Once again Anchorage Daily News and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner book reviewer David A. James has selected one of my books to share with his readers, and his point-by-point overview of the book is a good roadmap for anyone interested in Arctic travels of the past. The book was written almost a century ago by Will Hudson, a news photographer working for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who happens upon the chance to join an Arctic adventure which challenges him to the core, but as James writes: “From start to finish Hudson never loses his enthusiasm nor his humor. This book is a gem.”

The book is Icy Hell: Experiences of a news reel cameraman in the Aleutian Islands, Eastern Siberia, and the Arctic fringe of Alaska, by Will Hudson, A.S.C.; published in June, 2026 by Northern Light Media, first published in 1937.

James: “Hudson’s tale begins nonchalantly enough on the streets of Seattle. In the spring of that fateful year he was working as a news photographer and happened to bump into an acquaintance of his, Captain Louis Lane, who promptly invited him along on a six month trip to Alaska and Siberia. Five days later Hudson sailed off aboard the Polar Bear, unaware of the odyssey that would soon enough follow.”

The Polar Bear, a 90’ 81-ton schooner built in 1911 by E. W. Heath Co. of Seattle, had been chartered by a group of college graduates who wanted to go to Alaska to go hunting. The cost of the trip was sponsored by Harvard University, and possibly to justify the expense, the school sent two naturalists along to collect natural history specimens and provide a kind of scientific purpose to the trip. Will Hudson had been invited to come along as the official cinematographer. When the ship was caught by pack ice and forced to overwinter on the exposed coast of northern Alaska, the captain, Hudson, and two other men left the ice-bound ship to be cared for by its capable crew and traveled south with two dog teams, crossing the uncharted Brooks Range.

David James writes: “The final section of the book tells of that adventure. Taking 10 dogs, the quartet, soon accompanied by a young Inuit man as a guide, traversed the Endicott Mountains and dropped into the Interior, fighting ice and ground conditions, inadequate gear, and temperatures as cold as 60 below. It didn’t stop them from observing the beauty however.

“’Great prismatic bands were playing across the skies like giant searchlights,’ Hudson writes of the Aurora.”

As James so rightly notes, “This book is a gem.”