I’ve always loved wild places. To me that’s the greatest thing about living in Canada — we still have these vast wild places almost on our doorstep.
In new book, Adam Shoalts chronicles his 4,000-kilometre trek across Canada’s Arctic
Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada’s Arctic
Adam Shoalts Penguin Random House
The day Adam Shoalts was gearing up for one of the most daunting challenges of his Arctic adventure, he discovered a looming footwear crisis.
He was about to tackle the forbidding Coppermine River, launching an upstream battle in the company of his trusty canoe. And he was wondering whether his boots would hold out.
The Coppermine would be a crucial chapter in his 2017 endeavour to trek some 4,000 kilometres across Canada’s Arctic — a solo venture that prompted fellow veterans of northern travel to wonder whether he had lost his mind.
He had already confounded nature by travelling upstream on the formidable Mackenzie River. But the Coppermine, with a current three times stronger, was far more frightening. As he tells us in his riveting new memoir, Beyond The Trees, its “tortuous course was filled with innumerable obstacles: thundering whitewater rapids, sheer cliffs, canyons and a powerful rip-roaring current that extended for hundreds of kilometres.”
No way could he blithely paddle its length. He faced hours and days of careful wading, of hauling his canoe while walking along a shoreline, of old-fashioned portaging.
“I was in for the challenge of my life,” he writes. “Worse yet, my wading boots were starting to fall apart, the left one having been ripped open on some soft underwater rocks ...” But he still went ahead, hoping the boots would survive.
Talking about these anxieties now, Shoalts, 33, reveals a quiet pragmatism. He has joked that he doesn’t much like flying because he’s not that much of a risk-taker — but he also insists his four-month journey was never foolhardy.
“I wear a life-jacket and portage around giant rapids that would be unsafe to run,” he says from his current home in Ontario’s Norfolk County, southwest of Hamilton and an area with sufficient wilderness on its doorstep that he can stand living there. “If you take a journey across the Arctic, there will be a lot of hazards, but I’m not being an adrenalin junkie who deliberately seeks to do dangerous things.”
Still, the untamed Coppermine did fill him with dread. “But I feared more for the success of my expedition,” he says now. He had been warned beforehand that he would never make it upriver, that the thrashing whitewater rapids and looming cliffs would defeat him. And defeat did seem a possibility when high on a cliff, where it was impossible to bring his canoe with him, he was striving to negotiate its passage down below with a rope.
“I remember that my palms were sweaty as I was on those cliffs, my canoe down below just bobbing in the current, a rope tethered to the bow, and attempting to guide it upriver,” he says. “I knew that if I made a mistake and didn’t guide the canoe just right with my rope, it could easily flip over in the current and be swept away, and everything would be lost.”
Even his satellite phone — his sole link to the outside world — was down below. And again the measured pragmatist took over. “I would just take things one step at a time and be positive and say, ‘This has to be done, so I just have to find a way to do it.’”
In 2018, Shoalts became the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s explorer-in-residence. He was still in his 20s when he published his first book, Alone Against the North, which chronicles his adventures in the unmapped Hudson Bay Lowlands. That volume prompted the Toronto Star to label him Canada’s Indiana Jones. Since then, other critics have compared him with Lee Child’s fictional creation, Jack Reacher, and John Hornby, a doom-driven Arctic explorer from the past.
“I don’t see a connection with any of those people, to be honest,” Shoalts says with a laugh. “They’re all known for carrying guns. I don’t carry guns and I’m not really the gun-flicking cowboy type.”
When he began his journey at Eagle Plains, Yukon, in May 2017, it never occurred to him to make it easy for himself.
“I think the one thing that made people raise their eyebrows was doing it solo,” he says.
But he makes clear that solitude holds no fears for him — indeed there are moments in his journey when he might have lingered overnight in some remote settlement and interconnected with others for even a few hours, yet chooses to push on.
“I find it liberating to be on your own, out in the wild,” he says. “I’ve always loved wild places. To me that’s the greatest thing about living in Canada — we still have these vast wild places almost on our doorstep. Northern Canada is the greatest wilderness left in the world outside of Antarctica.”
Shoalts sees his sturdy Nova Craft canoe as a hero of his saga. He was travelling as well with a backpack and two precious barrels containing rations representing more than 170 pounds of dead weight.
Yet nothing ultimately seemed to signal defeat — not the threatening grizzlies and musk ox, not the terrible winds, not the terrifying ice floes on Great Bear Lake, not the vast boulder field that made every step treacherous, not the swarms of mosquitoes that feasted greedily on him. Each was a challenge to be confronted.
Shoalts was determined not to “romanticize” his situation. But he wanted to write “first and foremost an adventure story that’s going to entertain people and put them in my shoes so they can become armchair explorers sharing these moments with me.”
At the end, returning by aircraft to more comfortable civilization, he was already thinking about next time: “I had my notepad out and was already starting to brainstorm. How can I plan another journey that will top this one?”