Peter Stark likes the cold. He not only lives in Missoula, but heads further north whenever he gets the chance (or a magazine assignment), albeit usually in the summer. He didn't actually drive to Greenland in the title story but he did make it as far as Yellowknife in a 1973 mini-van piloted by his improbably named father-in-law Rags. From there he and wife Amy scouted private, regularly scheduled and military aircraft to get them to Baffin Island and across Smith Sound to Qaanaaq, Greenland. Whether Stark is at the precipice of the monster ski jump in Iron Mountain, Michigan, squeezed into a kayak with the local Greenlanders or meditating on the properties of snow, he's an alert, adventurous guide with a highly developed sense of irony. Most of these stories originally appeared in Outside magazine, which has produced a stable of terrific writers on natural history and adventure.  (ARC69, $14.95)