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Richard Bangs
Richard Bangs is founding partner of Mountain Travel Sobek, America's oldest and largest adventure travel firm. Bangs is a world adventurer, international river explorer, Web pioneer, and award winning author. He has led first descents of 35 rivers around the globe, including the Yangtze in China and the Zambezi in Southern Africa. Bangs has published more than 500 magazine articles, 13 books, a score of documentaries and several CD-ROM's, and has lectured at the Smithsonian, National Geographic Society, the Explorers Club and many other notable venues. He was founder and editor-in-chief of Mungo Park, a Microsoft travel publishing effort, and was part of the founding executive team of Expedia.com. He was creator and publisher of Expedia Travels Magazine, and Executive Producer of Expedia Radio. He also served as president of Outward Bound, and is currently editor and producer of well-traveled.com, another Microsoft Travel initiative. His recent book, The Lost River: A Memoir of Life, Death and the Transformation of Wild Water, won the National Outdoor Book Award in the literature category. His latest book is Adventure Without End.
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Nevada Wier
Nevada Wier is an award-winning photographer specializing in the remote corners of the globe and the cultures that inhabit them. Nevada's journeys have taken her throughout Southeast Asia, India, China, Nepal, Africa, New Zealand, Central Asia, Mongolia, South America and other obscure regions of the world. Her work has been published in numerous national and international publications, including National Geographic Adventure, Geo, Islands, National Geographic, Outdoor Photographer, Outside and Smithsonian. She is a Fellow of the Explorer's Club, and member of the Society of Woman Geographers and was featured in a Northwest Airlines international television and print ad campaign. Nevada's books are The Land of Nine Dragons - Vietnam Today (Abbeville Press, 1992), photography from contemporary Vietnam, winner of the Lowell Thomas Best Travel Book of 1992 award, and Adventure Travel Photography (Amphoto, 1993). She was a participating photographer in A Day in the Life of Thailand (Collins, 1995) and Planet Vegas (Collins, 1995).
Nevada was featured in a National Geographic Explorer television episode on her travels down the Blue Nile River in Ethiopia on assignment with National Geographic Magazine. She is a frequent photographer on Canon Photo Safaris (OLN) -- recently in the Galapagos with actress, Kristen Davis, and previously in South Africa with actor, Sam Waterston. She is also a regular guest on The Travel Channel. Nevada is a lecturer for seminars and professional panels, and a featured speaker for banquets and conferences. She was recently on a nation-wide tour with Live...from National Geographic.
Nevada has guided the gamut of outdoor programs in the mountains, deserts and rivers of the world. This includes 20 years as a Course Director/Instructor for Outward Bound, a boatman for AZRA on the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River and a professional ski patroller in New Hampshire. She has traveled and trekked extensively on expeditions and private explorations in search of unusual places and photographs. For more information on Nevada Wier, visit www.nevadawier.com.
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Wade Davis
Wade Davis is an explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. He holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D in Ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American Nations while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate fold preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1998), Shadows in the Sun (1998), Rainforest (1998) and One River (1996), which was nominated for the 1997 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction, Canada's most prestigious literary prize. His most recent book is Light at the Edge of the World (2002). He is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2002 Lowell Thomas Medal (The Explorer's Club) and the 2002 Lannan Foundation $125,000 prize for literary non-fiction. Recently his work has taken him to East Africa, Peru, Borneo, Tibet, the High Arctic, the Orinoco Delta of Venezuela, and the deserts of Mali and Burkina Faso.
A native of British Columbia, Davis has worked as a guide, park ranger, forestry engineer, and conducted ethnographic fieldwork among several indigenous societies of Northern Canada. He has published over a hundred scientific and popular articles on subjects ranging from Haitian vodoun and Amazonian myth and religion to the global biodiversity crisis, the traditional use of psychotropic drugs, and the ethnobotany of South American Indians.
He has written for National Geographic, Newsweek, Premiere, Outside, Omni, Harpers, Fortune, Men's Journal, Conde Nast Traveler, Natural History, Utne Reader, National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, and several other international publications.
His photographs have been widely published, and his research has been the subject of more than 600 media reports and interviews in Europe, North and South America and the Far East, and have inspired numerous documentary films as well as three episodes of the television series, The X-Files.
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