Ptarmigan Song

Steve Durr was 14 years old in 1964 when his adventurer father pulled him and the rest of his young family out of a comfortable life in central New York for a year of wilderness living in Alaska. There were no girls. There were no cars or movie theatres or milkshakes or dances. But amid the profound beauty of Southwestern Alaska's Wood River Lakes region, the teenager found something else, and his life would shift forever. Ptarmigan Song is an Alaskan memoir of one family's first year of bush living. It was a time before cell phones, before the pipeline, before snowmobiles ruled the trails- an Alaska gone by. They didn't know what they were doing, but as Steve's father liked to remind them, "We learn by going where we have to go."