2017 Presentation: YEGs

Through its Young Explorers Grants (YEG) program, National Geographic Society has launched the career of many a photographer, explorer, researcher and bright young mind. Each year, Mountainfilm brings a handful of these “YEGs” to the festival presentations and exhibits. The 2017 crop includes:

Chris A. Johns is a photographer and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida who has spent recent years prowling the thick cloud forests of Hawaii in search of Philodoria, a tiny and little-known moth endemic to the island state. Johns aims to document, study and create a family tree of these highly adapted moths, which are threatened by a critical loss of the plant leaves they eat. Through the grueling work, Johns has already identified several species new to science.

As the the daughter of former National Geographic editor in chief Chris Johns, taking pictures was probably in Louise Johns’ DNA. Still, she didn’t consider herself a photographer until she took a photojournalism class in college and was subsequently inspired to document the changing landscapes of the West while working as a wrangler on a Montana ranch. In her project, “Harmony in a Montana Conflict Zone: Riding Range on a Yellowstone Borderline,” she reveals the changing relationship between ranchers and nature by chronicling range rider, wildlife biologist and mother Hilary Anderson.

Stretching from Manali to Srinagar in the north of India, like a necklace across the Himalaya Mountains, is the highest-altitude road in the world. Each year, pummeled by landslides, avalanches and flooding, the road is reconstructed. But, with a new tunnel scheduled to be completed, that will soon change. Explorer Cameron Kruse’s project, “A Road Among Clouds,” will document the people, places and stories behind the final reconstruction using images, social media and film.

Michael O. Snyder is part of a team working on a project titled “America’s Eroding Edges,” which travels to the margins of the United States’ territory, where the rim of American identity meets the edge of rising oceans. From Alaska to Guam, the American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands, the team is chronicling the citizens who have been largely cropped out of America’s climate change portrait. Prior to his work on this project, Snyder hiked the Appalachian and John Muir trails, rode the Trans- Siberian Railway and cycled more than 3,000 miles across Europe.