Tracking Giants is now on sale
It has been fairly quiet around here, and with good reason. I wrote a book!
Tracking Giants: Big trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest is a travel memoir about searching for the Champion trees of BC. It came out in May 2023 with Greystone Books. Please visit this link to learn more and order.
A funny, deeply relatable book about one woman’s quest to track some of the world’s biggest trees.
When she first moved back west after nearly a decade away, Amanda Lewis was an overachieving, burned-out book editor most familiar with trees as dead blocks of paper. A dedicated “indoorswoman,” she could barely tell a birch from a beech. But that didn’t stop her from pledging to visit all of the biggest trees in British Columbia, a Canadian province known for its rugged terrain and gigantic trees.
The “Champion” trees on Lewis’s ambitious list ranged from mighty Western red-cedars to towering arbutus (madrone). They lived on remote islands and at the center of dense forests. The only problem? Well, there were many…
Climate change and a pandemic aside, Lewis’s lack of wilderness experience, the upsetting reality of old-growth logging, the ever-changing nature of trees, and the pressures of her one-year timeframe complicated her quest. Burned out again—and realizing that her “checklist” approach to life might be the problem—Lewis reframed her search for trees to something humbler and more meaningful: getting to know forests in an interconnected way.
Weaving in insights from writers and artists, Lewis uncovers what we’re really after when we pursue the big things—revealing that sometimes it’s the smaller joys, the mindsets we have, and the companions we’re with that make us feel more connected to the natural world.
““Spiked with wit, self-deprecating humour, and a bright, light-beam approach to philosophy, Tracking Giants is dotted with beautiful descriptive passages and local tree history… This is progress, not defeat. The story grows its own captivating heartwood. At its centre is not the tree tracker, but the tree itself, that being connected to a complex system will, with care, outlast all of us, our quests to conquer, our ambitions to be the best and make our mark…. Anyone who reads this book will find themselves looking at trees in a new way, searching the sky for their crowns, and will marvel at not just their beauty, but their necessity. In the end, Lewis is no longer a hunter of Champions, but a champion herself – a champion of trees – no longer a seeker of transformation but a human being in service of something greater.””
““An entertaining nature memoir about finding community in the forest…. I appreciated her calling out the colonialist mindset of ‘discovering’ big trees, and her conflicting feelings about naming Champion trees…. As a fellow completist, it was refreshing to see Lewis reframe the project to something that would be more enjoyable to her, instead of needing to achieve the biggest or best…. Lewis creates a compelling argument for creating your own path instead of following the one laid out by others.””
““This is a wonderful truant of a book about our relationship with trees, with the precarious earth, with our own unchecked ambition. It begins as a simple solo quest to track some of the world’s biggest trees and emerges as a gorgeous manifesto for plotting a different course entirely. The timing of this book—with its wide roots and radical shoots—is just right.””
