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Flying The Frontiers Volume I, A Half Million Hours of Aviation Adventure, brings to life tales from the log books and journals of people for whom aviation is a way of life. These intrepid and independent pilots, engineers, aircraft salvagers, and smoke jumpers tell of their adventures and misadventures over the endless bush and forbidding barrens of Canada's North, allowing readers a rare glimpse at a unique way of life that has taken these men and women across Canada and around the world.

Told firsthand by the people who experienced them, these are wondrous aviation tales of near-misses and amazing successes, heroism and foolishness, innovations and renovations, where the element of risk is part of every flight plan. Now in its fifth printing!

Order through your local bookstore

or the following distributor:
Alpine Book Peddlers
105 Bow Meadows Crescent, Suite. 140
Canmore, Alberta T1W 2W8
Attention: John Blum
phone: toll free: 1.866.478.2280, 403.678.2280, fax: 403.678.2840
email: alpinebk@aeontech.ca OR: info@alpinebookpeddlers.ca
Website: www.alpinebookpeddlers.ca/

Reviews:  “Portraits of ‘Positive Attitudes” “Ever since she lived in the Peace River country, explains Shirlee Smith Matheson in her preface, she wanted to write about the kind of people she met there – people who ‘through hard work and positive attitudes, tackled jobs that more practical people would never dare.’ . . . What is the common denominator? Adventure says the author, and her book assuredly bears out this assessment.” Virginia Byfield, Alberta Report, p. 47, Dec. 12/94  

“The author has discovered 12 people and woven a thread around them: in various ways they have contributed to the pioneering of aviation in Canada during the period from the 1920s to the 1990s. All have flown the frontiers of Canada, be it bush flying, instructing, barnstorming, crop spraying, opening up the Arctic, or outfitting in the Rockies. . . . This is a good book for anyone interested in some unusual detail of aviation development in Canada due to the fortitude and ingenuity of some of these pioneers.” Grahame Inglis, Airforce, p. 55, April/95  

“Flying the Frontiers encourages browsing: its themes and issues …are presented subtly, and await discovery. Matheson’s skillful handling of narrative creates the impression, in most places, of indirect involvement in the story, but her presence is never intrusive.” Geoff Cragg, CBRA (Canadian Book Review Annual), Transportation 5079, undated.