Alaska Literary Map

My father first handed me a copy of “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer when I was 14. Like most kids growing up in Colorado, I had dreams of making it as a mountaineer someday, and had already devoured all of Krakauer’s writings at that point (to this day, I can still remember how I first envisioned Talkeetna as he described it in “Eiger Dreams”). The main topic of the book aside, my impressions of the people and places described in the book, particularly the Alaskans along Stampede Trail where much of the book’s drama takes place, are still quite vivid in my mind. Twenty years later, I now live along the famed road, where I often encounter pilgrims making a trek to the Magic Bus, hitching a ride as far as the road goes. Or at least I did, until the bus was removed in 2020.

When a friend shared an article with me in 2014, published by Brooklyn Magazine which included a map of the “Best Book for Every State”, I took issue with the book chosen to represent Alaska: “Into the Wild”. Although many Alaskans have very strong feelings about the subject matter of “Into the Wild” (and, in some cases, have very strong feelings even about the author), I felt that there were hundreds of other books written by Alaskans that better expressed a sense of place in this diverse state. And as a cartographer, I set out to create a more representative map of Alaska. The ensuing project consumed the better part of three winters (2014-2016), with many of those dark days of the North spent in the Alaskana section of the University of Alaska Fairbanks library.

The final product was the Alaska Literary Map, which includes four layers of georeferenced annotation available as a static image. In 2016, I had hosted a StoryMap in ArcGIS Online to share the interactive maps, but after changes in technology and accounts, the link is no broken. As I stand up a new Storymap and blog post describing the GIS details of the map, as well as add books that have been written within the past decade, enjoy the link below to the large format map.