Alone Against the North

The age of exploration is not over. When Adam Shoalts ventured into the largest unexplored wilderness on the planet, he hoped to set foot where no one had ever gone before. What he discovered surprised even him. Shoalts was no stranger to the wilderness. He had hacked his way through jungles and swamp, had stared down polar bears and climbed mountains. But one spot on the map called out to him irresistibly: the Hudson Bay Lowlands, a trackless waste of muskeg and lonely rivers, moose and wolf—an Amazon of the north, parts of which to this day remain unexplored. Cutting through this forbidding landscape is a river no hunter, no explorer, no Native guide has left any record of paddling. It is far from any important waterways, even further from any settled land, and about as far from civilization as one can get. It was this river that Shoalts was obsessively determined to explore. It took him several attempts, and years of research. But finally,...