Icy Hell

In the Spring of 2026 Northern Light Media reprinted Will E. Hudson’s rare and hard to find 1937 book, Icy Hell: Experiences of a news-reel cameraman in the Aleutian Islands, Eastern Siberia and the Arctic fringes of Alaska. 

The book describes the travels of a private hunting and exploring party on a 1913 trip in the schooner Polar Bear, through the Bering Strait into the Beaufort Sea, then east to Demarcation Point, and then overland by dogsled to Ft. Yukon when the Polar Bear became trapped in the sea ice.

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, he had worked as the first still photographer on the staff of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer since 1908.

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, stopping in Fort Yukon, and mushing up the Yukon River to Circle. From there they rode on horse-drawn sledges to Fairbanks, then continued south to Cordova and home to Seattle in time for Christmas.

Hudson noted: “No one had ever made a trip directly through the Endicotts by the course we were contemplating. We had been told by some natives earlier in the season that it could be made from where we had located our camp.”