Gates of the Arctic National Park: Twelve Years of Wilderness Exploration

“The Arctic wilderness is incredibly beautiful,” states Joe Wilkins in Gates of the Arctic National Park. Looking at Wilkins’ photographs throughout this book, this is almost an understatement–through superb photography he demonstrates breathtaking, spectacular sceneries page after page, stunning the reader with his images. This is a very beautiful book with plenty of text to explain what Wilkins describes during his backpacking, canoeing, and kayaking trips. He starts his book with nice location maps. His writing is very good, very easy to read, giving us details about several wilderness trips with different partners as well as details about the sceneries, richly illustrated with photographs. He leaves nothing out; we see close-ups of berries, mushrooms, and flowers, and also wildlife photos of grizzly bears, gray wolves, squirrels, moose, caribou, musk oxen, and so on. For the more stunning sceneries, he uses full-page photos and for others smaller formats, many with informative captions. But Wilkins overdoes the hundreds of photos in this book. There are way too many unnecessary photos of seaplanes taking off, landing, and flying in the air, and an excessive number of pictures of camping gear and self-portraits. These are filler snapshots distracting the reader from the real story.