Category: Events

James is an acclaimed photographer featured in The Human Element and Chasing Ice. He’s a scientist, adventurer, president and founder of the Colorado-based Extreme Ice Survey and Earth Vision Institute. Environmental photographer and thinker James Balog explores the crucial concerns of our time. In this presentation, he will share stunning images and provocative ideas from his latest book, The Human Element:…

Alan Arnette climbs, coaches, talks, and writes. He advocates for Alzheimer’s patients, caregivers, and researchers at every opportunity. As Alan saw his mom, Ida, go through the Alzheimer’s journey, he said it took her life and changed him forever. So after a 30-year career in management roles with Hewlett-Packard, he took early retirement in 2007 to…

On December 11th, 2021, Dylan Taylor flew aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket on NS-19 and became the 606th human to enter space and the 592ndhuman to cross the Karman Line. Dylan will discuss his experience on the spaceflight, as well as what the future holds for human spaceflight and exploration. Dylan is a Rocky Mountain Explorers Club…

Rick Ridgeway has experienced many adventures in his life, including the first American ascent of K2 and the first crossing on foot of a corner of Tibet so remote no outsider had ever seen it. In telling these stories, Rick also describes his shift from someone fascinated by wild places to someone dedicated to saving…

In her presentation, Explorers Club member Gaelin Rosenwaks will take you on a journey from satellite tagging bluefin tuna in the Western Atlantic Ocean to drilling ice cores in the frozen Bering Sea to the bottom of the Blue Hole in Belize, in order to illuminate cutting-edge scientific research being conducted to understand the complexity of…

Join fellow Club member Douglas Duncan for a personal guided tour of the winter night sky at the Fiske Planetarium on the University of Colorado Boulder campus. Fiske opened in 1975 with a generous donation from Wallace Franz Fiske, Class of 1917. The 65-foot diameter dome is the largest planetarium between Chicago and Los Angeles and…

Ian Billick, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) near Crested Butte, will discuss the history and future of field science within the context of exploration and discovery. He will quickly move through the age of exploration starting with the fall of Constantinople, through economy botany, to the emergence of modern science, and…

Climber, filmmaker, photographer, and activist, Jake Norton, has spent most of his life in the high mountains and remote regions of the world. From helping discover George Mallory’s remains on Mount Everest to following the footsteps of Sir Ernest Shackleton across South Georgia Island, unearthing 3,500 year old human remains in cliffside caves high in…

Join us on Tuesday, September 14 at 12 PM MDT as Club archivist Lacey Flint shows us some of her favorite artifacts in the Club’s Library at HQ. Note: this will be earlier in the day so we don’t make Lacey stay at work until dark. Wait ’til you see Teddy Roosevelt’s Magic Lantern slides.

Learn more about this new book, a riveting history of the momentous Friendship 7 space flight that put America back into the space race. If the United States couldn’t catch up to the Soviets in space, how could it compete with them on Earth? That was the question facing John F. Kennedy at the height…

On April 25, 2015, TEC member Jim Davidson was climbing Mount Everest when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake released avalanches all around him and his team, destroying their only escape route and trapping them at nearly 20,000 feet. It was the largest earthquake in Nepal in 81 years and killed nearly 8,900 people. That day also…

Whenever Mother Nature is throwing a temper tantrum, George Kourounis is usually not far away. For over two decades, he’s been documenting extreme forces of nature and natural disasters worldwide, from chasing tornadoes and hurricanes to climbing down inside active volcanoes. He’s appeared on countless television programs on The Weather Channel, Discovery, National Geographic, Netflix, Science…

Most people associate Yellowstone National Park with geysers and so did RMEC chapter member Jim Pisarowicz until he was dispatched by the National Park Service to help document the massive 1988 Yellowstone wildfire. It was during that time that he came to the realization that these geysers were essentially a system of caves that were…

In July 1881, Lt. A.W. Greely, the first president of The Explorers Club, and his crew of 24 scientists and explorers were bound for the last region unmarked on global maps. Their goal: Farthest North. What would follow was one of the most extraordinary and terrible voyages ever made. Greely and his men confronted every possible…

In summer 2020, Tez Steinberg of Boulder took social distancing to the extreme by spending 71 days on the Pacific Ocean alone, rowing solo and self-supported from California to Hawaii. Called the United World Challenge, it was a collaborative mission to raise scholarships to United World Colleges, help protect our oceans, and inspire others. And…

Come hear Club member Chris Nicola’s presentation on how five Jewish families survived the Holocaust by taking refuge in a Ukrainian cave in excess of 500 days. Chris describes how he spent ten years developing a story, which he had first heard as a rumor, of how a group of 38 Jews survived the Holocaust…

George Frandsen has heard all the jokes from people amused by his passion for collecting fossilized dinosaur excrement – ancient poo if you will. The 41-year-old from Jacksonville, Florida, who started collecting at age 19, holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest collection of coprolites, the scientific name for fossilized poo. The word comes…

 In 2002, the Joola, a government-owned Senegalese ferry, capsized off the coast of The Gambia in a tragedy that killed approximately 1,863 people, leaving only 64 survivors. The Joola is recognized as the second worst maritime disaster in peacetime history yet few people are aware of this event and how it shaped the lives of Senegalese people.   Karen will…

We can’t live our entire lives on Zoom. Sometimes explorers have to get out and, well, explore a bit. Masked up and socially distant, of course. Join us to learn how prairie dogs, specifically the black tailed prairie dog of the Great Plains, have been systematically persecuted by western land holders and governments starting in…

The McMurdo Dry Valleys are the largest ice-free region of Antarctica.  They were first discovered by Robert F. Scott’s party in the early 1900’s, and have since become an important scientific resource for research on fundamental life sciences, geology, and extraterrestrial studies. Dr. Gooseff has been conducting research in the Dry Valleys since 1998 and…