The Conversation

Each Memorial Day weekend, artists and activists, filmmakers and photographers come to Telluride for Mountainfilm. At our core, we are about exploring, preserving and sustaining environments, cultures and conversations, so this unique gathering is part film festival and part ideas festival with leading edge thinkers – and doers – getting together to change the world.
Leading up to this year’s festival we wanted to focus on conversations worth sustaining and we’ve asked some of Mountainfilm’s special guests to help us out. Throughout the coming weeks we’ll be posting our conversations with them. We hope that they engage and inspire you.

If you want to participate in this discussion, just submit your questions via our Facebook page or our Twitter account.

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One of the world’s most accomplished mountaineers and explorers, an author, filmmaker and photographer, Rick Ridgeway is known for being on the first team of Americans to summit K2 and the first from any country to do it without supplemental oxygen. He was on the second American team to climb Everest. But in recent years, he has taken on his most daunting challenge — saving our Earth’s wildness.

A conservationist to the core, Ridgeway has become an indispensable ally of Earth’s most iconic endangered species and wild places. He has trekked from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro to the Indian Ocean amongst lions and elephants, to raise awareness to how humans have transformed our wild world, and hauled a 300-pound rickshaw across the 16,000-foot rugged Tibetan wilderness to protect the chiru, a Tibetan antelope being killed off by poachers. Ridgeway

In the last several years, Ridgeway has brought this battle home to America’s last remaining wild places and the iconic animals in danger of disappearing. Part of the Patagonia family since the beginning, Ridgeway partnered with the clothing company to launch the Freedom to Roam campaign, an initiative based on the idea that wild animals need hundreds of miles of interconnected, undisturbed wild habitat to survive. In the United States, where sprawl and concrete has gobbled wilderness at a terrifying pace, this attempt to protect migratory corridors for North America’s grizzlies, caribou and wild salmon is an awesome feat.

The epic journeys of these incredible animals are reminiscent of Ridgeway’s own adventures. And in the face of a challenge this huge, it takes a bold, passionate and determined leader to succeed — a leader exactly like Rick Ridgeway.

What factors first fueled your thirst for adventure?

I grew up in the orange groves Southern California in the 50’s and 60’s, and when I saw the place paved over with housing developments, I fled to the mountains above the LA basin. I used to ditch school and go up there on my Honda 50 motor scooter and hike around: it was where I found solace. Then I started going up there in the winter, and pretty soon had to buy myself an ice ax and boots and crampons and a copy of Freedom of the Hills, with its instruction section on how to use the tools. So I taught myself: I couldn’t find anyone else with my interest or passion for the mountains and mountaineering— that didn’t happen until I was out of high school.

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