Last year I stayed the entire week in Banff for the famous festival … and was somewhat disappointed.
This year — though it’s only an hour away — I’m giving it a complete miss.
Here’s the first review I’ve seen online:
I arrived at the Banff Film and Book Festival last night to find snow flurries and white-capped gorgeous Canadian rockies surrounding the Banff Center, and where last night a few Outside colleagues took top honors at the Book Awards. Out of 113 entries from 14 countries, these were the winners:
1) Outside contributing editor Nick Heil’s book, Dark Summit, The True Story of Everest’s Most Controversial Season, won the John Whyte award for Mountain Literature. …
2) Former Hardway columnist Mark Jenkins’ book, A Man’s Life: Dispatches From Dangerous Places, a collection of his popular Hardway columns, won the Adventure Travel writing award. …
3) The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek by Sid Marty won the Canadian Rockies award, which celebrates regional talent.
4) Mont Blanc by Mario Colonel won the Mountain Image award for best photography.
5) Fallen Giants by Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver won the mountaineering History award. It was annouced that the book also has been nominated for a Pulitzer.
6) Lofoten Rock by Chris Craggs won the Mountain Exposition Award.
7) The Grand Prize was shared by Sid Marty’s The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek, and The Wild Places, by Robert McFarland.
8) Fatal Tide: When the Race of a Lifetime Goes Wrong by David Leach received a special mention.
Tons of terrific authors are in attendance at the Festival this year, including Jennifer Lowe-Anker (author of Forget Me Not: A Memoir, about her life with Alex Lowe); Maria Coffey (author of Explorers of the Infinite); Topher Donahue (author of Bugaboo Dreams); climber Majka Burhardt (who gave an inspiring presentation about her book, Vertical Ethiopia); and Dr. Geoff Tabin, author of Blind Corners: Adventures on Everest and the World’s Tallest Peaks (who gave a hilarious and moving presentation about his work performing cataract surgery in the Himalaya, and whose projects were written about by Dark Summit author Nick Heil in Outside and filmed by Serac Adventure Films’ Michael Brown.
—Mary Turner – Outside – The 7 Best Adventure Books at Banff
This is the one I added to my “to read soon” list:
Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes
besthike.com 