, if you're not eco-minded, is "Yellowstone to Yukon." The idea behind is that large animals, above all grizzlies, need a lot of room to roam -- and this room needs to be adequately networked and connected, with as few human-disturbed chokepoints as possible. Well, Karsten Heuer, a native of Canmore, Alberta, and a former Parks Canada ranger at Banff, decided to hike all the way from Yellowstone National Park to the British Columbia-Yukon border -- more than 2,000 kilometers/1,200 miles, and involving skiing and canoeing, not just hiking. Breaks in the trip were jam-packed with PR work on both sies of the border. This book is about his trip. It's also about some of the problems the development of Y2Y corridor would face. Surprising for many from the American side of the border (and contrary to one brief reviewer, this is about preserving ALL the Rockies, not just the American portion of those mountains) overall, more of the problems are probably on the Canadian side of the border. And that's in spite of the often anti-environmental leadership that currently resides in Washington, D.C. Both exploratory oil drilling and coal mining crowd closer to the heart of the Rockies north of the border. Logging in the north involves more rapacious cutting, often clear-cutting in places it wouldn't be allowed in the U.S. What's driving this is Canada's governmental structure, which is even more "provincial rights" in *reality*, in many ways, than the U.S.'s is "states rights" in *hyperbole.* And the Alberta and B.C. provincial governments have generally been as knee-jerk pro-development as California's anti-environmental Congressman Richard Pombo -- and in a position to do more with that. Read this book, complete with stunning photos, to show why Y2Y needs preserving.

Glaciers, wild animals, & personal difficulties

Walking The Big Wild: From Yellowstone To The Yukon On The Grizzly Bears' Trail by wildlife biologist and member of the Y2Y Conservation Initiative Karsten Heuer, is the expressive and panoramic saga of an incredible 3,400 kilometer hike from the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming to the shores of Watson Lake in the Yukon. A captivating, descriptive, informative journey showcasing the splendor of nature and revealing its intense vulnerability to human expansion, Walking The Big Wild is a grand saga of glaciers, wild animals, personal difficulties, and great physical challenges, and very highly recommended reading for non-specialist general readers with an interest in environmental issues, nature and wildlife, and Rocky Mountain and Canadian wilderness enthusiasts.