Sean Penn + Jon Krakauer

Sean Penn

Filmmaker

Academy Award winner Sean Penn has become an American film icon in a career spanning nearly three decades. He has been nominated four times for the Academy Award as Best Actor in DEAD MAN WALKING, SWEET AND LOWDOWN, and I AM SAM. Most recently, he won the Oscar in 2003 for his searing performance in Clint Eastwood's MYSTIC RIVER. READ MORE ▶

Jon Krakauer

Author

Born in 1954, Jon Krakauer grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, where his father introduced him to mountaineering as an 8-year-old. After graduating from Hampshire College in 1976, Krakauer divided his time between Colorado, Alaska, and the Pacific Northwest, supporting himself primarily as a carpenter and commercial salmon fisherman. For the next two decades, however, his life revolved around climbing mountains. In 1977 he traveled alone to Alaska's Stikine Icecap, went three weeks without encountering another person, and ascended a previously unclimbed route on a huge, intimidating peak called The Devils Thumb. In 1992 he journeyed to Patagonia and climbed an ice-encrusted, mile-high spike of granite called Cerro Torre—once considered the most difficult mountain on earth, and still regarded as one of the loveliest. READ MORE ▶