Peter Athans
Himalayan mountaineer and cinematographer Peter Athans is known in some circles simply as "Mr. Everest". Since 1985, Athans has led 15 expeditions, attempted five different routes from the Tibetan and Nepalese sides of the mountain, and on seven occasions has attained the summit — more than any other climber who is not of Sherpa ethnicity. Athens’ most recent Himalayan accomplishment was leading the 2002 National Geographic Everest Expedition, documenting a special two-hour program celebrating fifty years of Everest exploration.

Athans’ accomplishments on other peaks are equally impressive. He has led expeditions to Lhotse, Nuptse, Makalu, Manaslu and K2 and has succeeded in forging a new line up the rarely climbed south face of Annapurna South. Moreover, his lightning-fast ascents of Cho Oyu, Ama Dablam and Pumori were remarkable in their speed and efficiency. In recent years Athans has focused his exploratory climbing efforts in the eastern Himalayas, opening new routes in the Tibetan borderlands with China.

Athans is a member of The North Face Design and Development team, guides mountaineering adventures throughout the world and is a high-altitude camera operator. His work has been featured in productions for NOVA, National Geographic Television and Film, ABC Sports and NBC Sports and in the feature "Seven Years in Tibet. Athans is currently working on an autobiographical project entitled "Nearly Sherpa: Seven Summits of Everest".

Jérôme-Cécil Auffret
The scriptwriter and director of over thirty films for television, Jérôme-Cécil Auffret is an eclectic filmmaker who moves easily from documentary to fiction, often combining the two. Among his favourite topics are history, anthropology, adventure and exploration. As a pioneer of fiction documentaries, Auffret has directed films for several series, including four films for the series "Lord of the Animals", produced by Boréales and broadcast in over 45 countries. He is presently working on two feature-length films: "Sabu", whose story takes place in Africa; and "Siam", to be shot in India, Thailand and Switzerland. His current documentary projects include films on the Egyptologist Christian Jacq; the vision of animals; animals in space; Easter Island; and the photographer Yann Layma, who spent 25 years photographing China. Auffret’s many filmmaking awards include the Banff Mountain Film Festival’s award for Best Film on Mountain Environment for "The Lord of the Eagles" in 1992, and an Emmy Award for "The Pelican of Ramzan the Red".

Subhankar Banerjee
Subhankar Banerjee’s two-year photographic journey in the stark wilderness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in remote northeastern Alaska, encompassed 4,000 miles undertaken on foot and by raft, kayak and snowmobile, in all four seasons, accompanied by his friend and Inupiat guide Robert Thompson. When not exploring, Banerjee lived with native Gwich’in Athabascan and Inupiat families, where he came to understand their relationship to the land and its wildlife. This project culminated in the publication of "Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land" (The Mountaineers Books, Seattle, 2003). In this book, eminent writers, conservationists and biologists tell the story of the United States’ last great wilderness, complementing Banerjee’s images.

Subhankar Banerjee’s work as a photographer stemmed from his childhood passion for painting, coupled with a deep love and concern for the wilderness and disappearing indigenous cultures. Born in India in 1967, Banerjee received his bachelor’s degree in engineering before moving to the United States, where he obtained master’s degrees in physics and computer science. Before starting his career in photography, he was employed in the scientific fields for six years. Banerjee has worked closely with conservation organizations and members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to educate the public about the need to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from industrial exploitation. His images have appeared in "Newsweek", "Discover", "Outside", "Audubon", "Sierra", "National Wildlife", "Natural History", "Smithsonian", "Washington Post", "Los Angeles Times" and "Seattle Times".

Mauro "Bubu" Bole
A resident of Trieste, Italy, Mauro "Bubu" Bole has been an alpine guide since 1990. Having embraced the new climbing discipline of dry-tooling in the winter of 1999, he pushed its standards significantly upward over the next two years by repeating the most difficult routes in existence and putting up new ones. Bole rose to the top ranks of the world’s climbers when he added a 10th grade to the scale of climbing difficulty in the Dolomites after completing the first free ascent of the "Couzy" route on the Cima Ovest di Lavaredo.

In 2000, Bole organized his first expedition abroad, during which he opened a new route in the Cordillera Blanca, in Peru. This marked the first time that a climb rated at the 9th grade of difficulty had been accomplished above an elevation of 5000 metres. The following year, during an expedition to Pakistan, Bole did a new route in the Trango Towers and put up a climb at the 10th grade of difficulty on Shipton Spire (5850 m). Also in 2001, Bole was crowned "Italian Mountaineer of the Year" and awarded the Grignetta d’Oro at the Climbing World Cup, held in Lecco, Italy.

John Catto
John Catto is a veteran cameraman/producer with 18 years’ experience shooting cultural and political events in over 35 countries. More recently, the focus of Catto’s assignments has been documenting explorations, adventures and mountains sports. His most recent shoots have taken him to Guyana and Alaska for National Geographic Television. The popular and multi-award-winning "La Escoba de Dios", produced in 1992, was Catto’s first venture combining his passion as an alpinist and his profession as a cameraman. In 2000, "Hitting the Wall", a climbing documentary for National Geographic Television, won him a second Emmy for electronic cameraperson. In 2001, John produced and directed the film "Jump", which added a ninth festival award to his credit. Five Emmy nominations and a dozen awards later, Catto has earned a reputation as an outstanding cameraman and independent filmmaker, working for National Geographic Television, Discovery Channel, ESPN and OLN, among others. An accomplished alpinist and rock climber, Catto has made several first ascents in the U.S.A, Canada, Patagonia, and the Karakoram mountains of Pakistan.

Helen Cherullo
Publisher of Seattle-based The Mountaineers Books, Helen Cherullo has been involved in publishing more than 500 of the titles produced during her 10-year tenure. Those titles have included books with a natural-history and advocacy perspective by many highly regarded nature photographers such as Art Wolfe, Brad Washburn, Pat O’Hara and, most recently, Subhankar Banerjee. The Mountaineers also works with freelance photographers around the world to produce guidebooks, outdoor-activity instructional guides, biographies, histories and calendars. Before she became a publisher, Cherullo’s career focused on graphic production and printing management. She is vice-president of the board of directors for the Publishers Association of the West, a community of book publishers and manufacturers. Born in Chicago and raised next to a forest preserve in the city’s suburbs, Cherullo has had a lifetime passion for nature study and preserving wild places

Greg Child
A mountaineer who has summited K2 and Everest, Greg Child lives near Moab, Utah. Perhaps more significant than his climbing is Child’s rare gift of being able to bring those experiences home to the rest of us. He is a writer for "Outside" and has also authored several books: "Thin Air: Encounters in the Himalayas", "Mixed Emotions: Mountaineering Writings of Greg Child", "Postcards from the Ledge", "Over the Edge" and "Climbing Free" (co-authored with Lynn Hill). In 1987, Child was honoured with the American Alpine Club’s Literacy Award for his prolific and insightful mountaineering literature.

Maria Coffey
Maria Coffey has triple citizenship — English, Irish and Canadian — which may explain why she has never felt firmly rooted anywhere. Coffey was born in England, where she attended the University of Liverpool and trained as a teacher. In 1985, she came to Canada on a one-year teaching-exchange program, and decided to stay. Two years later she married Dag Goering, a veterinarian, photographer and kayak guide. They have wandered around the world together, usually by kayak, and Coffey has written a number of books about their shared experiences, as well as four books for children. Her titles can be found on their Web site: www.hiddenplaces.net

Coffey’s first book, "Fragile Edge", was an account of her relationship with the British mountaineer Joe Tasker, and her efforts to come to terms with his death after he was lost without trace on Everest. In her most recent project, she has returned to the subject of risk taking in high places; "Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow" is an examination of the impact of mountaineering on the lives of climbers and, most importantly, on the lives of those who love them.

Leo Dickinson
A veteran alpinist and skydiver, Leo Dickinson is one of the outstanding action sports filmmakers in the field today, having made over 50 films of his own and helped in many others. These films have won numerous awards in every major mountain film and adventure film festival. In 1970, Dickinson persuaded Yorkshire TV to finance his first film, an ascent of the North Face of the Eiger, in Switzerland. Since then his work on television documentaries has taken him around the world, from Patagonia to the Himalayas. During his mountaineering career, Dickinson has climbed several major routes in the Alps, as well as reaching over 25,000 feet on both sides of Everest. Having first parachuted in 1971, he has made over 3000 jumps, 1500 of them with a camera on his helmet, recording many records and stunts. Dickinson’s skydiving films include four documentaries and four comedies. In 1991, he organized and filmed the four-man team that made the first hot-air balloon flight over the summit of Mount Everest. Dickinson is the 2003 winner of the International Alliance for Mountain Film Lifetime Achievement Award for mountain filmmaking. He has won the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film Festival on three separate occasions with his films "Dudh Kosi – Relentless River of Everest" (1978), "The Cerro Torre Enigma" (1981) and "Eiger" (1984).

Ed Douglas
Writer, traveller and mountaineer Ed Douglas has been climbing for 17 years, having started on the gritstone edges of Derbyshire while still at school. Currently associate editor of Climber magazine and editor of the Alpine Journal, Douglas is the author of "Chomolungma Sings the Blues", which won a Special Jury Mention at the 1998 Banff Mountain Book Festival; "Regions of the Heart: The Triumph and Tragedy of Alison Hargreaves", co-written with David Rose; and "Tenzing: Hero of Everest", which has just been selected as a finalist at this year’s Banff Mountain Book Festival.

Ava Karvonen
Canadian award-winning producer Ava Karvonen got her start in the business back in 1977 when she played the ongoing role of a child for three seasons of a science and nature multimedia radio series with her filmmaker father, Albert Karvonen. Ava Karvonen went on to produce the critically acclaimed children’s animated and live-action series "Stories from the Seventh Fire", the one-hour documentary specials "Return of the Peregrine" and "How the Fiddle Flows" (featuring Metis fiddlers and dancers), and several award-winning episodes of the series "Treasures of the Wild" (broadcast on Canada’s Discovery Channel). In addition to television, Karvonen also produces children’s new media including the award-winning CD-ROM series "Zoology Zone" and the interactive TV series "wildfiles.tv" (currently in production). Karvonen has served on the jury at England’s Wildscreen and Canada’s Gemini awards (twice).

George Lowe
In 1953, George Lowe was a member of the team that put Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on top of the world. As part of the final-assault group, he climbed to within 350 metres of the summit of Everest and was the first to greet Hillary and Norgay on their return. Subsequently, Lowe climbed again in the Himalayas, as well as in the Pamirs, in Greenland and elsewhere. In 1957–58, he made the first crossing of Antarctica with Sir Vivian Fuchs’s party, meeting Hillary at the South Pole. Lowe has received several awards, including the Cuthbert Peek Award of the Royal Geographical Society for mapping and exploration in the Himalayas and in the Antarctic.

Peter Matthiessen
Born in New York City in 1927, Peter Matthiessen is a novelist, environmental activist and lifelong naturalist whose non-fiction books include "The Tree Where Man Was Born", which was nominated for the National Book Award, and "The Snow Leopard", which won it. He became one of only a handful of National Book Award winners to be nominated in both fiction and non-fiction categories. Matthiessen’s newest book, "End of the Earth: Voyages to Antarctica", recounts his experiences on the ultimate wildlife safari — a true back-of-beyond voyage to the world’s most unforgiving land, the islands off Antarctica’s northern ice shelf. The ultimate lyricist of loss, Matthiessen agonizes over what is passing away, but does so in a manner that increases our appreciation of what remains.

Simon Mawer
Born in England in 1948 into a Royal Air Force family, Simon Mawer spent his childhood in various locations including Cyprus and Malta. After taking a degree in biology at Oxford University, Mawer taught biology in the Channel Islands, Scotland and Malta, before moving to Rome with his Maltese wife in 1977. They have lived in Italy ever since and have a son and a daughter. Mawer became deputy head of St George’s British International School in Rome, but currently has reduced his commitments to part-time teaching.

Mawer’s first novel, "Chimera", was published in 1989 and won the Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize for first novels. Next came "The Bitter Cross", a historical novel about the Knights of Malta, and "A Place in Italy", a light-hearted non-fiction work about life in Italy (both published in 1992). These were followed by "A Jealous God" (1996) and "Mendel’s Dwarf" (1997). A finalist in the Los Angeles Times Book Awards for 1998, "Mendel’s Dwarf" was also in the final ten for the U.K.’s Booker Prize. Mawer’s most recent books are "The Gospel of Judas" (2000), widely praised on both sides of the Atlantic, and "The Fall" (2003), which won this year’s Boardman Tasker Award for Mountaineering Literature. Mawer is currently working on his eighth book, a novel provisionally entitled "Becoming Absent".

Timmy O’Neill
Born in 1969 in the suburban shadow of Philadelphia, Tim O’Neill fostered his adventurous spirit by climbing the fences, buildings and trees of his urban playground. At age 19, armed with a $69, one-way ticket to Wyoming, he boarded a Greyhound bus bound for wilderness and freedom. He landed in Yellowstone National Park, worked in a gift shop, discovered rock climbing one weekend and never looked back. O’Neill travelled extensively in the western U.S. for seven years, living the iconoclastic "climbing bum" lifestyle. He’s still a bum.

During the past several years, O’Neill has been exploring the world’s great mountain ranges, climbing from Pakistan to Patagonia. A trip to South America from December 2001 to April 2002 netted him a month of whitewater kayaking on the rain-forested rivers of southern Chile, seven weeks of bagging alpine first ascents in Argentina and Patagonia, and finally a wild climbing adventure in the heart of Venezuela’s Orinoco jungle.

O’Neill is one of the fastest climbers in the world. He has set many on-sight speed records in Yosemite National Park on several of its formations, including the world-record ascent of the famed 3000-foot "Nose" on El Capitan in three hours, 24 minutes in 2001. In 2002, in Yosemite Valley, he teamed up once again with Dean Potter, and the two became the first ever to link up, in a continuous push, three massive Grade VI walls, climbing over 80 pitches and 9000 vertical feet in less that 24 hours.

Børge Ousland
The first person to trek solo and unaided to both the South and North poles, Norwegian explorer Børge Ousland trained by dragging car tires behind him as he skied with 175 pounds of old phone books and lead in his backpack. Having also recently summited Everest, he has just returned from his Trans Patagonia Ice Cap Expedition, where he made the first unaided crossing of a vast Patagonian glacier that lies between Chile and Argentina.

Geoff Powter
Climber, writer and psychologist Geoff Powter has been involved with the Banff Mountain Festivals as a moderator and a panelist since 1987, and as the interviewer of the Voices of Adventure series for the last six years. Powter has also been the editor of the "Canadian Alpine Journal" for the last 12 years, and he is the president of the Canadian Himalayan Foundation. A frequent contributor to climbing and outdoor magazines, Powter received a 2002 National Magazine Award for his profile of climber Barry Blanchard in "Explore".

Tashi Tenzing
Tashi Tenzing is a native of the Himalayas, though now a citizen of Australia. He was born in the old British hill station of Darjeeling, where his maternal grandfather, Tenzing Norgay, settled from Nepal in the early 1930s to seek mountaineering work with the great British expeditions to Everest. The rest, as they say, is history, for he went on to make the first ascent of Everest with Edmund Hillary in May 1953.

Tashi Tenzing has followed in his famous forebear’s footsteps and has reached the summit of Everest twice – first in May 1997 and again in May 2002. He works guiding treks and tours for his company, Tenzing’s Journeys, as well as guiding in Antarctica and anywhere else in the world where there are mountains and snow! In 2001, Tashi Tenzing published his first book, "Tenzing and the Sherpas of Everest", co-authored with his wife, Judy. He and Judy coordinate Sherpa Projects, ably supported by Tashi’s vast family network in the Himalayas and India.

Gordon Wiltsie
Gordon Wiltsie, 50, is a photographer, writer, mountaineer and explorer whose work has taken him to some of Earth’s wildest and remotest regions, including numerous journeys to the Himalayas, the Andes, the Canadian Arctic, Antarctica and both geographic poles. He is widely considered to be one of the most creative and prolific expedition photographers in the world, and his work appears regularly in such international publications as "National Geographic", "Travel and Leisure", "Outside", "Geo", "American Photographer", "Terre Sauvage", "Life" and other leading adventure and skiing magazines. For more than 25 years, as well, Wiltsie’s adventure and expedition stories have had a wide following of readers and he has been featured as a contributing editor for several magazines including "Ski" and "Powder". He is also the principal photographer for three books, and his images appear regularly in calendars, posters, advertising and many other formats.

When not traveling on distant assignments, Wiltsie lives in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Meredith, and their two sons, writing and creating image advertising photography for outdoor clothing and equipment companies and other national advertisers. He loves to tell stories and is a popular lecturer for large audiences across the United States, Canada and Europe.

Sharon Wood
Mount Everest was the culmination of an odyssey that began at age 12 when Sharon Wood’s father took her up her first mountain. By the time she was 17 she was devoting all her time to climbing. Her first break came in l977 when she joined an all women’s expedition to Mount Logan. Then in l983 she had her first big success, with the Cassin Ridge on Mount McKinley. Expeditions to Makalu (l984), the south face of Aconcagua (l984) and the northeast face of Huascaran Sur (1985) followed. By l986 Wood realized that she was "ready for anything". Her ascent of Mount Everest by the difficult west ridge and north face was a first for a North American woman.

After Everest, Wood moved on to other adventures. Much in demand as a public speaker, she travels North America sharing her experiences and her approach to risk. She became very involved in starting a private school in her home town of Canmore, Alberta, where she lives with her two sons. In l997, Wood received the Summit of Excellence Award at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.