When We Walked on Frozen Rivers

Book excerpt: Frozen Rivers is another spellbinding memoir in Elisabeth Weigand’s YukonWild Series. In our times of pain and suffering, this series brings to the reader something beautifully positive. A life when lived with purpose and virtue can be long enough. Each chapter is steeped in the author’s love of wilderness, her desire for adventure and her familiar intimacy with the land. Weigand orients the reader to the merits of slowing down the pace of life and reflecting on the significance of the smallest of our decisions. Frozen Rivers takes people to one of the purest places in Canada’s northern landscape: A distant fly-in trapline where Weigand and her partner spend the first of their winters understanding and exercising traditional life skills, adjusting to nature’s regulations and discovering the bliss of shared seclusion and the satisfaction when less is more. Her writing is evocative and poetic, humorous and informative, held together with atmospheric descriptions of the untamed heart of the Yukon Territory. A land that is bigger than us.