Big POW announcement time!
We’re psyched to let you know about a new addition to the Friday night event line up. After Jon Walsh’s feature presentation, we are stoked to host a Protect Our Winters Climate Panel.
Protect Our Winters will be hosting a moderated discussion called “Climb For Climate” which will focus on the distinct role climbers can take in protecting and preserving their wild escapes
Protect Our Winters’ mission is to turn passionate outdoor people into effective climate advocates. They bring together a community of athletes, creative pioneers, and forward-thinking business leaders to affect systemic solutions to climate change.
Panelists
Graham Zimmerman, Moderator Thirty-something male. Heavy drinker. Of coffee. Sporter of Moustache. Enamored with alpinism and the experiences, challenges and relationships that come from it.
Born in New Zealand raised in the Northwest. After being exposed to alpine terrain in the Cascades he moved back to NZ where he cut his teeth in the Southern Alps and became a strong part of the Kiwi climbing community. Then, after graduating from university in 2007 he moved back to the states and has been focused on climbing as it applies to alpinism ever since. This has taken him on expeditions from Alaska to Patagonia to Kyrgyzstan to Pakistan and all over the lower 48 and Canada where he has established numerous new routes on rock, ice and snow.
Anne Gilbert Chase Anne Gilbert Chase is both a registered nurse and professional mountain climber living in Bozeman, Montana, where she works at a local hospital. Anne Gilbert also works as an athlete ambassador for Patagonia and other companies in the outdoor industry. She has traveled and climbed around the world testing products for Patagonia in some of the world’s harshest environments.
Anne Gilbert started rock climbing in college, but it wasn’t until she moved west to spend time in big mountains that she fell in love with every discipline of climbing. Since then she’s climbed around the world, including India, Patagonia, France, Spain, Alaska and Canada. She calls Bozeman, MT home where she works as a registered nurse at the local hospital.
Majka Burhardt Majka Burhardt has a passion for creating unusual connections. As a professional climber, conservation entrepreneur, author and filmmaker Majka has spent two decades leading multi-stage international ventures focused on current issues of environmental and cultural significance spanning Africa, Europe, South, and North America.
Majka is the Founder and Executive Director of Legado, an international organization working to protect the world’s most threatened mountain ecosystems by empowering the people who call them home. She founded Legado to address the growing need to create conservation solutions that put mountain people at the center of preserving the world’s most biodiverse mountains— the water towers of our world.
Concurrent with her role as Executive Director of Legado, Majka is a professional climber and ambassador with top outdoor company Patagonia. She is an American Mountain Guides Association Rock Guide and also former two-term member of the organizations’ Board of Directors. Majka is a Mulago Foundation Henry Arnhold Fellow for her work in conservation entrepreneurship and graduated from Princeton University cum laude and received a MFA in Creative Writing from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.
Majka lives in New Hampshire with her husband, Peter Doucette, and their twin children.
Dr. Alix Contosta
Dr. Alix Contosta is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Earth Systems Research Center. She studies winter ecology and the winter-to-spring transition, especially the ways in which climate change impacts terrestrial ecosystems during the so called “dormant season.”