2011Mountainfilm in Telluride: Wade Davis Returns to Telluride

19 May 2011Mountainfilm in Telluride: Wade Davis Returns to Telluride

Wade Davis is a fixture at Mountainfilm in Telluride and that's a good thing.

Telluride Inside… and Out interviewed Davis in 1997 on his first ever visit to Mountainfilm in Telluride, the town he took by storm. His subject at the time was his then latest book, One River, a tribute to the life and work of one of his mentors, the legendary explorer/botanist Richard Evan Schultes, about the discoveries Davis and protege Tim Plowman made on their odyssey through the Amazonian jungle in the mid-1970s. Since then, there have been many other books and many miles traveled. With Davis, the sky's the limit. Well, maybe not. The man is unstoppable.

Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, in addition to "Renaissance man," he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” In recent years Davis' work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland.

An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, (and licensed river guide), Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in 8 Latin American nations while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller later released by Universal as a motion picture.

Wade is currently is fulfilling a two-book contract with Knopf (USA), one about the Stikine Valley in British Columbia, which he describes as “The Serengeti of the North.” The Valley, the shared birthplace of three of British Columbia’s great salmon-bearing rivers, the Stikine, Skeena and Nass, is under siege by developers of fossil fuels. Sacred Headwaters is due out this fall.

Wade's second book Into the Silence:The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest is also due out this year.