STEVE SWENSON grew up in Seattle and started climbing in the nearby Cascade Mountains at age fourteen. He graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Civil Engineering. He has been climbing for forty-five years with over twenty expeditions to South Asia, including ascents of K2 and Everest without supplementary oxygen. He was part of a team that won the 2012 Piolet d’Or award for the first ascent of Saser Kangri II (7,518 metres). Married with two sons aged twenty-two and thirty-two, he recently retired after thirty-five years of project management, design, policy making, finance, and communications consulting related to water and wastewater infrastructure projects.
MASA TAKEI is a freelance writer. Publications he’s written for include Canadian Geographic, explore, Western Living, and The Globe and Mail. He also contributed to National Geographic’s guide to Canada’s national parks. He writes primarily about outdoor travel and subcultures. For the project he initiated at The Banff Centre, he scripted and hosted a year-long web series for High Fidelity HDTV (now Blue Ant Media). Masa Off Grid was also made into an hour-long TV documentary for the cable channel radX. His work has been nominated for National Magazine Awards and a Canadian Screen Award. He now lives in a 320-square-foot, off-grid cabin near a decent surf break on Haida Gwaii.
JON TURK received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1971 and wrote the first environmental science textbook in North America, but he left academia to engage in extreme expeditions in remote parts of the world. Jon’s two-year kayak passage across the North Pacific Rim was named by Paddler Magazine as one of the ten greatest sea kayaking expeditions of all time. His circumnavigation of Ellesmere with Erik Boomer was nominated by National Geographic as one of the top ten adventures of 2011 and awarded “Expedition of the Year” by Canoe and Kayak Magazine. Jon chronicles his journeys and mental and spiritual passages in a trilogy books: Cold Oceans, In the Wake of the Jomon, and The Raven’s Gift.
FREDDIE WILKINSON is a climber from Madison, New Hampshire. He believes that any adventure is only as good as the stories you bring home.
EDITOR
BIOGRAPHIES
MARNI JACKSON is a Toronto journalist, author, and editor whose work has appeared in Outside, explore, The Globe and Mail, Rolling Stone, The Walrus, and Brick, among other publications. Her writing has won numerous National Magazine Awards and she is the author of three books of non-fiction. From 2006–2009, Marni was Rogers Chair of the Literary Journalism program at The Banff Centre, a month-long residency for professional non-fiction writers.
TONY WHITTOME was for many years editorial director of Hutchinson and of Random House U.K., and he is now consultant editor at Penguin Random House. Apart from fiction, history, politics, and poetry, he has published widely on climbing, travel, outdoor adventure, and environmental issues.
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