She was struck by lightening in 1993 (Match to the Heart), her first book of prose received significant acclaim and won the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award (Solace of Open Spaces), and now she sets out on a year long journey of the Circumpolar North for a book “the Farthest North: The End of Ice” (to be published by the National Geographic). No stranger to the North, her book This Cold Heaven is a magisterial reflection on seven years of travel in Greenland, Inuit lives, the enigmatic and compelling Knut Rasmussen, fjords, glaciers, narwhals, and hunting expeditions. More an essayist than a naturalist, her books have a personal and intimate quality, and her themes are the infinite draw of the unknown, the impermanence and beauty of open spaces, and the connectivity of humans to wild lands. Her current expedition will last a year, and take her by dogsled, snowmobile, reindeer, and fixed wing airplane to Alaska, Sápmi, Nunavut, Greenland, Siberia, and Chukotka. She intends to document some of her experiences on her blog, and in various dispatches to NPR’s Morning Edition, National Geographic Magazine, a show of photographs and indigenous art, and a documentary film. The name of her expedition, “Ukiivik,” is Greenlandic for “a place where one stays for the winter.