An Afternoon with explorer Adam Shoalts

Sunday, October 18, 2015 at 3:00 pm Archived

In the Atrium, McNally Robinson - Grant Park, 1120 Grant Avenue

Speaking & Signing Alone Against the North: An Expedition into the Unknown (Viking). Co-presented by the Winnipeg International Writers Festival as part of our collaborative Fall Literary Series.

It took explorer Adam Shoalts several attempts, years of research, and two friends abandoned his single-minded quest to explore the Again River, located in the trackless waste of the Hudson Bay Lowlands. But finally, alone, he found the headwaters of the mysterious river. Paddling his way to the saltwater of James Bay, Shoalts discovered something that seemingly shouldn’t exist: a series of unmapped waterfalls. He also discovered edenic islands, and braved wild white water rapids, but the waterfalls captured both his imagination and the world’s.

Adam did a single interview, with The Guardian, and was a celebrity, appearing on morning TV, feted by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and congratulated by the Governor General. We assume that because we have mapped the world from space, it must be exhaustively known. But it is wilder, stranger, less homogenous than we assume.