Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada's Arctic

By Adam Shoalts

Book Overview

Winner of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario's 2016 Young Authors Award
Winner of the 2017 Louise de Kiriline Award for Nonfiction

Adam Shoalts was no stranger to the wilderness. He had hacked his way through jungles, stared down bears and climbed mountains. But, one spot on the map called out to him irresistibly. Cutting through the forbidding landscape of the Hudson Bay Lowlands is a river no hunter, no explorer, has left any record of paddling. It was this river that Shoalts was obsessively determined to explore.

What Shoalts discovered as he paddled downriver appeared in no satellite imagery or map: a series of waterfalls that could easily have killed him. Just as astonishing was the media reaction when he got back to civilization. He was crowned "Canada's Indiana Jones" and was feted by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and congratulated by the governor general. Shoalts had proved that the world is bigger than we think.

Gripping and often poetic, Alone Against the North is a classic adventure story of single-minded obsession, physical hardship, and the restless sense of wonder that every explorer has in common. Shoalts's story makes it clear that the world can become known only by setting out into the unfamiliar, where every step is different from the one before and something you may never have imagined lies around the next curve in the river.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1037804244
• ISBN13: 9781037804243
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Penguin Books Canada
• Length: 416 Pages

Customer Reviews

Read for descriptions of the area

I buy books like this one to get a feel of a place. Shoalts provided that but he also provided a literal step by step report of his journey. He obviously was very fit, an excellent canoeist and planned his trip meticulously. If he was less in any one of those areas, he would have probably died along the way. I found his decision to go on this trip alone dumb and his writing to be very self-indulgent. But if you want to know what it's like beyond the trees in Canada, this book will tell you.