Beyond the Trees

In the spring of 2017, Adam Shoalts set out alone to cross a stretch of North American wilderness so remote that a person can travel for months without meeting a road or another human being. His route ran from Eagle Plains in the Yukon Territory to Baker Lake, Nunavut, close to 4,000 kilometers of rugged, untamed country.

The timing left no slack. He had to leave as the spring ice broke up and then race the calendar to reach his destination before winter returned. Along the way he faced shifting ice floes, swollen rivers, lakes wrapped in fog, and gale-force storms, all of it in a maze of terrain with no easy line through.

Much of the journey was brutally physical. He paddled upstream on white-water rivers that only expert canoeists would attempt to run in the downstream direction, hauled his gear over fields of jagged rock that stretched to the horizon, and picked his way through swamps while mosquitoes swarmed him at every step. With so little margin for error or rest, he pushed on deep into the Arctic summer nights, sometimes without stopping to eat.

Beyond the Trees is Shoalts's account of that trip, written with a clear eye for the beauty of the natural world and for the pull toward adventure that many readers will recognize in themselves. It became a national bestseller in Canada.