Modern explorer heeds the call of the wild
Canadian has written book about his adventures
When Adam Shoalts got back to his campsite around dusk, there was a black bear sitting outside his tent. It stared at him and wouldn’t look away.
He shook his ice axe, expecting it to run off, but this strange bear wasn’t startled.
“I knew it had smelled the food on me,” Shoalts says.
He was alone on this camping trip in the mountains on Vancouver Island last month, but not by choice.
His brother and a friend had agreed to go, but backed out — an increasingly common problem for Shoalts, a professional explorer whose excursions have become so intense most who accompany him once refuse to do it again. But the 29-year-old does not cancel trips.
His ice axe was not much of a weapon — dull, light and a foot long. If the bear came close enough that he could use it, Shoalts would be in some trouble.
“I was really yelling at it,” he says. “It didn’t run. It kept its eyes on me the whole time and sort of walked off slowly, behind this big tree. It was still looking at me.” He grabbed what he could and left the campsite, with plans to return to get his tent in the morning.
For Shoalts, it was a mild encounter — nothing like being in a canoe in a frigid Arctic stream, with a shotgun propped on the gunwale as a polar bear swam toward him. Nothing like watching the river disappearing in front of him, realizing he was about to discover an unknown waterfall by tumbling over it.
Since discovering that set of four unknown waterfalls on the Again River south of Hudson’s Bay in 2012, Shoalts has gained international notoriety as part of the contingent of 21st-century explorers ushering in what some are calling a new “golden age of exploration.” This summer, he was included on Canadian Geographic’s list of the 100 greatest modern explorers.
Now, he’s written a book about his discoveries. Alone Against the North: An Expedition into the Unknown details his obsession with the Again River, a little line on the map hidden underneath a northern stretch of the Quebec-Ontario border. It took him three expeditions to reach the river — the last time he was alone — and in doing so, he reminded Canadians their country still has blind spots.
Even the most remote stretches of the Canadian wilderness have all been mapped, usually by photographs from planes and satellites — but, as Shoalts writes, those images are “no more like exploration than staring at the moon through a telescope ... is akin to the Apollo moon landings.”
That leaves him combing over explorers’ journals, old canoeing handbooks and mining logs to find areas without a written record of human contact — so he can have the best shot at finding undocumented topographic features.
The attention from the Again River discoveries has helped him secure sponsorships to fund more expeditions. It has sustained a healthy stream of paid speaking engagements at birdwatching clubs, kindergarten classes, seniors’ homes and libraries.
It has also brought admirers, who email requests to join him on expeditions. So far, he’s only taken up one person’s offer, a real estate agent named Chuck from Los Angeles.
Shoalts doesn’t seem to relish any of the attention. He has resisted his publisher’s urgings to join Twitter.
“I’ll be happy to get out of the media limelight and back into the wilderness doing what I do best,” he told an interviewer on CTV’s Canada AM in 2013, at the height of his Canadian celebrity.
There is little glamour or thrillseeking in what he does — just a lot of time alone in the woods, with swarms of black flies that stick to exposed skin like thick layers of ash. But when he finishes a trip, he takes little pleasure in the comforts of home.
In a diner in his hometown Pelham, Ont., he was recognized and given free pie. But usually, he eats the same granola he does on trips, just more of it. Then he starts planning another trip. His latest is a five-month expedition across the Arctic to mark Canada’s 150th year in 2017.
“I don’t really think of myself as an adrenalin junkie even though people always say, ‘You have a death wish,’ ” he says. “This is about people who are really interested in the little details, spending a long time in the woods alone.
“But it’s inevitable, if you just keep doing this, things are going to happen ... You’re in a dangerous line of work.”