A timely and beautifully told story, Karsten Heuer’s Being Caribou has been chosen as Grand Prize winner in the 2005 Banff Mountain Book Festival competition. Chronicling Heuer’s 2003 journey with his wife, filmmaker Leanne Allison, into the caribou calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the book is a passionate and personal response to one of the foremost environmental issues in North America.

“We are so used to amazing wildlife images in TV documentaries,” says jury member and UK-based editor Maggie Body. “Karsten Heuer offers the verbal equivalent of those magical visual moments.” Being Caribou, The Mountaineers Books (USA, 2005) was among 39 finalists in six categories. More than 150 books were entered into the 2005 competition. A committee selected the finalists, which were then passed to the 2005 Banff Mountain Book Jury to choose the winners. Working with Maggie Body on this year’s jury were Bill Buxton, a Toronto-based technology researcher and expert on Central Asian mountaineering, and writer, photographer, and natural historian Jeremy Schmidt.

The Jon Whyte Award for Mountain Literature went to Mick Fowler’s memoir On Thin Ice, Baton Wicks Publications (UK, 2005). Jury member Bill Buxton calls Fowler’s involving account of award-winning ascents throughout Asia and the Americas, “a far cry from the grunt/epic/hero/tragedy school of mountain writing. In many ways, the climbing is simply a backdrop to great storytelling, powers of observation, travel writing, and humour.”

American photographer and preservationist John Fielder won the award for Best Book — Mountain Image for his photo essay collection Mountain Ranges of Colorado, Westcliffe Publishers Inc. (USA, 2004). “A great eye coupled with wonderful technique, and then married to a beautifully produced book,” Buxton says.

The jury stepped away from the typical book previously chosen as the award winner for Best Book — Adventure Travel, awarding Andy Cave’s memoir Learning to Breathe, Random House Group Limited U.K., (U.K. 2005). Cave’s story about his lifelong journey from a job in the coal mines of northern England to a career as a mountaineer was considered a tale of epic adventure and exploration, skillfully told, that fit well into the travel category. “It was a mental, cultural, socio-economic, and spiritual journey as much as a physical one,” Schmidt says. “Those are the characteristics that mark the best adventure travel writing of any sort.”

Dougald MacDonald was awarded the prize for Best Book — Mountain Exposition for his book Longs Peak: The Story of Colorado’s Favourite Fourteener, Westcliffe Publishers Inc. (USA, 2004), which Buxton calls “as much a love letter as a history of Longs Peak.”

Jim Perrin’s long-awaited biography of iconoclastic British climber Don Whillans, The Villain, Random House Group Limited U.K. (U.K. 2005), won the award for Best Book — Mountaineering History. “This is one of the most meticulously researched and written biographies that I have seen in the mountain literature, or that of any other field,” Buxton says. “It is, in short, a tour de force.”

Calgary-based author and editor Bill Corbett was awarded the Canadian Rockies Award for his book The 11,000ers of the Canadian Rockies, Rocky Mountain Books (Canada, 2004). A detailed route guide to the area’s 54 highest peaks, the book is filled with route descriptions, extensive histories of first ascents, and photos.