Category: Blog Posts

The Strong Heart Series

Three books, stand-alone, one grand story….wilderness, adventure, coming of age, great animals, ancient legends….Scroll down for reviews and reactions….available everywhere books are sold….Available from Ingram Content Group

Set on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula and along the British Columbia coast, these tales follow an ornery young girl as she finds her power in an impossible way.

Strong Heart: One early summer Sarah Cooley, 14, orphaned, lands on the doorstep of a grandfather unaware he has a granddaughter, just as he and his friends are about to head into the wilderness. They decide to take her along to teach her a lesson. All too soon they discover she may be taking them….

Adrift: The following December, in the Gulf of Alaska, the container ship Seattle Express catches fire, forcing the crew to take to the lifeboats. One lifeboat crashes ashore against Haida Gwaii, remote islands in the Gulf of Alaska. A down and out salvage company races to seize the drifting ship. While the marooned sailors struggle to survive, relatives back on the Olympic Peninsula hatch a desperate rescue plan…..

Totem: That spring, Sarah and her companions want to return to Bear Valley in Olympic National Park before Buckhorn Corporation starts mining there, to see it one last time. At the same time, strange elk kills start appearing around the park and then deep in the interior. Sarah’s companions experience dreams or visions of an ancient past that somehow reflect their present reality just as impossible animals appear. Everything comes to a head in Bear Valley…..

Going both ways across the Land Bridge

Now it seems there is some evidence humans used the Bering Land Bridge to pass from the Americas back to Eurasia…..

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-dna-evidence-charts-native-american-migrations-back-across-the-bering-sea-180981435/

Further evidence – ancient seafaring

Check out this article arguing that ancient humans reached some islands in the Mediterranean sea as long ago as 450,000 years, by boat, not on foot. If this is true, those humans were not modern homo sapiens but homo erectus, suggesting that hominids became capable sailors hundreds of thousands of years ago. If this is true (and I believe it is) then all theories about human migration need to fully explore the notion humans sailed the coast and among islands, out of sight of land, just as often, if not more often, than undertaking long journeys over land. This makes sense, if you think about it, because during these times there were many periods when great ice sheets covered the land, not to mention all the enormous meat eating predators who were, then, the apex predators – short face bear, dire wolf, cats…..

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040618222002774