Tracking Giants

This funny and relatable memoir follows Amanda Lewis, a worn-out book editor who returned to western Canada after almost ten years away. She had spent years chasing deadlines and rarely thought about trees beyond the paper they became. Self-described as someone who preferred indoors, she could hardly tell a birch from a beech, yet she resolved to visit the largest trees in British Columbia, a province known for its rugged terrain and enormous forests.

Her target list of so-called Champion trees ranged from massive Western red cedars to towering arbutus. Some grew on remote islands, others deep within dense woods. The quest was far from simple. Lewis had little wilderness experience, she confronted the upsetting history of old-growth logging, and trees change over time. Climate change and a pandemic added further complications, and all of it had to fit within a single year.

Burned out once again, Lewis began to suspect that her habit of approaching life as a checklist was the real problem. She reshaped her search into something humbler: getting to know forests as interconnected living places. Drawing on insights from writers and artists, the book explores what we really seek when we pursue big things. It suggests that smaller joys, the mindsets we bring to the natural world, and the people we travel with can often make us feel most connected to it.