These musings are mine, and welcome to them. A retired university librarian and previously a bookseller, I’m director of the Alaska Center for Horace Kephart Studies, an informal institution staffed by one man and a Golden Retriever. We see no significant grants in our future.
Horace Kephart (1862-1931) was a librarian and outdoor writer. He was highly thought of in his day, in both spheres. Why bother to read Kephart today? The purpose of the Center is to bring Kephart, who still has much to say to us, back to a modern audience. Click here for a brief intro to Kephart’s life.
More broadly, the Center is interested in the vigorous tradition of American outdoor and exploration writing in its Golden Age between the Civil War and the Great Depression, when the world was still fresh and mysterious. There are lots of wonderful writers out there, and interesting resources and websites dealing with camping, canoeing, bicycling, sailing, woodcraft, mountaineering, and vintage adventuring. Besides Kephart, other writers of this ilk include George Washington Sears (“Nessmuk”), Daniel Carter Beard, Ernest Seton-Thompson, Stewart Edward White, Albert Bigelow Paine, Warren Miller, William Long, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Dr Frederick A. Cook, Robert E. Peary, Capt. Joshua Slocum, Fanny Bullock Workman, and many others of this grand and cantankerous cadre of outdoor writers, male and female.
Here under appropriate categories are also observations, some dubious for sure, about other topics of interest to the proprietor and the dog, both with short but exuberant attention spans.
This happens from Vole Manor, on Chena Ridge looking east across the Tanana River and the Tanana Valley of Interior Alaska. Welcome to our world. Comments are welcome.
—Dennis Stephens
