Category: Events

CU Professor James Green has experienced a front-row seat in the assembly, deployment, and maintenance of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and witnessed the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which has enough fuel for another 20 years, assuming it’s not overtaken by micrometeorites. In fact, thanks to 19 years of upgrades and repairs…

The History of RMNP, Trends in Wildlife and Wildfire Management, and an Update on Recent Field Research Throughout time, Rocky Mountain National Park, the third most visited National Park in 2019, has been influenced in many ways; however, park rangers and managers hope to keep the essence of Rocky unchanged. This program explores how visitation…

In a break from previous formats, our March dinner will provide members an opportunity to share their most recent projects with other chapter members. Come prepared to explain where you’ve been and the exploration you’re proudest about. Ground rules: • Six minutes per presentation; maximum 8-10 talks.   • No more than a five-year look-back. Current…

Join Cassandra Brooks as she tells stories from the bottom of the world and her efforts to protect it. Brooks will share imagery and stories from her five research expeditions to Antarctica, including the challenges of conducting science operations and media in the windiest, coldest, and most extreme environment on earth. She will also share…

On October 13,1972, a Uruguayan plane carrying a Rugby team and their friends crashed in the Andes. Sixteen of the 45 passengers survived 72 days trapped on a glacier, isolated from civilization and having to resort to eating the bodies of the dead to survive. In those 72 days, they endured extreme cold temperatures, avalanches,…

An RMEC encore event ….. Andrew and Jacquie McKenna have graciously again invited chapter members and guests to join them in a fall kick-off celebration at their ranch near Ward located at 47517 Peak to Peak Highway. (Directions forthcoming.) Time: 12 PM, with mine tour to follow. As an added bonus, Club member Markus Raschke…

Giraffe are icons of the African wilderness, but they are under significant conservation threat. With only 117,000 individuals widely distributed in isolated populations across 21 different African countries, giraffe face diverse challenges throughout their range, which require diverse solutions to address them.  The Giraffe Conservation Foundation, with a collaborative international team of scientists and local stakeholders,…

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…