KATHERINE KEITH is a wilderness athlete, experience junkie, spiritual questor, long-distance dog musher, and mother to a fifteen-year-old daughter and thirty-five dogs, living above the Arctic Circle in Kotzebue, Alaska. Professionally, and as a jack-of-all-trades survivalist, she is a small business owner, rural Alaska project director, energy engineer, commercial fisherman, and wellness advocate. Accomplishments such as completing six Ironman triathlons and five 1,000-mile dog sled races form the cornerstone of Katherine’s philosophy of generating grit through overcoming real-time obstacles. A never-ending dreamer, Katherine is currently pursuing climbing the seven tallest summits on every continent as a budding alpinist. Above all, she loves spending time star-gazing, chasing northern lights, and playing cribbage by the woodstove with Amelia at camp.

Part Elizabeth Gilbert, part Beryl Markham, Katherine’s story is powerful look at loss, perseverance, and adventure.

Seventeen years ago Katherine fled her childhood home in Minneapolis to the Alaskan Highway in a short-bus-turned-ice-cream-truck-turned-camper. She wasn’t expecting Alaska to cure her, exactly, only to offer escape and perspective and the promise of new adventures as she pursued her childhood dream to survive and thrive in Bush Alaska. This is the story of how Katherine found her way, both despite, and because of, the difficulties of living— and racing—in the remote wilderness. It’s the story of how she learned to put one foot in front of the other, over and over again, while recovering from traumas—first childhood abuse and later the deaths of her newborn daughter, and then her husband the following year, and being left to raise her second daughter on her own in the wilderness.

Needing to find a way out of the numb hollowness that she’d come to accept as normal—she reconnected with endurance pursuits from her teenage years (which included rock climbing and an 1,100 mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail), and has since competed in both a half and full Ironman each year. Long-distance dog sledding later opened yet another a door to a new existence. For Katherine, dog racing across the state of Alaska offered the best of all worlds by combining raw wilderness with solitude and athleticism. She has competed in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race every year since 2014, each time reaching the boundaries of what she thought herself capable of, and then pushed farther.

Told with passion and heart-wrenching honesty, EPIC SOLITUDE will capture the sorrow that can carve us apart, while revealing the depths we have within us to survive, persevere, and move ahead.