Teresa Earle and Fritz Mueller have been documenting the Yukon's wildest places for the past decade.

The couple has come face-to-face with grizzly bears feasting on chum salmon.

They've listened to 150,000 Porcupine caribou flow by their tent as the ungulates make their annual trek to their calving grounds.

If you been around the territory for a while, you would probably recognize Earle's and Mueller's work.

Earle calls herself a content specialist and writes about the Yukon for magazines like Up Here.

Mueller shot the photo of the Tombstone Valley, sunlight flooding in the background and the entire landscape shades of red and orange. He waited for days in a tent as a storm passed through the valley.

And he was sick.

When there was finally a break in the weather, Mueller raced across the tundra with his film camera. This was only five years ago, but film was still the better option back then, he explained.

"There was such a brief moment to take just three pictures before it was gone,” Mueller told the Star this week.

That photo was snatched up by Tourism Yukon and is displayed all over the territory.

Now, the couple has put a book together.

Yukon: A wilder place took 10 years for the couple to complete.

Mueller and Earle explored the territory's rivers and streams; they learned about birth and death from a caribou herd and experimented how different light looks on alpine flowers.

"Basically, we were looking for an excuse to have an adventure in the Yukon,” Mueller admitted.

They had no idea who would publish the book, nor how it would come together.

Mueller's mom was a photographer. Mueller grew up in awe of the glossy photos in National Geographic. He wanted to become a "scientist-adventurer-photographer,” but instead found himself strapped to a desk as a wildlife biologist.

"I reached a point where I was in government, sitting behind a desk, and I thought, ‘Yikes, if I don't do this, I'm going to regret not having tried,' ” he said.

So the adventure began.

Some publishers were leery of taking on a 160-page collection of photographs and text.

"They were initially all excited about the content, and then they'd do research and find out there's really only one bookstore in the territory,” said Earle.

Then they would realize there are only 35,000 people living here and back away more quickly, she continued.

The company which actually published the book is Greystone Books, an imprint of Douglas & McIntyre.

Earle said that in part, the publisher accepted their book out of a labour of love. It took two years to get from a stack of photos and text to a book sitting on the shelves in stores across the country.

Earle said it wasn't so much of a struggle to boil 10 years of journal writing into 6,000 words. She's always been of the "less is more” mentality.

Choosing 120 photos from the pair's 10 years of adventures was more of a challenge.

Earle knows readers will look at the photos first.

"But to be honest, what people hang off of is story,” she said.

She's hoping readers learn something about their own backyard from her writing.

"The Yukon is an extraordinary place,” said Earle. "If the book works, hopefully it encourages other people to care about it, too.”

Flipping through the book, Earle and Mueller can stop on any page and tell you their version of the story.

One of their favourites is of a grizzly bear that appears to be only a few feet away from the camera.

The bear's fur is coated in ice. The pink tinge under its mouth shows it's caught a salmon or two for lunch.

The photo was taken on the Fishing Branch River between Dawson City and Old Crow.

Earle explained that a warm spring feeds into the river underground, causing the water to stay open much later than any other river nearby.

This means the chum come much later to spawn, she said.

"Once they're full of salmon, and they get all coated with ice and snow, then they climb up the mountain into these caves that are geothermally heated,” Mueller piped in.

"It's minus 10 or 15 outside, and in these caves it's like, plus 10!”

Flip a few pages further and the couple will tell a story of a pink sunset composed of dust particles which have travelled in a jet stream from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

Mueller and Earle agree on one thing: they live in a place that's relatively unknown and under appreciated.

"We're very privileged,” said Earle.

The pair will be signing their book at Mac's Fireweed Books Saturday, Dec. 3, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.