Wade Davis Presentation
Wade Davis who has appeared at Mountainfilm many times is often thought as an anthropologist and ethno-botanist; yet he considers himself more of a storyteller. Now after a two-year absence he returns to Telluride with two important stories. In the first he is an activist, explaining at the Symposium on Friday the critical debate over drilling in the Sacred Headwaters, a still primal, sub-alpine basin in northern British Columbia that is the source of three salmon-bearing rivers.
The second story he tells is about the famed mountaineer George Mallory who made several attempts on Mount Everest, the final one fatal. Ten years in the making, Davis’s forthcoming book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest shows how the mountaineer’s obsession was rooted in 19th-century imperial ambitions, but then became a redemptive statement for a generation of men trying to repair their psyches after the brutality of World War I.
This book used new access to notes and personal letters and is the latest opus from the highly productive Davis who has written more than a dozen books and appeared in countless films while also serving as an Explorer-in-Residence for National Geographic.