I went with Telluride local and nationally know ski and adventure writer Rob Story which is always its own adventure. Rob and I continued our trademark routine of coming off the trail in the dark. My wife, Sarah, asked why I haven’t yet learned to bring a headlamp.

Our plan was to go into Fruita after riding and go to the Hot Tomato to see co-owner Anne Keller, whose compelling photography exhibit on World-Class Mountainbike racer Tara Llanes will be at MF this year. But of course, when we finally packed up, it was too late. Traveling with Rob is always … different; and he will share his unique perspective - tweaked and twisted, outraged and insightful often all at once - about his travels at MF this year. He will talk specifically about his interaction with the peculiar species, Outdoor Photographer . (I would link to his website here - but in his own inimitable Story way, he doesn’t have a website - yet). He is on a great program at the Opera House on Saturday (click to view schedule) with Anne and Tara, and a terrific short film called Malletheads about bike polo.

The worst part of the trip (other than falling on a cattle rail - which really hurt) was missing dinner at the Hot Tomato which gets rave reviews for its pizza. The best part was seeing the Colorado. Living in Brooklyn for a long time, it has been a while since I have laid eyes on that river. I am afraid to figure out when the last time was - I did go rafting down it when I was a kid but not sure since then.

The Colorado River will be well-featured and throughly discussed at MF this year. Wade Graham, our symposium host, said that the Colorado - and the Four Corners - SouthWest area is Ground Zero for water issues in this country. It remains an enormous - and essential resource for the area - but with all of the development, it is highly unlikely the river can continue to deliver everything expected of it.

You get an incredibly good sense of both the challenges facing the river - but also just how amazing it is in the new Grand Canyon IMAX film we are playing this year at MF, Grand Canyon - River at Risk. This film - which should be one of our highlights - was directed by Greg MacGillivary who was at MF last year with The Alps. When he asked me if we had any interest in showing it in 3D, we set out on quite a journey at MF. I should actually say our Festival Producer, Stash Wislocki, set out. Mercifully, I have been out of many of the conversations but Stash, our projector expert K2, and the extremely good people of MacGillivary-Freeman Films have worked tirelessly to make this come together.

The film features MF regular Wade Davis and Robert Kennedy Jr and their daughters as they go down the Grand Canyon. After the screening, Wade will speak about the river - and will join some other experts for a discussion. If you haven’t seen Wade Davis speak before, I very much recommend checking him out (he will also do q/a after the film, Schooling the World).

One of the true LIONS of the Grand Canyon is Martin Litton, our poster “boy” this year. For those of you who don’t know him, he rowed dories down the Colorado - through the infamous Lava Falls - into his early nineties. For those of you that do, you will learn something new about his remarkable life in the film, The Good Fight. Martin was all set to come but sadly is not feeling well and won’t be able to make it to MF this year but we hope to have him back next year.

Posted by Festival Director David Holbrooke

“Let go” they tell me …

We had a staff meeting earlier this week and everyone on the MF staff told me it was now time for me to let go.

After taking in a whole LOT of films/books/articles/conversations we have finally got the matrix as they call it around here locked. It has been quite a wild process to see - particularly as a filmmaker myself. I have to say the programming came about through a strange elixir of fortunate happenstance, late night hunches, and listening to as many, many, many wise people as I could. It also came about from a whole lot of time thinking about this.

So then, with this behind Emily (one of the wise people by the way) and me, the staff tells me I no longer have control over this festival. They said the schedule was in place and it was time for me to let the people who actually know what they are doing (as opposed to me) do their jobs - that the festival takes off from here on out and that I could relax. Even though I don’t think I am a control freak (probably not hard to find someone to disagree) I have to admit hearing that unsettled me.

It also left me with the question - what in hell do I do now? There are a bunch of emails and phone calls to return but I figured the first thing I’d do is something I could control - which is this post.

I don’t have a lot to say, having said most of it writing the program (which Lise, Anne and Casey have done a great job putting editing/designing). However, I will keep trying to fill this space with really interesting things you might want to read or see that are part of our program.

First check out this Huffington Post by Laurie Garrett. She is part of our Village Green initiative (we will have a really strong explanation of this potentially exciting new idea on our website soon). But what she really is: a brilliant thinker and passionate writer who is a leading expert on infectious diseases. She is finishing a book about global health in a post-9/11 world and has written this really important piece about what is happening throughout Asia. Besides the Village Green - where she will be talking about leading the charge to retrofit her 80 year old, 30 story Brooklyn building, you will also be able to see Laurie at a breakfast talk where she will blow your mind with what is happening with the food crisis in Asia right now. In the meantime, check out her article here.

I am going riding in Fruita tomorrow and am going to have dinner at the Hot Tomato and visit with Anne Keller (who will be showing her photos of Tara Llanes at MF and who blogged for us earlier).

Now with all of this free time, I will have more good stuff soon.

David

David Holbrooke is in the full depths of his first year as Mountainfilm festival director.

Sure, it’s a shameless plug; but hey, it’s for the benefit of everyone. Early bird prices for the 30th annual Mountainfilm in Telluride festival are in effect until May 1, 2008. That’s next Thursday. The Wilson Pass, which provides admission to all festival programs, is over 15% off. You can’t beat $250.00 for a weekend of inspiration, education, laughs and entertainment. The festival will be held May 23-26, 2008.

Monday. It’s dusty in my van. I’ve had desert sand blown at and about me for three weeks straight. Fine grains nestle into my keyboard and make the space bar crunch. Across the chassis from me a friend flips through the pages of my book with chalky hands and blackened fingers. I’m two months into my book tour, and still I am not used to this.
When I was young, I thought writing was about pages and words. I thought of writing as the outcome—a book. Now, I know it a reason to travel, a justification for months spent in a closed office in front of a computer screen, an evening spent with an Ethiopian family inside their rock hewn house, and finally, as a departure point of shared stories.
Just over a year ago, I was approached by an Ethiopian publisher to write what is now Vertical Ethiopia: Climbing Toward Possibility in the Horn of Africa. Today, I’m twelve events deep into a forty-show tour where I take myself and others away from the distended stomachs and spindly limbs of the Ethiopia of our imagination and ask where else we can go.

What I like the most are the stories other people share along the way. It’s odd, this same impulse towards explanation is what created the book in the first place and is now what sustains me on this cross country journey. A man in Jackson Hole told me of being sixteen and watching Emporer Selassie’s long velvet robes cascade down the streets of Addis Ababa in the 1950’s. A woman in Ft Lauderdale told me of her first and last visit to the northern part of the country—the same area my book is based on, the same area where the famine of the 1980’s made world headlines—where she learned how to farm barley and found inspiration for her burgeoning organic farm in Iowa.

Today is no different; the audience is just smaller. My climbing partner flips a page to a photo of a woman with beetroot-stained purple hands. “This is Ethiopia?’ He asks.

And so we begin. Away from images of an aching population continually subject to drought and famine made worse by human hands. Toward something deeper. For me, this depth includes adventure—climbing this time—in a landscape and culture that is known only for everything that is the opposite. I tell my story in the midst of the yucca and cholla and red rocks as the sand swirls around us here, and in Ethiopia, at the same time.

To learn more about Vertical Ethiopia and Majka Burhardt visit www.majkaburhardt.com.

Our guest blogger this week is Anne Keller, an extremely talented photographer, whose work will be showing at this year’s festival. Keller had the honor of accompanying and photographing world-class mountain biker, Tara Llanes, after an accident left Llanes paralyzed.

There’s a look people give me when I tell them that one of the main reasons I was able to sustain a long term project focusing on such a serious, delicate subject is that; I had a ton of fun.

Yeah yeah, go ahead, make the look. But really, months later, after all the reflection that goes on, that one explanation stands out like a sore thumb. I had days where I laughed harder than I had in a long while.

I should preface by saying that my previous work had entirely been within the cycling industry, and I had, by no means, any type of photojournalism background or experience. Shooting this project was an emotional and often very trying journey into a place where the nature of capturing a photograph felt both extremely intimate and occasionally invasive. I came to understand more in those four months about knowledge and compassion for a subject than anything had ever taught me. And I can honestly say that my involvement in this was a pivotal point in my direction as a photographer.

But, well, then there was the fun.

Tara once made this statement that she was the same person she was before, just a little shorter. I always liked that statement. And being on the sidelines as entirely well meaning, caring individuals bowed their heads, lowered their voices and offered unsolicited words of somber inspiration, I began to feel bad. I began to understand that maybe the reason people can choose to avoid their friends and families in times of serious illness, injury, etc is that we all have an aversion to sounding like a Hallmark card, we just don’t know how to get beyond it.

It took me awhile too. The first time I found myself openly laughing I probably looked around to make sure no one was watching me. Oh the humanity! Laughing at the disabled! But the more time I spent with Tara, the more I came to believe that, possibly, that was the best thing for her. Because the alternative sounded really depressing; bowing our heads and being somber.

I remember one night in Denver. Four of us had gone out to dinner and had driven my VW bus. Perfect vehicle for a wheelchair, really. Afterwards, us parked on a busy street, Tara decided to try a new method of transferring to a car seat. A transfer that involved going from the floor, to her knees, to the bench seat. The idea didn’t go so well and Tara ended up in a crumbled heap on the floor of the bus, doubled over, laughing. Bus door wide open, us standing outside grasping for anything to keep us upright we were laughing so hard, Tara’s wheelchair rolling away down the sidewalk, and pedestrians walking by staring in disbelief. Would somebody please help this poor girl and save her from her friends.

Because, really, I think that laughter in a situation that is, by all means, of course, serious, challenges our notions that we must always adhere to treating people with the same seriousness that their condition dictates. Instead, I can only hope that by treating Tara like she still had the capacity to have fun, which she did, we allowed her to exist in a world where she still felt like herself. A world where her every move was not filtered through a reference of dealing with a debilitating injury, where instead she was allowed her humanity.

So, yes, today, after all of it. The emotional rollercoaster that it sometimes was, the strong bond of friendship created, the ups and downs, all of it; I still say, bring on the laughter.

To see more of Anne Keller’s work, please visit: http://www.annekellerphotography.com/

Special thanks to guest blogger, Katie Lee - one of the few people to travel Glen Canyon prior to the Glen Canyon Dam.

It pours over my flushed, hot face– a chilling, cold gift that flows from a breathtaking place in that hot and burnished desert. Even though my eyes and the bridge of my nose are numb and aching with the cold, my cheeks and lips burning under this icy fountain, I do not pull away. I’m locked in a painful kind of ecstasy. Random drops sprinkle my hair. I feel the soft tickle of moss against my cheek–its caress like loving fingers.

Tilting my chin higher I part my lips to taste the gift. At first I do not swallow, but let it tumble, thrash and overrun my mouth until my teeth ache with the chilling sweetness. Now I open my throat and swallow the rapture, hungrily. I open my eyes. Thru rippling water, I see bobbing maidenhair fern, smooth flesh-tinted canyon walls, clinging moss and glistening rock above this spring of gracious water—the Savior when it gently flows, the Killer when it rages. But this is only one of many streams to soothe the burning–there are hundreds of cataracts to lounge on, many languid waterfalls to stand under in these glorious canyons along the Glen. I lie down on the cataract ledges, roll over them and hug them, pull the mosses over my breasts and let them drape down my body, literally dressing myself in nature. Moving cautiously down a slippery slide, I come to the edge of the pool and wade in. Watching goose bumps spread over my skin reminds me of the coming winter—where I’ll be singing in some snowbound city, pouring all my woes into my guitar—where I’ll hold my vision to this refuge, dream about my Glen Canyon and the river I can’t wait to get back to. My special river.

The one that won’t be here anymore!

Katie Lee
Copyright - April 2000

** Katie Lee will be an honored guest at Drilling Down: Water and the Southwest - a special corollary to the Moving Mountains Symposium on Water.

Did you know that the average African family uses about five gallons of water per day? The average American individual uses approximately 100-176 gallons per day. (Statistics are according to U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet “Water Q&A: Water Use at Home” and the World Resources Institute, 1998-99 and 1996-97. “A Guide to the Global Environment.)

March 22 is World Water Day. The U.N. General Assembly dedicated this day in 1992 to raising awareness of the lack of clean, safe drinking water around the world. Events are planned in several countries. In the United States, 69 cities officially recognize World Water Day. For a list of events near you, visit this link at worldwaterday.net.

Water.org, the site for Water Partners International, encourages your involvement through Participation, Donation and/or Education. I humbly recommend that we to do all three; but additionally, we can use the raised consciousness of World Water Day to make deliberate decisions with regard to our personal consumption.

‘Water’ is Mountainfilm’s theme for the 2008 festival. This presents a focused opportunity to learn, discuss and evaluate the state of this precious resource. Mountainfilm will welcome notable authorities on water at the Moving Mountains Symposium, on May 23, 2008.

Posted by Brook Sutton

As a Mountainfilm Tour presenter out on the road, I introduce myself to the audience du jour as their “guide for tonight’s cinematic journey around the world” and then proceed to tick off the locales we’ll collectively visit through the eyes of filmmakers, do-gooders, animals and heroes. Sometimes it’s a fleece-n-birks crowd, other times it’s a formal affair or sleepy eyed college kids taking a break from learning or partying. It’s a two-way experience as I get just as much out of it as they do. I return to the hotel or home of a host absolutely wired from the rush of sharing seldom seen labors of love with a roomful of folks hungry for inspiration, education and just darn tootin’ fun. It’s a tough job but somebody has to show it.

My latest round of shows took me to Golden, Colorado; Brunswick, Maine; Breckenridge and Ouray, Colorado. The venue in Golden was the American Mountaineering Center (AMC), home of the American Alpine Club (AAC), the newly inaugurated Bradford Washburn American Mountaineering Museum, a very comprehensive mountaineering library with an impressive rare books room, and a host of other organizations such as Outward Bound West and the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative. It’s a lot under one roof and you can’t help but leave overwhelmed by the effort that has gone into preserving and sharing our nation’s alpine personality. If you find yourself on the Front Range of Colorado, do take the jaunt to Golden for a “peak.” The show was, as expected, heavy on the climbing side. Showing “The Accidental Mountaineer,” a lovely short recounting first ascents of Alaska’s biggest by Barbara Washburn during the 1940s, was a treat considering the Washburn’s daughter, Betsy Cabot, was in attendance and got to see footage of mom she had never seen before. The feature, “Fitzroy,” took us back to 1968 on a road trip to Patagonia to make the first ascent of The California Route with the “funhogs”: Yvon Chouinard, Dick Dorworth, Lito Tejada-Flores, Chris Jones, and Doug Tompkins. If you haven’t seen this classic gem of a film, you’ll get a chance at Mountainfilm 2008, and here’s why … it’s the reason why Mountainfilm in Telluride exists (and hence the Tour and this wordy post). You see, “Fitzroy” won the Grand Prize at the 1969 Trento Mountain Film Festival in Italy and the experience led Tejada-Flores and some other notables like Royal Robbins to recreate an American version at Telluride’s Historic Sheridan Opera House thirty years ago this coming May. The film’s soundtrack is shrill and dramatic but the camerawork by Tejada-Flores is superb. I’m thrilled that it and Tejada-Flores and Dorworth in person will be a part of the festival’s retrospective, but hopefully it won’t be as unnerving an experience as it was in Golden. About halfway through the film, an elderly gentleman suffered a heart attack. Lights up, movie off, no less than four doctors in the house, and the Tour’s first (and hopefully last) mid-feature medical evacuation was under way. I’m happy to report that the man in seat M5 survived and will be outfitted with a pacemaker. After the commotion, I shakily dimmed the lights, pushed play, and we were all back amidst the finest wind and granite Argentina has to offer. Another shameless festival plug I must insert here is a presentation called “Climbatology: Climbers and Climate Change” that debuted at the AMC the night before, personably “Ankered” by Conrad. The program takes a then-and-now look at glaciers in the Everest region through the work of Alton Byers, director of the Alpine Conservation Partnership, deemed by the AAC’s website as “arguably the best photographic documentation of how climate change is affecting the world’s highest, most famous mountain.” It’s not just the side-by-side photographic pairings of disappearing glaciers in the region that alarm climate change scientists but the appearance of enormous moraine lakes that pose catastrophic dangers to inhabitants and ecosystems in the valleys below should an edge fail. In triplicate with short presentations by Dawa Sherpa and Kitty Calhoun, “Climbatology” also documented the disappearance of previously climbed vertical ice in Africa and once-snowy landing strips into remote areas of Alaska and it resonated with the audience of climbers and trekkers. And now the plug: a condensed version of “Climbatology” will be presented at the 2008 festival. Done.

The four shows in Brunswick, Maine were an entirely different litter of kittens. Hosted by The Frontier Café in the town known for Harriet Beecher Stowe and Bowdoin College, the super cozy, 75-seat theater embedded within a brewpub/organic restaurant/coffeshop/arthouse/can-I-just-move-in-right-now space made me realize that it’s not the quantity of butts in seats but the quality of those butts. Keep in mind that it’s a long winter in Maine and what seemed to warm the soul almost as much as the delicious handcrafted soups and lattes (that are allowed in the theater!) is the mishmash of visual treats that traveled by my side in my carry-on luggage. The content challenged assumptions about residential lawns (“Gimme Green”) and flyfishing (“Running Down the Man”); provided cultural introductions to the coconut gathering Minang people of Indonesia (“Gatherers from the Sky”) and philosophizing ski bums (“Solilochairliftquist”); and took us up to the soaring summit of India’s Thalay Sagar (“Harvest Moon”) as well as a short but very steep crack in Yosemite (“The Obscurist”). I really love first-time Tour shows because I get to dig deep into the archives for the best and the weirdest and give an audience a yitload to talk about and process on the way home. It’s Mountainfilm’s mandate to open up conversations worth sustaining and looking back on the too-many-to-count post-show exchanges I had with attendees while discreetly attempting to wrap up all things technical for the night, the shows in the meticulously renovated Fort Andross mill building in Brunswick, Maine did just that, and more. I can earnestly say “Mission Accomplished” without a banner in sight.

On the day I returned to Colorado, I immediately whizzed off to Breckenridge for the last of a series of monthly shows at the Speakeasy Movie Theatre, benefiting both the dZi Foundation, based in Ridgway, Colorado, and Mountain to Mountain, based in Breckenridge. Founded by a handful of climbers that over a span of 25 years had logged many a trip to the Himalaya, dZi is a swirling phenomenon of over 45 self-sustaining projects in remote regions that “empower local visionaries—and communities—to reach their true potential.” If you told dZi’s founders on their first treks into the Asian mountains that they would be filling on-the-spot, no fee eye glass prescriptions to over 1,400 children, they’d have looked at you like one of those indifferent yaks that indirectly support climber’s dreams. And this Optical Solutions Project is just one of the many realms dZi has committed to serve. It’s what you make of those in-the-moment, tangential mindbursts about “giving back” that count. Mountain to Mountain, though a relative newcomer to the world of nonprofits, has a great mentor in its relationship with dZi. Its mission to “promote education and community development by creating ties with mountain communities at home and abroad” heralds one of my favorite (and preferred) human survival theories: linkages. As the crowd-pleasing film “The Hatch” subliminally pointed out, the trout in the Gunnison River are linked to the annual epic stone fly hatch that are linked to the flyfishermen who are linked by their efforts to preserve the unique ecosystem. The survival of all of the above, however, is linked to the power enjoyed by only one ellipse of that chain: the human vote. By now, you’ve probably realized how important I think an outrageous 10-minute mountain biking film like “Trial and Error,” set in an old growth forest in British Columbia slated for clearcut, can be and is. In my opinion, the filmmakers that independently produce these glimpses of possibility, beautifully synchronized to music and dialogue, deserve a red carpet that reaches Mars. (By the way, I nervously put in “Fitzroy” for the first time since “the Golden incident,” hoping for a solid 29 minutes of darkness, and whew, no dialing of 911. I guess you could say I got on that horse and rode it all the way to Patagonia and back.)

My last two shows rounded out a five-year tradition for me—two nights in Ouray, “the Switzerland of America”—for the dZi folks. Same faces, same hunger, same beer sponsor (New Belgium), different movies. Over the years, this particular group of repeat attenders has seen over 80 films from the Mountainfilm library and just can’t get enough. Because of the inordinate amount of helmet-haired ice climbers that make their way up the fire hall steps each year, I feel like I can pull out a classic climbing film like “The Bat” and get away with it without alienating or boring too many non-climbers. Knowing one’s audience is an asset in many jobs but being able to customize a show for an annual reunion of like-minded adventure film buffs, and all for a good cause, is one of the greatest parts of this one. I’m fortunate to have this gig every once in a while and hope my “guided” evenings have inspired people to travel, learn, document, link up and pitch in.

Will the world be saved from the ravages of its human inhabitants by mountain-based non-profits banding together and putting on a smattering of movie nights on five continents? It’s a stretch but I ask “why not?” Paul Hawken, author of “Blessed Unrest” and special guest at Mountainfilm 2007, believes that a new movement is afoot, one being forged by the over one million dot.orgs of today (and growing daily). His website describes it as “the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture, and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people’s needs worldwide.” If a provocative three-hour evening of films sparks any semblance of awareness into action then we have not only entertained but also done our good deed for the day. That’s my take and I’m sticking to it. One of Mountainfilm’s mottos of past was “imagine the power of film to change the world in which live.” Whether it’s in Telluride over Memorial Day weekend or your butt in a seat at a Tour show’s microwaved version, it’s all good and it all matters. See you in line …

Posted by Daiva Chesonis

Sidenote: We are so appreciative of the amazing posts from our guest bloggers - and the generous spirit they embody to put thoughts down and share them with us every Friday. This week is an intermission for a shameless plug of one of the events we have planned for this year’s festival. Here’s the basics, but check it out in more depth at: Mountainflim Press Releases.

• Tribute to the late Sir Edmund Hillary: Renowned mountaineer and filmmaker, David Breashears will host a tribute to the eminent “mountaineer’s mountaineer” who passed away earlier this year. Guests close to Hillary will attend. Rarely seen films chronicling his life and exploits will be presented.

Photos credits: Breashears/Peakpromotionnepal.com, Hilary and Tensing in 1950’s/Channel 4, Hilary and Tensing later in life/picasaweb.com

Posted by Brook Sutton