Trout Tracks by Jim McLennan

“Drawn from 55 years of excessive obsession with trout, water, streams, and flies, this collection of essays from Canada’s most widely read flyfishing author since Roderick Haig-Brown reveals the depth of engagement that this sport engenders. Poised and polished words reveal the flaws and virtues of humanity, the strength of Mother Nature, the beautiful mystery that is a wild trout, and the obsessed’s inexplicable need to outsmart a creature with a brain the size of a pea.”

The Sun is a Compass by Caroline Van Hemert

In Comox, I stopped at Blue Heron Books, where I picked up Caroline Van Hemert’s The Sun is a Compass, her personal account of travelling, along with her husband, for five months by rowboat, kayak, raft, foot, ski, and sled from Washington State to Alaska, crossing Canada’s Yukon and Northwest Territories in the process.

Gone Viking: a Travel Saga by Bill Arnott

To “go Viking” is to embark on an epic journey. For more than eight years, Bill Arnott journeyed throughout the northern hemisphere, discovering sites Scandinavian explorers raided, traded, and settled – finding Viking history in a wider swath of the planet than most anthropologists and historians ever imagined.

A Few Feet Short: an Uncommon Journey to Everest by Jamey Glasnovic

From the Kathmandu Valley to the Middle Hills and the highest peaks on the planet, Glasnovic’s journey takes him through the cultural melting pot of northeastern Nepal and up into the Khumbu Valley, traditional homeland of the Sherpa people, finding his way eventually, and without any intention of actually climbing it, to the base of that most iconic of mountains, Everest.