As vividly as Jon Krakauer put readers on Everest, John Vaillant takes us into the heart of North America's last great forest, where trees grow to eighteen feet in diameter, sunlight never touches the ground, and the chainsaws are always at work.

When a shattered kayak and camping gear are found on an uninhabited island, they reignite a mystery surrounding a shocking act of protest. Five months earlier, logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin had plunged naked into a river in British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw. When his night's work was done, a unique Sitka spruce, 165 feet tall and covered with luminous golden needles, teetered on its stump. Two days later it fell.

The tree, a fascinating puzzle to scientists, was sacred to the Haida, a fierce seafaring tribe based in the Queen Charlottes. Vaillant recounts the bloody history of the Haida and the early fur trade, and provides harrowing details of the logging industry, whose omnivorous violence would claim both Hadwin and the golden spruce.

"The felling of a celebrated giant golden spruce tree in British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands takes on a potent symbolism in this probing study of an unprecedented act of eco-vandalism. First-time author Vaillant, who originally wrote about the death of the spruce for the New Yorker, profiles the culprit, an ex-logger turned messianic environmentalist who toppled the famous tree — the only one of its kind — to protest the destruction of British Columbia's old-growth forest, then soon vanished mysteriously. Vaillant also explores the culture and history of the Haida Indians who revered the tree, and of the logging industry that often expresses an elegiac awe for the ancient trees it is busily clear-cutting. Writing in a vigorous, evocative style, Vaillant portrays the Pacific Northwest as a region of conflict and violence, from the battles between Europeans and Indians over the 18th-century sea otter trade to the hard-bitten, macho milieu of the logging camps, where grisly death is an occupational hazard. It is also, in his telling, a land of virtually infinite natural resources overmatched by an even greater human rapaciousness. Through this archetypal story of 'people fail[ing] to see the forest for the tree,' Vaillant paints a haunting portrait of man's vexed relationship with nature. Photos." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"This tragic tale goes right to the heart of the conflicts among loggers, native rights activists, and environmentalists, and induces us to more deeply consider the consequences of our habits of destruction." Booklist (Starred Review)

"Mr. Vaillant is absolutely spellbinding when conjuring up the world of the golden spruce. His descriptions of the Queen Charlotte Islands, with their misty, murky light and hushed, cathedral-like forests, are haunting... The chapters on logging, painstakingly researched, make high drama out of the grueling, highly dangerous job of bringing down some of the biggest trees on earth." The New York Times

"Make some more space on the shelf of Essential Northwest Books. John Vaillant has crafted a debut book that is a stunning look at this region's history and environment." Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"A scrupulously researched narrative worthy of comparison to Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild." Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice)

"The case of the golden spruce is a fascinating eco-mystery that cuts right to the heart of modern settlement of the Pacific Northwest." The Oregonian

"Vaillant's start-and-stop narrative yields whiplash here and there, but he ably covers all the bases....Vaillant's tale of how it got to be so is of unfailing interest." Kirkus Reviews

"A gracefully written, ambitiously researched and enthralling story of ecological majesty and human greed. It should enter that pantheon of memorable books that capture our region's character: a page-turner of a debut." The Seattle Times

"Only a writer of Vaillant's skill could capture both aspects of their dying world in such a powerful way." Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm

In the tradition of Krakauer’s Into the Wild, The Golden Spruce tells an astonishing true story of a furious man’s obsessive mission against an industrial juggernaut, the struggle of the Haida people to save their world, and the mysterious golden tree that binds them all together.

When a kayak and camping gear are found on an uninhabited Alaskan island just north of the Canadian border, they re-ignite a mystery surrounding a shocking act of protest that made international news. On a winter night in 1997, a logger-turned-activist named Grant Hadwin plunged into the frigid waters of the Yakoun River in the Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw behind him. When he was done, a unique spruce tree — 50 meters tall and covered with luminous golden needles — was teetering on its massive stump.

The tree, which baffled scientists, was sacred to the Haida on whose land it had stood for over 300 years. It was also beloved by local loggers who singled it out for protection in the midst of vast clear cuts. Since the 1970s, the mist-shrouded archipelago — one of the continent’s most pristine and vibrant ecosystems — has been a battleground with government officials and logging companies squaring off against the Haida and environmental groups. The loss of the mythic golden spruce united loggers, natives and environmentalists in sorrow and outrage. But while heroic efforts were made to revive the tree, Grant Hadwin, the tree’s confessed killer, disappeared under suspicious circumstances.

John Vaillant’s article on the death of the golden spruce was published in 2002 in The New Yorker, and this book has grown out of it, dramatizing the destruction of a deeply conflicted man and the wilderness he loved; in so doing, it traces the rise, fall and rebirth of the Haida nation, and exposes the logging industry — the most dangerous land-based job in North America — from a point of view never explored in contemporary non-fiction.

To look at this seedling — if one could see it at all — and believe that it had every intention of growing into one of the towering columns that blot out so much of the northwestern sky, would have seemed far-fetched at best. In its first year, the infant tree would have been about two inches tall and sporting a half dozen or so pale green needles. It would have been appealing in the same abstract way that baby snapping turtles are, its alien appearance transcended by the universal indicators of wild babyhood: utter helplessness and primordial determination in equal measure. Despite its bristling ruff and a stem as straight as a sunbeam, the seedling was still as vulnerable as a frog’s egg; a falling branch, the footstep of a human or an animal — any number of random occurrences — could have finished it there and then.

Down there, in the damp darkness of the under story, the sapling’s wonderful flaw was a well-kept secret. With each passing year, it dug its roots deeper into the riverbank, strengthening its grip on life and on the land. In spite of the odds, it became one of a handful of young trees that would survive to shoulder their way into the sunlight, competing with giants a dozen feet wide and hundreds of feet tall. In the end, it would be the sun that exposed this tree’s secret for all to see and, by the middle of the 1700s, it would have been abundantly clear that something extraordinary was growing on the banks of the Yakoun. It was a creature that seemed more at home in a myth or a fairy tale: a spruce tree with golden needles.

—excerpt from The Golden Spruce

The felling of a celebrated giant golden spruce tree in British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands takes on a potent symbolism in this probing study of an unprecedented act of eco-vandalism. Vaillant profiles the culprit, an ex-logger turned messianic environmentalist who toppled the famous tree.

John Vaillant has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, and Men’s Journal among others. He lives in Vancouver with his wife and children. Of particular interest to Vaillant are stories that explore collisions between human ambition and the natural world. His work in this and other fields has taken him to five continents and five oceans. The Golden Spruce is his first book.