A scene from In Nansen's Footsteps, a film featured in the 2009 Banff Mountain Film Festival.
Spring and fall seem to be the times for adventure film festivals. Maybe the festival organizers know that during the warm summer months the audience for movies about adventure, travel and the outdoors would rather be doing than watching.
Whatever the reason, a number of film festivals are scheduled for this autumn, bringing you reels of exotic wildlife, stunning vistas and all the climbing, biking, hiking, surfing, padding and riding you eyeballs can stand. Some festivals you need to travel to, being one time events. Others will come to you in the form of traveling film tours.
Here are several that looks promising:
Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival
Banff, Alberta, October 30 – November 7, 2010
This festival, held in a lovely corner of the Canadian Rockies, is followed by a world tour where the top films from the festival are screened in various cities.
The Banff Center also sponsors the Radical Reels Tour, a collection of films focused on “high-adrenaline films” and sports such as skiing, climbing, kayaking, BASE jumping, snowboarding and mountain biking.
Reel Rock Film Festival
Premiere: Bolder, Colorado, September 16, 2010
Devoted to films about climbing, this festival tours the United States and abroad this fall and winter. The festival was founded by Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen, the owners of the adventure film company, Sender Films.
Adventure Film Festival
US Premiere: Boulder, Colorado, November 18-20, 2010
This international film festival, dedicated to celluloid capture of all things adventurous, kicked off in Chamonix, France, in August, and premieres in the United States in Boulder, Colorado. It then tours several big American cities, including Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Boston.
Tahoe Adventure Film Festival
Mont Bleu Resort and Casino, Lake Tahoe, December 12, 2010
Another festival that rounds up films on a variety of adventure sports. Set in the Sierras, this one night event offers all the razzle dazzle you’d expect of a Tahoe resort casino.
Midwest Ski Film Festival
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 16, 2010
This annual film festival showcases mostly new school skiing films, featuring freeskiers hucking and sliding over myriad jumps, rails and other obstacles.
New England Mountain Bike Film Festival
Debut: Boston, Massachusetts, December 4, 2010
Sponsored by the New England Mountain Bike Association, this film festival screens mountainbike films made by northeastern filmmakers. After the debut in Boston, the films are shown at events held by regional chapters of the association.
How absolutely beautiful those places are. I was just reading an article in yesterday’s NRV Current about Michael Abraham of Blacksburg, Virginia, and his wife,Jane, who climbed Mt. Rodgers last weekend. Mt. Rodgers is Virginia’s highest peak.
“Jane and I,(after)donning our hiking boots, reached the trailhead at Elk Garden between Rogers and nearby Whitetop Mountain at 10am——-we crossed Va 600 and began ascending through a grassy field in the warm sunshine at the end of a record breakind hot summer . We entered the woods and the sky coulded over—-it reminded me of my first ascent when I was a pup, walking with my dad.”( Michael is now 55) I love this part–which he also wrote in one of his books–”about 10,000 years ago, the earth was ensconced in the throes of its most recent ice age. Huge glaciers covered much of our continent, extending within a few hundred miles of Mount Rogers. While left unscathed, Rodgers did see a concomitant change in local vegetation, as colder temperatures bulldozed what we now think of as northern,boreal forests into our temperate South. When the glaciers retreated–the temperate forests returned. Following the glaciers northward,boreal forests migrated along the Appalachian ridges,but they also evacuated the lowlands, moving upwards in elevation. Today, a handful of acres of the top of Mount Rogers are still crowned with this forest,an island,of Nova Scotian vegetation, floating atop a sea of Appalachian hardwoods.” He is a bicyclist,writer,and ecologist.