CHRISTIAN BEAMISH holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California Santa Cruz and an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. A surfer, surfboard shaper, and writer, Christian is the author of The Voyage of the Cormorant (Patagonia Books, July 2012). Voyage is the account of his three-month solo surfing expedition down the Pacific coast of Baja California by sail and oar in the eighteen-foot Shetland Isle beach boat he built. Christian lives in Carpinteria, California, with his wife, Natasha, daughter, Josephine, and German Wirehaired Pointer, Rio.
BARRY BLANCHARD: Canadian Mountain Guide and alpinist Barry Blanchard was born in Calgary, March 29, 1959. Twelve years later three boys navigated the Bow River through the western side of the city on a raft of nailed together railway ties, and Barry was at the helm steering the adventure. He found mountain climbing in the books of his high school library, some of which are still in his possession. A six month trip to the French Alps in 1980 set the course of Barry’s life: to climb the steepest and most complicated faces of the world’s great glaciated peaks. Barry moved to the mountains in 1982 to pursue his Mountain Guiding career (he is an internationally certified—UIAGM—mountain guide) and has included making Hollywood features such as K-2, Cliffhanger, and The Vertical Limit in his professional life. Barry lives in Canmore, Alberta, with his two daughters, Rosemary and Eowyn.
IAN BROWN has been a roving feature writer at The Globe and Mail for the past decade. He is the author of three books, including The Boy in the Moon, which won the Charles Taylor Prize and the Trillium Book Award, among others, and was selected as one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2011. He was the host of Later the Same Day, Sunday Morning, and Talking Books on CBC Radio, and of Human Edge and The View From Here on TVO. He has travelled in the mountains of Alberta and British Columbia nearly every year for the past thrity-five years. He lives in Toronto.
FITZ CAHALL is the founder and host of The Dirtbag Diaries, an online radio show dedicated to adventure and the stories that define outdoor culture. He currently works as the creative director at Duct Tape Then Beer, a digital storytelling agency in Seattle, Washington.
MARIA COFFEY is the internationally published author of twelve books, three of which deal with mountaineering themes. Fragile Edge: Loss on Everest won two prizes in Italy, including the 2002 ITAS Prize for Mountain Literature, and Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow won the Jon Whyte Award for Mountain Literature at the Banff Mountain Book Festival in 2003 and a National Book Award in 2004. For these titles, along with Explorers of the Infinite (2008), Coffey was awarded the 2009 American Alpine Club Literary Award. Originally from the U.K., Coffey lives with her husband, veterinarian and photographer Dag Goering, in British Columbia, Canada. They are the founders of Hidden Places, a boutique adventure travel company, and Elephant Earth, which advocates for elephant welfare and conservation. Maria’s website is hiddenplaces.net.
NIALL FINK is a graduate student at the University of Alberta. He works as a wrangler, canoe guide, and hunting guide in the Yukon and Northwest Territories during the summer and lives in Edmonton during the winter. His first book, I Was Born Under a Spruce Tree, was written in collaboration with Tr’ondek Hwech’in Elder JJ Van Bibber. To learn more visit niallfink.com.
CHARLOTTE GILL is the author of Eating Dirt, a tree-planting memoir nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, the Charles Taylor Prize, and two B.C. Book Prizes. It was the 2012 winner of the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Her previous book Ladykiller was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Stories, and many magazines. She lives on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.
DON GILLMOR is the author of Mount Pleasant, a novel set in contemporary Toronto. His first novel, Kanata, dealt with 200 years of Canadian history. He is also the author of a twovolume history of Canada, Canada: A People’s History, and three other books of non-fiction. He has written nine books for children, two of which were nominated for a Governor General’s Award. He has worked as a journalist and was a senior editor at The Walrus and a contributing editor at both Saturday Night and Toronto Life magazines. He has won ten National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto.
NIALL GRIMES was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, and continued growing there for twenty years until he couldn’t take it anymore and moved to England. From his late teens, rock climbing has been his passion, and sadly, almost thirty years later, he has found nothing to replace it. He’s not much of a reader, but he does enjoy a good joke or a catchy song lyric. In two thousand and something his co-authored book Jerry Moffatt: Revelations won the grand prize at the Banff Mountain Book Festival. He cites his time in the Mountain and Wilderness Writing program as one of the ten best things he’s ever done.
KARSTEN HEUER has worked as a wildlife biologist and wilderness park ranger for the Canadian National Parks Service for the past eighteen years. During this time he has become a well-known explorer, author, and filmmaker with a penchant for following some of North America’s most endangered wildlife on foot and skis. His two bestselling books Walking the Big Wild and Being Caribou have earned him numerous awards, including a U.S. National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Banff Mountain Book Festival’s Grand Prize, and the Wilburforce Conservation Leadership Award. He lives in Canmore with his wife and son and is the president of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, a world leader in large-landscape conservation.
KATIE IVES: A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Katie Ives is the editor-in-chief of Alpinist Magazine. Her writing and translations have appeared in various publications, including Alpinist, The American Alpine Journal, Mountain Gazette, Urban Climber, She Sends, Circumference, 91st Meridian, Outside Magazine and Patagonia Field Reports. In 2004 she won the Mammut/Rock & Ice Writing Contest, in 2005 she attended the Banff Mountain and Wilderness Writing program, and in 2008 she received third place in the UKC/International Literature Festival Writing Competition. In 2011 she served as a jury member for the Banff Mountain Festival Book Competition.
BRUCE KIRKBY is a writer, photographer, traveller, and adventurer. As a columnist for The Globe and Mail, regular contributor to explore Magazine and Canadian Geographic, and author of two bestselling books, Sand Dance and The Dolphin’s Tooth, Bruce’s journeys have taken him across Arabia by camel, down the Blue Nile on raft, and over Iceland by foot.
ANDY KIRKPATRICK: The U.S. magazine Climbing once described Andy Kirkpatrick as a climber with a “strange penchant for the long, the cold and the difficult,” with a reputation “for seeking out routes where the danger is real, and the return is questionable, pushing himself on some of the hardest walls and faces in the Alps and beyond, sometimes with partners and sometimes alone.” The author of two Boardman Tasker award-winning books, Psychovertical and Cold Wars, Andy has climbed extensively in the Alps and greater ranges.
BERNADETTE MCDONALD is the author of eight books on mountaineering and mountain culture. She was awarded four major prizes for Freedom Climbers, including the Boardman Tasker Prize and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Grand Prize. Additional literary awards include Italy’s ITAS Prize (2010), India’s Kekoo Naoroji Award (2012, 2009, and 2008) and American Alpine Club literary award (2011). She was the founding vice president of Mountain Culture at The Banff Centre and director of the Banff Mountain Festivals for twenty years. Among other distinctions she has received the Alberta Order of Excellence (2010), and the Banff Summit of Excellence Award (2007).
HELEN MORT is from Sheffield, U.K. She has two poetry chapbooks with Tall Lighthouse Press, The Shape of Every Box and A Pint for the Ghost. Her first collection, Division Street, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2013 and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. From 2010–2011, she was Poet in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. She is currently working on No Map Could Show Them, a collection of poems about women and mountaineering, which she began writing as part of the Mountain and Wilderness Writing program at The Banff Centre.
JAN REDFORD spent several years climbing, kayaking, and taking on jobs like tree planting until motherhood motivated her to become a French Immersion teacher. Her work has been published in The Globe and Mail, the National Post, and various anthologies, and has won multiple writing prizes, including first place in Room’s 2011 creative non-fiction contest. She is working on a climbing memoir, and will start the MFA program in Creative Writing at UBC in September 2013. She lives in Squamish, B.C., with her husband, not far from her two adult children, surrounded by phenomenal mountain biking trails.
WAYNE SAWCHUK grew up as a logger, trapper, and guide, and is now a conservationist, author, and photographer who fights to protect the country he once logged. He is the recipient of the federal Canadian Environment Award and the Province of British Columbia Minister’s Environmental Achievement Award, both given in recognition of his work to establish the 6.4 million hectare Muskwa-Kechika Management Area. He is the author of the coffee-table photo book Muskwa-Kechika: The Wild Heart of Canada’s Northern Rockies. Each summer Sawchuk leads three-month horseback expeditions into the Northern Rockies, and he is a member of the Explorers Club of New York.
ERIN SOROS has published short fiction and non-fiction in international journals and anthologies. Her stories have been produced for the BBC and CBC as winners of the CBC Literary Award and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. “Surge” was aired on the BBC as a finalist for the BBC National Short Story Award. Morning Is Vertical, a collection of stories with photographs, is forthcoming from Rufus Books. She is at work on her first novel, Hook Tender, set in a 1940s logging camp in the coastal mountains of British Columbia and inspired by the oral and archival history of immigrant and indigenous communities.
STEVE SWENSON grew up in Seattle and started climbing in the nearby Cascade Mountains at age fourteen. He graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Civil Engineering. He has been climbing for forty-five years with over twenty expeditions to South Asia, including ascents of K2 and Everest without supplementary oxygen. He was part of a team that won the 2012 Piolet d’Or award for the first ascent of Saser Kangri II (7,518 metres). Married with two sons aged twenty-two and thirty-two, he recently retired after thirty-five years of project management, design, policy making, finance, and communications consulting related to water and wastewater infrastructure projects.
MASA TAKEI is a freelance writer. Publications he’s written for include Canadian Geographic, explore, Western Living, and The Globe and Mail. He also contributed to National Geographic’s guide to Canada’s national parks. He writes primarily about outdoor travel and subcultures. For the project he initiated at The Banff Centre, he scripted and hosted a year-long web series for High Fidelity HDTV (now Blue Ant Media). Masa Off Grid was also made into an hour-long TV documentary for the cable channel radX. His work has been nominated for National Magazine Awards and a Canadian Screen Award. He now lives in a 320-square-foot, off-grid cabin near a decent surf break on Haida Gwaii.
JON TURK received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1971 and wrote the first environmental science textbook in North America, but he left academia to engage in extreme expeditions in remote parts of the world. Jon’s two-year kayak passage across the North Pacific Rim was named by Paddler Magazine as one of the ten greatest sea kayaking expeditions of all time. His circumnavigation of Ellesmere with Erik Boomer was nominated by National Geographic as one of the top ten adventures of 2011 and awarded “Expedition of the Year” by Canoe and Kayak Magazine. Jon chronicles his journeys and mental and spiritual passages in a trilogy books: Cold Oceans, In the Wake of the Jomon, and The Raven’s Gift.
FREDDIE WILKINSON is a climber from Madison, New Hampshire. He believes that any adventure is only as good as the stories you bring home.