♪ >> Valerie: Welcome to Canada Files .

I'm Valerie Pringle.

My guest today is Adam Shoalts, historian, geographer, writer.

But above all, he is an explorer.

Who completed a 4,000 km solo journey across Canada's Arctic.

He has written five best-selling books on his many adventures.

And was made a fellow of the Canadian Geographic Society for his extraordinary contributions to geography.

>> Valerie: Hi Adam.

>> Adam: Hi Valerie.

>> I think people think, between Google Earth, GPS, that the age of exploration is over, you know.

What's left to find?

>> I actually think the opposite.

We're living in the Golden Age --the renaissance of exploration.

It's never been better to be an adventurer or explorer than right now.

I mean yes, we have satellite images and GPS.

But those are tools you can use to plan next expeditions.

If you just look at archaeology, it's incredible-- the discoveries in the last few years.

New shipwrecks, archaeological sites in the desert.

Even new Mayan cities down in the central America rainforest.

You'd think for sure, those were all discovered decades ago.

But no, new ones are coming up all the time.

I mean, just to take that one example-- Mayan cities in the central American rainforest.

Well, surely you could see them all on satellite images.

But some of them, you could be literally standing 10 feet from a pyramid, and you would never know it's a pyramid.

In 1000 years, it's completely buried by leaf litter.

The forest has grown up so it just looks like a hill to the naked eye, if you don't know what you're looking for.

Same with Viking artifacts in the Canadian Arctic.

There's many new discoveries going on, on that front.

The possibilities for exploration, I always say, are only limited by the imagination.

There's so many new things that will still be accomplished.

That we can't even begin to think of and dream up right now.

So no, there's still plenty to be discovered out there.

>> What do you want to find?

>> Well, I'm working on several new books.

My new one that will be coming out in October is about a lost explorer.

So this is another historical inspired expedition.

But with history, it will never get old.

Because we're constantly generating new history.

But this is a fascinating individual.

Been completely forgotten by history.

He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.

There's nothing to look up on this individual--pure cold-case.

His journals, his letters have never been published.

They've just been collecting dust for over 100 years.

And I stumbled upon him, almost by accident.

I said this man was incredible!

He was credited with saving the lives of hundreds of whalers.

Whose ships were frozen into the Beaufort Sea.

In those days, there's no telegrams.

Nothing to get word to the outside world.

He volunteers to travel on foot 800 kilometers in the dead of winter in the Arctic.

To bring word of their plight to the outside world.

So relief ships can be organized.

He ends up as a special constable for the Northwest Mounted Police.

He leads their dogsled patrols.

He maps rivers.

>> He's your kind of guy.

>> He is my kind of guy, yes.

>> Was his name Adam Shoalts Senior?

>> No, his name is Hubert Darrell.

Which is not a well-known name but I hope to change that with my new book on him.

Which is based on my own expeditions.

Took me years to retrace his routes.

Find his old forgotten campsites.

Go where he went.

Break trail where he broke trail across the Arctic.

I mean he wandered 1,000s km from Alaska to Hudson Bay into the High Arctic.

I've been retracing his roots.

Finding his old campsites.

Spending endless hours with a magnifying glass.

Trying to decipher his letters that he wrote back home to his family and they were preserved as keepsakes.

Which I dug up out of the archives.

Many of them are water-stained or the writing is faded.

But basically to reconstruct his life's journeys--his adventures.

To put the pieces of the puzzle together.

What happened to him?

He vanished in 1910, almost without a trace deep in the wilderness of the western Canadian Arctic-- Northwest Territories.

I went to go find out what happened to him.

Can I solve the mystery of his disappearance?

And shed light on his life story.

>> How do you look at yourself?

Am I an explorer, an archaeologist, historian?

>> Well, I wear different... >> Geographer.

>> Like a lot of people, I wear different hats on different days But for the most part, I think of myself as a guy who loves the outdoors & woods-- that's what I was as a kid.

I was very lucky.

I grew up with a forest right on my doorstep.

That really shaped and molded who I became.

Every chance I got as a kid, with my brother and my dog, I was out in the local woods.

Today, I'm still doing about the exact same thing.

>> Because I was going to say, how do you grow up to be Adam Shoalts?

In the sense of, the skills and knowledge that you have, is remarkable.

>> Right.

>> And specific.

>> It is but I'm a fish out of water with everything else.

Don't ask me about tariffs or anything like that.

But if you want to know about wilderness survival, that's my forté.

I should be more specific.

I only really know Canada.

I don't really know much about the world outside Canada.

Every chance I got, even as a teenager, I knew I wanted to devote it to the Canadian forest and wilderness.

So I tried to study all the different plants, all the wild mushrooms you could find in Canada so I could identify them.

...I got a head start because I figured out, unlike most, what I wanted to do when I was eight years old.

And I've never deviated from it.

Even when I was a little kid, 10 years old, I'd go to my school library and ask the school librarian, "Do you have any books on wilderness survival?

I want to know which plants are poisonous or safe to eat."

I would try those things out in my backyard forest.

It was a bit of a trial-and- error process for a few years.

>> And your mom and dad supported this.

Your dad was...sort of an inspiration in some ways to you.

>> Yes, my father knew quite a bit about the woods and trees.

He was a wood-worker.

So he was always quizzing my brother and I about...was this a shagbark hickory or a white oak?

Then we would harvest trees and help him with his projects in the family woodshop.

Normally, he built things like grandfather clocks, kitchen tables or bookshelves.

But every once in awhile, he would build canoes.

Which is how I got into the paddling part.

It did come a bit later.

I didn't really get into canoeing until I was a young teenager.

Before that, it was just about the forest.

I saw canoes really as a means to an end.

How do I get from point A to point B because I want to go deeper into the wilderness.

>> You got a PhD in history.

Where does that fit into what you love, and love to do, and what you want to do with your life?

>> Well, my PhD is in history but it's really the history of the wilderness and wild places.

That was the air I was breathing.

So I thought, if I'm already researching this for fun on a Friday night, I might as well do a PhD simultaneously.

>> How much Indigenous knowledge have you been able to acquire?

>> I mean that was something I was fascinated with ever since I was a kid.

Maybe it was partly the Ontario public school system.

But it was a pretty big part of the curriculum.

I'm not that old.

I grew up in the 90s.

I remember, I still have some of my school projects from my 5th grade class with Mrs. Stalk.

Where we did a project on the Haudenosaunee.

Each of us had to choose one of the six nations to present.

I did the Seneca.

That's still sitting under my bed in my little box of school projects.

So I became very fascinated by Indigenous culture and history while I was still just a kid.

And continued on in my teenage years.

Soon as I was in university studying history, my interest was in Canada.

But I was really interested in Indigenous history.

There's a very rich record of Indigenous oral history in Canada-- a lot of people don't realize it.

But we have actually have recordings that were made in the 1930s and 40s, among Indigenous elders.

Who at that time were in their 80s or 90s.

If you do the math, you're talking about people who were born in the mid-1800s.

Having their recollections recorded.

Listening to it is fascinating.

Because, of course, they're remembering the end of an era.

They can remember what life was like pre-European tools.

Using bows and arrows, living off the land.

Using flint knapping, this sort of thing.

Listening to that, rich traditions & fascinating stories Everything from bear attacks to legends of monsters up in the mountains.

This is the kind of stuff I absolutely loved at seven!

And my enthusiasm, as you can guess, has not really decreased with time.

I'm still very much in love with this sort of thing.

I could talk about this our entire interview if you want.

>> Who's your favourite explorer?

>> Well, I'd have to say, if you twisted my arm, and made me choose just one, I've always been very enamoured with Alexander Mackenzie-- he's my personal favourite.

Fact, I just read something a few weeks ago about Alexander Mackenzie and I thought to myself no, you're wrong, Author !

He's an individual who's not well understood.

For some reason, Canadian historians have always had this opinion that Alexander Mackenzie was a guy with very little personality.

I should said it for the audience who doesn't know who Alexander Mackenzie is.

>> Americans just know Lewis and Clark.

>> They know Lewis and Clark but it was Alexander Mackenzie who directly inspired Lewis and Clark.

Literally President Thomas Jefferson read Alexander Mackenzie's account of his expedition and said, "I need to find someone to follow in this guy's footsteps."

>> And make it to the Pacific Ocean.

>> So Lewis and Clark are actually 13 years after Alexander Mackenzie already reached the Pacific Ocean.

And he did it over a more northern and difficult route with a smaller party-- almost on his own.

He's actually paddling his canoe with a handful of French Canadian voyageurs and a few others.

He's an absolutely fascinating individual.

>> One...your first book, I think, was what, Alone Against the North .

You talk about your trip up an unnamed river in the Hudson Bay lowlands.

At first you went with a friend who couldn't...hack it at all.

I think represented most people, "Are you out of your mind?"

Between the bugs and bogs and the hideousness of it.

>> You know, he quit.

>> Yes.

>> You ended up continuing solo on this trip.

You recount this in this book-- it's an amazing story.

What is your lasting take-away from that?

Why was that worth it?

>> It was definitely worth it.

I always laugh about that.

It was my friend, Brent.

We still joke about that.

He says he wants to come on another expedition.

You know, we were halfway through that journey.

He said, "That's it.

I've had enough.

I want to be back home on my couch.

I don't want to be sleeping out here on the sub-Arctic.

On the coast of Hudson Bay.

That put me between a rock and a hard place.

Because up until that point in my life, all my solo journeys were very brief.

I'd only go into the wilderness alone for 4-5 days at a time.

And certainly not around polar bears.

I really didn't want to be there alone.

But I thought if I quit and go home.

And we never reach the river we came to explore, I thought that would be it.

My career would go down the drain.

I would never get another sponsorship from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

Who had sponsored that expedition.

This is agonizing but I have no choice.

I'm going to have to roll the dice and stay here alone.

In polar bear territory.

Finish what we set off to do or else it's game over.

Who knows.

I'll end up doing something entirely different with my life.

So I toughed it out.

Stuck it out.

Like many things, once you took the plunge, it wasn't that terrible!

I said I kind of like this whole solo wandering around the wilderness.

Before I knew it, I spent four months wandering across the Arctic.

I kind of got hooked on it.

So there's an upside to everything.

I do expeditions still with my friends.

I love the camaraderie and everything else that comes with working with someone else.

But every year, I also do solo journeys.

I like both of them.

>> The expedition across the Arctic.

That was 4 months.

You know, upstream in the Mackenzie and the Coppermine.

Ice-filled Great Bear Lake.

That was...a hard journey.

>> It was typical but I figured the difficult things are the ones worth perusing, right?

You only live once.

It's probably crossed all our minds.

Why not canoe alone across Canada's Arctic?

That's what I was thinking anyways.

I spent all winter-- at the time I was living in Sudbury and been brooding over my maps--strategizing.

I tried googling canoeing alone across the Arctic.

Nothing comes back, right?

It's just not really a place canoes were ever meant to go.

You're north of the treeline, up around the Arctic Circle.

If you damage your canoe, the nearest birch trees are 100s of miles to the south.

Many of the lakes are still ice-covered in July.

The traditional method of travel in the Arctic is, of course, dog sleds.

Or if you're not going to that, maybe you'll cross-country ski or snowshoe but I wanted to canoe there.

I was thinking maybe with warmer temperatures maybe it's possible, maybe I can pull this off.

I didn't know how long it would take.

Psychologically I was prepping for 5 months.

That's what I was thinking of in terms of food resources, rations and everything I was packing.

But I found the idea was something I couldn't pass up.

I remember when I estimated...

I said to myself, there's only a 50/50 chance I'll actually pull this off.

There's a good chance that winter will hit and I'm only halfway across the Arctic.

Because the wind or the ice has held me up.

And I just couldn't travel as quickly as I needed to.

I thought well, that would be kind of embarrassing.

Nobody cares about somebody who canoed halfway across the Arctic What a wimp!

(laughing) But I figured I can't live with the regret of not trying.

So I spent all winter training and studying my maps.

Coming up with my plans, devising my route.

Then in May, I set off.

That was the plan anyways.

>> It reminds me, in some ways, of that Matt Damon character in The Martian .

You know, you just solve one problem at a time.

There's so many decisions you have to make.

Can I set out?

Where do I camp?

What's safe here?

What do I do?

Just one thing after another.

>> It's so true.

>> To survive.

>> It's absolutely true...

I don't really think of it myself unless I'm immersed in the moment.

But those long journeys, they're very much intellectual problems--you're confronted with difficult decisions.

That you have to make, not every day, but every hour of every day you have to make a decision.

Do I go left or right?

Is it better to follow the north shore here?

What's the wind doing?

Is it going to shift on me?

Will I be more sheltered if I take the south shore?

Is there cliffs there?

Will I be able to find campsites?

Where am I going to make my next move?

Is it better to portage or should I try to run the rapids?

I have to analyze this minutely.

Can I get down to those rapids?

I mean, if you're in Algonquin Park, maybe it's not such a big deal if you capsize your canoe.

And your car in the parking lot is four hours away.

Out there, you're far away from any help.

So the margin of error is small.

You have to make these decisions Because of course, if you always error on the side of caution, you'll never get anywhere.

Instead of a 4,000 km journey, it's now 8,000 km.

Because you don't want to leave land, you're tracing every shore ...so there's constant decisions that have to be made.

Do I camp here?

Do I push on?

If I push on, will I find anything better?

Is there going to be a landslide does that bank look solid?

There's tracks here-- is there going to be a bear?

>> Would anyone know if you died?

>> Well, eventually I would hope somebody would notice.

Nowadays, I think my wife would probably notice.

Well, it would be awhile.

Even today, communication is patchy.

...Your phone won't work so you're relying on satellite communications.

In my case, I'm travelling alone and have to travel light.

So I don't have endless batteries to work with.

Usually, if I'm on a journey nowadays, I will try to check in with my wife every 3-4 days or so.

She's remarkably nonchalant.

Sometimes...I check 4 days later on a call.

And she doesn't pick up.

I was busy!

>> But it's slow and steady, is your view.

Tortoise hare.. >> Absolutely.

>> Is your philosophy of life.

>> Yes, well when you're doing a journey, yes, you have to take the slow and steady approach.

Otherwise, I'd never get across the Arctic.

It would have seemed so overwhelming, so daunting.

How am I going to cross 4,000 km alone in the Arctic.

I didn't really think of it as a 4,000 km journey.

Psychologically, I broke it up into maybe 12 different sections If I can just get through the Richardson Mountains.

up the Mackenzie River, reach the coast of Great Bear Lake.

That is a journey into itself.

So I would think of it that way.

Like that donkey with the carrot and stick.

I'd give myself rewards.

If I can get to my campsite tonight, I'll eat a power bar.

It'll be the most delicious thing I've ever tasted.

>> Your attitude!

>> Maybe I'll have a second cup of tea.

It's amazing.

>> ...keeping yourself positive.

Oh well, I'm swarmed with bugs but the wind has gone down.

>> Yes.

>> Or, you know, oh it's stopped raining but there're no forest fires.

I couldn't believe the power of positive thinking in the face of what most people would...crumble under.

>> It's true.

There's an upside to pretty much anything, right?

That's my philosophy in the wilderness.

No matter what happens, you have to look on the bright side.

Find something to be grateful for.

If it's raining, I tell myself it's been raining for 3 weeks straight.

I've run out of dry clothes.

Every morning at 5 am, I'm putting on wet underwear & socks crawling out into the frosty morning.

But on the bright side, I don't have to worry about forest fires When I'm wet, I tell myself this is kind of a good thing.

Because it keeps me wanting to move quickly so I don't get cold it's helping me maintain my pace.

If the wind is against me, it usually blows away the bugs.

Probably everyone's had that experience where you wake up in the morning, the first thing you always do is check on your food ration.

What happened to them in the night.

You look out and sure enough, a wolverine has come and eaten all your food rations.

You tell yourself that wolverine has really done me a favour.

A blessing in disguise that's going to make the portaging so much easier.

There's nothing to carry now, right?

Pretty much any scenario I'm in out there, I will try to say what's the upside?

I try to do that in life too.

Whatever comes your way, there's gotta be some potential silver lining, is my philosophy.

>> But you're not immune to fear.

You talk a lot about what comes into your head at night.

>> You know, the legends of the Wendigo .

>> Oh yes.

>> ...Legitimate, I think I hear a bear outside.

>> Oh yeah, terrified.

I'm terrified of the elements.

Mother Nature can be so powerful, so raw and untamed.

When the wind is howling and you're travelling in a 15 ft canoe, that is very quickly terrifying.

>> What's your most dangerous moment then?

>> I probably have to write out a piece of paper and rank them.

I think almost everything.

Despite the fact I've had some pretty dramatic bear moments.

I had a polar bear come right at me in my canoe.

They're surprisingly fast in the water.

They can swim faster than I can paddle.

I had a couple of grizzlies charge me.

...honestly, if you said I want to know your most scariest moment, it would all involve storms.

Big waves, far from land, trapped in my canoe.

Getting battered left and right.

Trying with every fibre of my being to keep that canoe upright, from flipping over in whitecaps, just crossing these big windswept lakes in the interior of Labrador or vast Arctic lakes.

Where you can barely see land.

You're miles from shore.

That probably counts as my most white-knuckle moments.

That whole thing, you're on a knife edge.

If you let it get out of hand, it's psychological terror.

This is the end because you know if you go into the water, even with a life jacket on, that water is freezing!

Probably the temperature is hovering around zero degrees Celsius so hypothermia is going to set in within 15 minutes.

I'll start to lose feeling in my extremities.

Even with the life jacket, I'll seize up.

I won't be able to swim to shore.

That means it's absolutely imperative that I don't make a mistake.

I have to ride these waves just right.

>> How much has being married and three little boys changed your life--crimped the style of the explorer?

>> It hasn't really.

We look at it as my livelihood.

And I have a family to support.

So if anything, I feel the pressure more.

To keep doing expeditions.

I'd be happy to transition to something else.

But nobody gives me any job offers.

Because ultimately I'm a self-employed adventurer.

As improbable as that sounds, it astonishes me more than anyone.

I haven't had a real job since my mid-20s.

Making my living through doing adventures, expeditions, guided hikes, writing my books.

Until someone comes knocking on my door to give me a real job, I'm basically stuck in this dilemma.

>> But it's interesting because people talk more and more about nature deficit.

And how our children just don't know the woods.

They don't know how to get out and be outside.

>> It's true.

I think everyone would be less stressed, more relaxed and happier if we could all get a little more nature in our lives.

I think...I always say I'm lucky and spoiled.

I have a stress-free job.

I don't envy people who have to answer emails and deal with 9 to 5 and all this.

Being out in the wild, it speaks to something in almost all of us If I was prime minister for a day, I would say our national priority is to have a nature park within a 10-minute walk of everyone's residence in the country.

I think that's essential.

It's not enough to get in a car and drive somewhere or get on a subway.

It has to be within walking distance of everyone's front door-- 10 minutes away.

Of course, we should preserve those amazing vast wild places in the north but it's essential even in the hearts of our biggest cities-- Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver.

Or wherever people live in the world because I think this is universal.

They should have nature parks where they can escape to.

>> One of my favourite quotes is a Canadian prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King.

He says, "If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography."

>> Yeah, you can never have too much geography though.

I wish we had even more.

All this talk of Greenland... ...to put it a slightly different way, in 2025 people always talk about how the world's shrinking.

Technology is erasing borders.

It's a small world.

You can go anywhere.

Of course, it's partly true in a sense.

I always say the amazing thing is, if you get out on the land, you go walking or paddling, the world is as big as it ever was.

The world is as big as it is today, as it was to our earliest ancestors.

Those hunter-gatherers setting out across the African plain, hundreds of thousands of years ago.

It's still as big as it was then.

If you're travelling under your own power.

When you look at it from that perspective, it's very exciting.

It's kind of wow, this is amazing!

The possibilities are truly endless.

>> We're hearing a lot about our border these days.

President Trump is very interested in the border.

>> This is something you've studied quite a bit.

>> Yes.

>> And how it ended up.

>> Can I get a one-minute history lesson?

>> I think that's a common misconception.

You'll hear that the border between Canada and the US is purely arbitrary.

Of course, you can be forgiven for thinking that.

If you look on a map, you see the 49th parallel.

It's a straight line-- you think it's purely arbitrary.

But it's not!

It actually reflects the natural contours in the land.

By and large, if you look at a watershed map of North America, you will perceive that the 49th parallel largely mimics it.

Not precisely because that would be impossible.

But generally speaking, on the north side of the 49th parallel, the Canadian side, most of the rivers are flowing north to Hudson Bay.

That's the old Rupert's Land--the Hudson's Bay Company.

It's the fur trade, beaver, canoe that built this country.

That built Canada.

And our borders aren't arbitrary.

They're natural geographical borders that reflect that.

If you look at everything on the south side of the 49th parallel, that's largely in the Gulf of Mexico watershed.

Or maybe I should say, the Gulf of America watershed.

I understand it was recently renamed.

But all those rivers are draining south.

Even when you're up in Minnesota, you're still in the Gulf of Mexico/America watershed.

Where just on the other side of the border, you're now on the Hudson Bay watershed.

The waters are flowing north.

In the age of the canoe centuries ago, everyone understood this.

This comes back to getting back to that human pace.

It's incredible when you're crossing the Rocky Mountains on foot--you've climbed up into these mountains.

You come to a stream that you've been following for weeks, and all of a sudden, it's flowing the other way.

It reverses.

All the water is flowing that way west to the Pacific.

All the water on this side is flowing east to the Atlantic.

So these watershed divides for countless millennia had a huge role in human history, trade and travel routes.

And Canada's border largely reflects that.

>> Final question.

What does being Canadian mean to you?

>> What does being Canadian mean to me?

Well, I think a lot of national identities around the world are tied to a sense of place.

To me, Canada's soul and beating heart is our geography.

Our northern geography, rivers and lakes, our seasons.

That to me is the essence of the Canadian identity.

It's what gives Canada unity.

That sort of northern geography, the change in daylight, that we think everyone has but they don't.

It's all part of living in this more northern cold vast country.

A land of rivers, lakes, mountains, glaciers and tundra.

Even if you never see it all, it's all bound up with what it means to be Canadian.

>> Well, safe journeys to you, Adam Shoalts.

>> Thank you.

>> Stay safe.

>> I will try my best.

>> Very nice to talk to you.

>> Nice chatting with you too, Valerie.

>> We'll be back next week with another episode of Canada Files .

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