Cassar Jewelers ClimbFest 2008: Recap and Award Recipients

Cassar ClimbFest 2008 Literature and Art Award Recipients: 

• Best Short Story – Non Fiction: Jock Glidden for a chapter from his unpublished memoirs which conveys the experience of the three most memorable climbs of his long and distinguished career. 
• Best Short Story – Fiction: Dingus Milktoast for “Juxtaposition” which illustrates the classic theme of the redemptive power of climbing.
• Best Non-Fiction Book: Dick Dorworth – Night Driving- Invention of the Wheel & Other Blues is a splendid record of one man’s personal journey through the backroads and mountain ranges of the world; woven into the history of a wildly experimental, consciousness-expanding era.
• Part Edward Abbey; part Jack Kerouac; part Thomas Wolfe; part Hunter S. Thompson; Night Driving establishes Dorworth as THE “beat” writer of the mountain community and he may well go down in history as the Godfather of the modern road trip. 
• Best Fiction Book: Jeff Long The Wall – The wall continues Jeff Long’s decades old exploration of some of the deeper and more unsettling aspects of climbing. “Great mountain tales can take you to the edge of destruction, and that’s where things start to get interesting,” says Long, “because one thing I’ve learned on expeditions and climbs is that there’s nothing like the brink of the abyss to bring out the angels and demons…. In The Wall I wanted to weave a few of these dangers together into a sort of a Gordian knot, one that couldn’t be neatly untied, only cut.” 
• Best Guide Book: Jerry Handren - Red Rocks Guide Book- This guide is a prime example of the new generation of guide books. It covers an important climbing area and is beautifully illustrated with accurate photos, route drawings and topos. 
• Best Poetry and the Lifetime Literary Achievement Award: Pat Ament - “ Light is sound” a compelling poem that uses the vertical landscape to reveal the discovery that the climber, like the rock he climbs on, is all the same quiet structure. 
• Best of Festival Book: Pete Takeda - “An Eye At The Top Of The World” Part CIA spy novel, part personal journal, all mixed with lots of great climbing action, creates a totally absorbing reading experience. ** 
• Best Painting or Drawing: Leighan Falley- oil on canvas- “Skier”. Artful rendition of an extreme skier leaping boldly into the void. 
• Best Photograph: Nathan Smith -“Ice Climbing in Idaho”. This photograph captures all the drama, energy and beauty of the ice climber’s winter landscape. 
• Best of Festival Art and Photography: Ammon McNeelly – “Incoming Storm”
• Ammons’ wild and brightly colored brush stokes somehow evoke the urgent energy climbers feel when they see a violent weather front approaching. 
• Peoples Choice award visual arts: Corey Rich - “Beth and Tommy”. Beth Rodden calmly reads her book as her husband, Tommy Caldwell peers nervously off the couples portaledge bivouac high on El Capitan. Featured in Corey Rich’s book My Favorite Place.

** An Eye at the Top of the World tells the tale of the Cold War CIA, who with cooperation of the Indian Government trained the world’s best mountaineers to spy on China using a transceiver powered by a plutonium battery. The battery held four pounds of alloyed plutonium-238 and plutonium-239. The device was lost in 1966 – avalanched into a glacier at the base of a legendary mountain called Nanda Devi.

The glacier is the source of the Ganges River. Pete first heard this legend as a campfire yarn while living in Yosemite Valley in the 1980’s. Over the years the fable turned out to be fact. He then quit his day job and spent three years researching and writing An Eye at the Top of the World. In 2005, Takeda and three others traveled to the mythic Indian Himalayas to retrace the steps of the CIA expeditions – nearly losing their lives in attempting to unravel the mystery.