Joshua Waldo Lake Shackelton, born in New Mexico in 1946, could never ignore the call of the wild. In 1964, spared from the draft, he slips up the coast as far as the tip of Vancouver Island before moving inland. Wending his way through BC's inlets and coastal mountains, Joshua discovers the nature of solitude; in the ports and villages, he discovers community.

Finally he reaches Haines Junction, in the Yukon Territory, where the Haines and Alaska highways meet. It is here that he discovers friendship (and gold). Miners catch gold fever, political conspiracies come to light and Joshua and his friends encounter the mystical and the mundane. When he finds himself at the centre of a mystery that includes the wreck of a military DC-3, a raft constructed by an ancient order of Japanese monks, and the wolfbear of Aleut myth, Joshua must work to unravel the threads and protect his friends from their own harebrained schemes. Suspenseful and warmly funny, Haines Junction is a tale of adventure and domesticity, loyalty and betrayal, and the laws of the Yukon.