Vanished Beyond the Map with Adam Shoalts

Name: Vanished Beyond the Map with Adam Shoalts
Start: 2025-10-14T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Playhouse Cinema

Schedule

Tue, 14 Oct, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Playhouse Cinema | Hamilton, ON

Join Adam Shoalts, Canada’s greatest modern-day explorer, as he discusses his journey into the arctic wilderness to solve a mystery more than 100 years old.
Part detective story, part biography, and part first-person adventure narrative, Vanished Beyond the Map combines expeditions with historical research to solve one of exploration history’s enduring cold cases—the mystery of Hubert Darrell.
In November 1910, explorer Hubert Darrell vanished in the uncharted wilds of the Northwest Territories. A prospector who had been swept up in the Klondike Gold Rush, Darrell later made his name as an expert guide, trapper, and restless wanderer who ventured where few others dared. At a time when travel by dogsled in the North was the norm, Darrell became legendary for traversing thousands of kilometres alone and on foot; ranging over mountains and across windswept tundra from Alaska to Hudson Bay. Contemporaries regarded Darrell as the hardiest, most competent explorer of his day. Despite clues reported by Inuit trappers and Mounted Police inquiries, his fate remains a mystery. While his disappearance sparked headlines around the world, Darrell’s name would soon also vanish from the history books, ironically, just as surely as he had in the wild.
Using the trail of letters, journals, and hand-drawn maps Darrell left behind Adam Shoalts retraces Darrell’s forgotten routes through the wilderness, searching for cabin ruins and old campsites.
Adam Shoalts is a historian, archaeologist, geographer, and Westaway Explorer-in-Residence at the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Shoalts holds a PhD from McMaster University where his research examined the influence Indigenous oral traditions had on fur traders in the subarctic and Pacific Northwest. He is also the author of the national bestsellers Alone Against the North, A History of Canada in Ten Maps, Beyond the Trees, The Whisper on the Night Wind, and Where the Falcon Flies. He enjoys long walks in the woods.
Books will be available to purchase on-site with a book signing to follow the talk.