"Blue Hills, a longed-for place where life was visionary was a dream that Judy Eskridge, a young, midwestern woman, couldn't let go. Judy reached for a simplicity beyond the polarized world of the 1960s. Once a raw frontier, America had evolved into a competitive superpower, convulsed by deep rifts. Before the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the boiling point of the revolution, Judy left Oklahoma for Alaska. As she journeyed up the Alcan Highway, Senator Robert Kennedy was shot, a signal to Judy that the world and the life she desired might never again exist in the Lower 48. A secret door opened for her into The Great Land: Alaska, a fresh country of opportunity, the epitome of America's frontier origins. Blue Hills, Alaska's Secret Door is the story of Judy and her family. It is also the story of the Native people, and the Caucasian trappers and traders. Together the trappers, traders, and Natives are Alaska's grass-roots people who were "Old Alaska." Reb and Judy met in Alaska six years before the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline began its transformation of classical Alaska. Carrying on the legacy of the old pioneers, Reb and Judy typified the Bush network; their lives were a window into the charm of a rapidly vanishing Alaska. Blue Hills covers the breadth of the North, and those who made it: from the Copper, Tanana, Yukon, and Kobuk River Valleys, to the Northwest and Yukon Territories in Canada. It is Alaska's personal story: the evolution from old to new, from the ice box to global neighborhood, the very human story of the woman and her family who lived it"--P. 8.