Join us for the Ontario Hiking Book Club!

Brand new for 2024, I welcome you to join the Ontario Hiking Book Club! We’ll be reading a different hiking/outdoorsy/adventure book each month. It’s fun and free to join!

We’re going to choose a new book each month by popular demand – I’ll post a poll each month in the Ontario Hiking Facebook group. Then, I’ll announce the book for the following month about partway through the current month to give you the chance to get your hands on a copy.

You’ll have the whole month to read the book. At the end of the month, we’ll have a casual discussion in the Ontario Hiking Facebook group where you can share your thoughts, questions, and how you enjoyed the book.

Everything will be done in the Facebook group because we all live across Ontario (so doing this in person would be a challenge) and even finding a time that works for everyone over a Zoom chat wouldn’t work that great. This way, everyone can share and discuss at a time that works best for them.

Not a member of the Facebook group (or don’t have Facebook)? You’re still welcome to read along, but you’ll miss out on the discussion component of things. I’ll be listing the book for each month right here on this page. You can also use this book listing for inspiration if you’re searching for books to read.

Not able to join us each month? Not a problem! Feel free to join the book club for one month, skip a month, join us the next month, whatever works best for you.

May 2024: Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart by Carrot Quinn

For May 2024, we’ll be reading Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart by Carrot Quinn. This is a memoir by the author who goes hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail in the USA.

Carrot Quinn fears that she’s become addicted to the Internet. The city makes her numb, and she’s having trouble connecting with others. In a desperate move, she breaks away from everything to walk 2,660 miles from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail. It will be her first long-distance hike.

In the desert of Southern California, Carrot faces many challenges, both physical and emotional: pain, injury, blisters, aching cold and searing heat, dehydration, exhaustion, loneliness. In the wilderness she happens upon and becomes close with an eclectic group of strangers – people she wouldn’t have chanced to meet in the “regular world” but who are brought together, here on the trail, by their one common goal: to make it to Canada before the snow flies.

You can get your copy of the book on Amazon, from your local bookstore, or borrow it from your local library.

April 2024: Grandma Gatewood’s Walk by Ben Montgomery

For April 2024, we’ll be reading Grandma Gatewood’s Walk by Ben Montgomery. This was the 2014 National Outdoor Book Award Winner in History / Biography and was nominated for a Goodread’s Choice award.

Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, sixty-seven-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. By September 1955 she stood atop Maine’s Mount Katahdin, sang “America, the Beautiful,” and proclaimed, “I said I’ll do it, and I’ve done it.”

Driven by a painful marriage, Grandma Gatewood not only hiked the trail alone, she was the first person—man or woman—to walk it twice and three times. At age seventy-one, she hiked the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail. Gatewood became a hiking celebrity, and appeared on TV with Groucho Marx and Art Linkletter. The public attention she brought to the trail was unprecedented. Her vocal criticism of the lousy, difficult stretches led to bolstered maintenance, and very likely saved the trail from extinction.

You can get your copy of the book on Amazon, from your local bookstore, or borrow it from your local library.

March 2024: The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

For March 2024, we’ll be reading The Salt Path by Raynor Winn. This book has many accolades, including the Best Book of 2019 by NPR’s Book Concierge, and was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award.

Just days after Raynor Winn learns that Moth, her husband of thirty-two years, is terminally ill, their house and farm are taken away, along with their livelihood. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, through Devon and Cornwall.

Carrying only the essentials for survival on their backs, they live wild in the ancient, weathered landscape of cliffs, sea, and sky. Yet through every step, every encounter, and every test along the way, their walk becomes a remarkable and life-affirming journey. Powerfully written and unflinchingly honest, The Salt Path is ultimately a portrayal of home—how it can be lost, rebuilt, and rediscovered in the most unexpected ways.

You can get your copy of the book on Amazon, from your local bookstore, or borrow it from your local library.

February 2024: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

For February 2024, we’ll be reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. This is a New York Times Best Seller and has been adapted into a major motion picture starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte.

The Appalachian Trail trail stretches from Georgia to Maine and covers some of the most breathtaking terrain in America–majestic mountains, silent forests, sparking lakes. If you’re going to take a hike, it’s probably the place to go. And Bill Bryson is surely the most entertaining guide you’ll find.

He introduces us to the history and ecology of the trail and to some of the other hardy (or just foolhardy) folks he meets along the way–and a couple of bears. Already a classic, A Walk in the Woods will make you long for the great outdoors (or at least a comfortable chair to sit and read in).

You can get your copy of the book on Amazon, from your local bookstore, or borrow it from your local library.

January 2024: Where the Falcon Flies by Adam Shoalts

For January 2024, we’ll be reading Where the Falcon Flies: A 3,400 Kilometre Odyssey From My Doorstep to the Arctic by Adam Shoalts. This is a #1 National Best Seller and it is a biography/memoir.

From Canada’s most accomplished adventurer and storyteller comes a gripping journey into the vastness of Canada’s landscape and history.

Looking out his porch window one spring morning, Adam Shoalts spotted a majestic peregrine falcon flying across the neighbouring fields near Lake Erie. Each spring, falcons migrate from southernmost Canada to remote arctic mountains. Grabbing his backpack and canoe, Shoalts resolved to follow the falcon’s route north on an astonishing 3,400-kilometre journey to the Arctic.

Where the Falcon Flies invites readers on an extraordinary armchair adventure that spans five ecoregions and centuries of fascinating history, and is a masterwork by one of Canada’s most successful and audacious authors.

You can get your copy of the book on Amazon, from your local bookstore, or borrow it from your local library.