Steve Swenson grew up in Seattle and started climbing in the nearby Cascade Mountains at age 14. He has been climbing for nearly a half century with over twenty expeditions to Asia under his belt including ascents of K2 and Everest without supplemental oxygen. The best mountain climbing in the world, Steve Swenson will tell you, is in the Karakoram. Swenson has been climbing in these mountains since 1980 and has a perspective on the land and its people like few others. A complex place, the Karakoram Range is located in Kashmir, a western Himalaya border region that has a long history of tension and conflict between China, India, and Pakistan, tensions that have only been magnified since 9/11. Over the course of more than thirty years climbing there, Swenson’s experiences have been laced with daunting challenges, exhilarating successes, and terrifying moments—caused by the risks inherent in alpine environments, as well as politics below spilling into the peaks above.

In 2012, he was part of a team that won the Piolet d’Or award for the first ascent of Saser Kangri II (7518 meters). His recent book published by Mountaineers Books is entitled, Karakoram: Climbing Through the Kashmir Conflict and he is a part participant of Banff Centre’s Mountain & Wilderness Writing Program.  

In 2003, Kevin Vallely was named one of Canada's leading adventurers by the Globe and Mail. His adventuring resume is stacked with compelling expeditions to all parts of the world including skiing Alaska’s 1,860 kilometre Iditarod Trail; scampering over Vancouver Island’s West Coast Trail in record time (10 hours, 13 minutes); attempting to bike and climb the island of Java’s 13 -10,000-foot volcanoes (a trip cut short when post-9/11 Indonesia became too dangerous); competing on the only Canadian team to finish the last and most difficult Eco-Challenge adventure race held in Fiji in 2002; retracing a 2,000 kilometre Klondike-era ice-bike route through the dead of an Alaskan winter, and most recently, with teammates Ray Zahab and Richard Weber, breaking the world record for the fastest unsupported trek from Hercules Inlet to the South Pole.

Kevin is a registered architect and runs his own company Vallely Architecture. He graduated from the McGill University School of Architecture in 1988 where he was awarded the Royal architectural Institute of Canada medal as top graduating student. He’s a recipient of a Commonwealth Scholarship to Cambridge University.