INSIDE MOUNTAINFILM IN TELLURIDE: ADVENTURERS

23 Mar INSIDE MOUNTAINFILM IN TELLURIDE: ADVENTURERS

Nearly 72,000 people voted for National Geographic Adventure’s People’s Choice Adventurer of The Year for 2012. The winners are Sano Babu Sunuwar and Lakpa Tsheri Sherpa, who with second-hand equipment, a tiny budget and no corporate sponsors, climbed Everest, descended with paragliders and paddled to the sea in an adventure they called “The Ultimate Descent.”

Many who made it as finalists are familiar to Telluride Mountainfilm audiences: Nick Waggoner of Sweetgrass Films with “Solitaire”, bike rider Danny MacAskill from “Way Back Home”, and Cory Richards from the Charlie Fowler Award-winning film “Cold”.

Other nominees Jon Turk and Erik Boomer, two oddly matched explorers who circumnavigated Ellesmere Island in Canada, plan on presenting their trip at Telluride Mountainfilm this year. Boomer, a 27-year-old professional kayaker, and Turk, a 66-year-old writer and Arctic explorer, barely knew each other when they set out for the 104-day, 1,485-mile expedition of the world’s tenth largest island.

Using skis, kayaks and their feet, the two men completed the massive task. Turk considered this trip his “retirement party,” while for Boomer, it was the first of what he hopes will be many adventures in the Great North. The pair risked unstable ice floes, hostile polar bears and most precipitously, dangerous winds that could sandwich the kayaks (and men) between enormous chunks of sea ice and the steep cliffs of the island. As Turk texted during the voyage, “Bears scare us. We scare bears. The wind scares us. We don’t scare the wind.”