Thursday, November 1
Daytime Program
3:00 – 4:10 p.m.
Max Bell Auditorium

Bernadette McDonald

Brotherhood of the Rope
with Charles Houston

An avid climber, hiker, and skier, Bernadette McDonald has traveled to the mountains of Japan, South America, Africa, Europe, and Tibet, as well as the North American Ranges, in search of warm rock and deep snow.

1987 marked the year McDonald took over directorship of the Banff Mountain Film Festival. During the two decades she provided leadership to this internationally renowned event, her expertise was sought world wide. She judged festivals around the world, launched the International Year of Mountains at the General Assembly of the United Nations, and edited a number of mountain literary works, including Voices From the Summit: The World’s Great Mountaineers on the Future of Climbing, Whose Water Is It?, and Extreme Landscapes. In 2005, she published I’ll Call you in Kathmandu: The Elizabeth Hawley Story.

With a vision of bringing the power of mountain experiences alive for audiences around the world, McDonald grew the Festival from a weekend film event to a twelve-month, global touring program with an international program of films, authors, speakers, and exhibitions spanning seven continents. In 2006, she was awarded the King Albert Award for her exceptional achievements in the mountain world.

In 1992, McDonald founded the Banff Mountain Book Festival, and this November will return to its main stage with a reading from her latest book Brotherhood of the Rope. Drawn from extensive interviews with Charles Houston, this story masterfully captures the development of an American hero.

Charles Houston is a mountaineer whose groundbreaking medical experiments on altitude and the human body helped calibrate the nation’s WWII air-assault strategy and shorten the war. He was the first to bring high-altitude pulmonary edema to the world’s attention, and has spent over five decades exploring problems caused by a lack of oxygen and the body’s mechanisms of acclimatization at altitude. He has also led a life of exemplary climbing achievements, starting his adventurous streak as a youth in the Alps. His formidable climbing career has included leading a successful expedition to Nanda Devi (8000 metres) in 1936 and expeditions to K2 in 1938 and 1953. In 1950, Houston and his team also researched a new route to Everest via the south.

Houston was the past director of the Arctic Institute in Canada’s Yukon Territory and is also the recipient of the King Albert Medal of Merit for contribution to high altitude medicine. He is still a leading authority in high-altitude medicine.

Author and climber McDonald (I’ll Call You in Kathmandu) deepens Houston’s legacy by providing a view of his inner struggles with depression, revealing this larger-than-life figure in very human terms, making Houston a pleasure to spend time with.

— Publisher’s Weekly