Montbell Challenge Award

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Montbell Challenge Award was founded to support people who dream of traveling to remote regions or of adventuring in unexplored places. Montbell proudly supports people who offer positive influence and hope towards others. Montbell supports unique challenges, regardless of their outcome.

Challenge Award 2022

Yuka Komatsu

Photographer
Yuka Komatsu was born in Akita Prefecture in 1982. She has been fascinated with mountaineering since high school, and has climbed mountains both in Japan and abroad. In 2006, she became the first Japanese woman to summit K2 (8,611m/Pakistan), the second highest peak in the world. For this accomplishment, she received the Uemura Naomi Adventure Award. Being drawn to people living in deserts and other natural places, she aspired to become a photographer. She began documenting in photographs the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis, and continues to convey the current situation of Syrian refugees. Her written works include To The Land of Humanity (Shueisha International). She is the recipient of the 8th Mika Yamamoto Memorial International Journalist Award.
Official site

Challenge Award 2020

Yuki Sekiguchi

A Polar Explorer
Yuki Sekiguchi was born in Yamagata Prefecture in 1987. While in high school, he dreamt of becoming an adventurer, and this led him to pursue that path instead of joining a company after graduation. At the age of 18, he made his first of many adventures by walking the length of Japan, which covered 2,715km and took him 109 days to complete (May to September 2006). He also attempted to traverse Alaska in deep winter, where temperatures can reach -50°C, and Death Valley in the middle of summer, where temperatures exceed 50°C. He has now traveled 7,000km on foot and 38,000km by bicycle in Japan and abroad.
Recently, he has been adventuring in polar regions. In 2016, he walked solo for 450km across the Arctic Sea ice with a sled. Since 2017, he has been undertaking a multi-year adventure project with the goal of completing "A Human-powered traverse of Canada in deep winter".
Official site

Challenge Award 2019

Pasche Family

NOMADIC FAMILY BY BICYCLE AS A WAY OF LIFE
Céline Pasche (1982) is an anthoropologist and a mountain guide. Xavier Pasche (1980) is an architectural draughtsman and a photographer. Since 2010, this Swiss couple has been travelling the world by bicycle. In 2013, Nayla, their daughter, was born in Malaysia. Their second daughter Fibie was born in 2017, during their new project called "The Great Northern Horizon." Today they still cycle the world together as nomads.
https://www.ylia.ch/

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