The North Face of Summer — Cirque Journal

The North Face of Summer: An Alaskan Novel

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Editions:Paperback: $ 20.00

ISBN: 979-8901557648
Size: 6.00 x 9.00 in
Pages: 501

It’s June, 1979, and many Alaskans are furious. President Jimmy Carter has “locked up” 100 million acres of federal lands in the state, severely limiting what can be done on them. The Kantishna Hills just west of Mt. McKinley National Park are now in a national monument, and long-established placer gold mining operations are subject to Park Service rules and oversight. However, the miners are refusing to cooperate and are angrily protesting. Equally determined environmentalists, led by the Sierra Club, are demanding that the Park Service shut down the mining.

Over the summer, tension and threats of violence in the Kantishna community increase. The story unfolds through the eyes of miners, Park Service officials, lodge operators, and visitors who are caught up in the conflict. Several of them are also dealing with personal and family issues. As they interact with each other and react to events occurring around them, they change and grow. However, the controversy over the mining remains stalemated.

Read What Other Authors Have Said about The North Face of Summer

Set in Interior Alaska in 1979, The North Face of Summer vividly portrays the clash between gold miners and environmentalists in the newly created Denali National Monument. Russell Tabbert’s story dramatizes the impact that this conflict has on the lives of an extraordinary cast of characters. It opens up a fascinating world of adventure, beauty and conflict in the shadow of North America’s highest peak.

— John Morgan, author of The Hungers of the World: New and Collected Later Poems, and The Nancy Poems

Russell Tabbert’s novel spreads itself out on the Denali landscape and covers the ground between those who work hard to extract a living from the dirt and those who seek re-creation by absorbing its natural beauty. He succeeds in showing how the space between their myopic visions is the true wilderness in which the characters have to cross. I especially enjoy how he portrays love as being vital to their survival. The North Face of Summer is a very sweet novel, entertaining, and although set nearly 50 years ago, relevant. Whenever I had to stop reading, I became anxious to step back into the Alaskan scene he brings to life.

— Dave Rowan, author of Loggers Don’t Make Love and Around the Edge of the Olympics on a Mountain Bike

Published: December 10, 2025
Publisher: Cirque Press
Imprint: Cirque Press
Editors:

Michael Burwell (Website)

Cover Artists:

Signe Nichols

Genres:

Alaska, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Tags:

Russell Tabbert

Tabbert received a BA in English and a PhD in English linguistics from the University of Iowa. He taught at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. His major research project was gathering data for and compiling the Dictionary of Alaskan English (1991). It is an “on-historical-principles” record of words that are unique to or highly characteristic of English used in Alaska. It was well reviewed in scholarly journals and in Alaskan publications, and it received a special commendation from the Alaska Library Association.

In retirement Tabbert has done free-lance editing and volunteer prairie and woodland restoration near his home in Grinnell, Iowa.

Tabbert had no intention of ever writing a novel. But in 1992, Bobby Waller, his former childhood neighbor in Rockford, Iowa, published The Bridges of Madison County (as Robert James Waller). Tabbert was amazed that it was such a huge commercial success. Having time on his hands, he decided to write a short parody of the story focused on two libidinous teenagers isolated in the Alaskan wilds instead of the cornfields of Iowa. He set it in the summer of 1979 when the controversy over the national monument “lock-up” was raging. But once he got started, he couldn’t help trying to make it a straightforward story with believable characters in likely settings and situations reflecting the D-2 and ANILCA battles. So over many years of dropping it and then coming back to it, it now is what it is.

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