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From these intrepid beginnings, the Wasatch Mountain Film Festival took root and steadily grew into a multi-day annual gathering that not only brings Salt Lake’s outdoor community together—it grows that community, too.
A young Stuart Derman stared at the infinite space that unfolded beyond the guardrailed nature paths of the national parks his family visited in the 1990s. Each scenic overlook served as more than a viewpoint—it expanded his still-developing mind’s grasp of space. Of nature. Of possibility.
When he first heard the term “mountaineering,” he didn’t know for certain what it meant. It wasn’t part of the typical parlance of West Windsor, New Jersey—it only conjured dramatized visions of K2 climbers. Risk, disaster, exhaustion, glory.
As foreign and far-away as mountaineering sounded, it sparked in him a bit of the thrill he’d felt at the national park overlooks. The thrill was bigger, in fact, because it implied access. Action. Setting foot in that great beyond.
Back at home, Stuart studied the few pieces of mountain media he could get his hands on—poring over Ed Vestieurs’ “No Shortcut to the Top” and rewinding the family VHS tape of Seven Years in Tibet for its umpteenth rewatch.
Still a teenager, Stuart begged his dad to learn to climb mountains with him. And sans mentors, gear, or even a plan, he started training. Hard. Long before anyone in the suburbs knew what a headlamp was, he ran nocturnal 10Ks to up his cardio capability. He got ahold of IMAX’s Everest and Kilimanjaro films and watched them on an elliptical machine for hours every week.
“Even though I wasn’t really clear about what my goal meant, I knew that if I started training anyway, I’d get into the mountains somehow,” says Stuart.
With a focus on starting with achievable steps, his father gamely agreed to try. They set their sights on Slide Mountain, a 4,000-foot summit in the Catskills. Soon after, a slightly bigger one. Stuart was hooked. He pegged Kilimanjaro as a goal. His dad was down.
Thus, despite their unlikely beginnings, Stuart and his pop soon stood atop Mt. Kilimanjaro—their first of the Seven Summits.
Stuart was hooked.
“I was like, ‘I love this.’ The experience sparked a dream that maybe someday I could even tackle the remaining Seven Summits,” he says.
He went all in on a 30-day National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) course on a glacier in the Waddington Range of British Columbia, opening up the skills and knowledge he’d need to start tackling summits on his own.
Stuart came home from NOLS fired up with fresh confidence. Stoked, inspired, ready for more.
It was this mindset that carried him headlong into his first scary experience: a simple gear failure with painful consequences.
“It was on Mt. Washington back east—a peak that is, of course, notorious for its terrible weather. We should have rethought the outing … winds were shrieking at 100 miles per hour, and temps hit -20 degrees,” he recounts.
One of his gloves froze solid—and then it shattered. With a glove in useless pieces, miles from the trailhead and at the complete mercy of Mother Nature—who seemed in no mood to bestow favors—Stuart suffered serious frostbite on his unprotected hand.
“It was the first time I thought, ‘God, I might be in over my head,’” he says. All the danger perpetuated by this smallest and oddest of gear failures brought the full severity of mountain risks into view.
Shaken by the scale of the realization, Stuart took a breather to recalibrate. But he couldn’t stay away for long.
Landing in the University of Utah’s Parks, Recreation, & Tourism program, he re-entered the outdoor scene in a spirit of curiosity and play. There, he fell in love with skiing, discovered the fine art of backpacking, and dove headlong into river rafting.
Keen to build a strong community of fellow outdoor lovers, Stuart searched for ways to connect with others. He attended a Banff Film Festival tour stop in Salt Lake with his friend Shane, and suddenly the next chapter of his life hit him straight on.
“Why didn’t the Wasatch have its own film festival? Why did we have such an incredible outdoor community, yet we were a mere stop on other festivals’ tours?” he asked. And so, Stuart and Shane set about founding the Wasatch Mountain Film Festival.
Stuart admittedly wasn’t a cinema expert. And he’d never undertaken something like this before. But he knew the power film had to plant new seeds of possibility in audiences’ minds. He owed much of his outdoor journey to the sweeping scenes of Seven Years in Tibet he’d rewatched on the floor of the family living room. Well-told stories of adventure had connected the dots between the Dermans’ park outings and the untamed wilds.
Impassioned about connecting those dots for future audiences and reveling in a shared love of adventure with the Salt Lake community, Stuart and Shane dug in. They held the first-ever Wasatch Mountain Film Festival as a small event within the Outdoor Retailer trade show—itself a major extravaganza, with the nascent film fest claiming just a little corner of the spotlight.
From these intrepid beginnings, the Wasatch Film Festival took root and steadily grew into a multi-day annual gathering that not only brings Salt Lake’s outdoor community together—it grows that community, too.
“I don’t have a ‘hardcore’ outdoor background myself,” says Stuart. “I’m not a big-name athlete–in fact, I adore skiing groomers. But isn’t that the point—to bring people in from the fringe, uniting the core athletes with the recreational folks? Sometimes I do feel stuck between multiple worlds. But maybe that’s a good thing—the friction and interplay of new people and new stories spark bigger ideas and cooler possibilities.”
Nine years in, the festival has grown to include an army of volunteers, planners, and sponsors, with Stuart and Shane remaining deeply hands-on to keep the spirit of the festival intact amid its expansion.
The 2023 Wasatch Film Festival will inhabit an indoor-outdoor space in Salt Lake’s funky-industrial Granary District, complete with a beer garden, vendor village, art booths, and workshops. Meanwhile the quality of the films themselves has matured as outdoor storytellers have garnered better support from industry players.
It feels big-time, and maybe it is. Maybe it’s arrived. But the impact Stuart aims for is still on the individual level.
“I want viewers to come away with a feeling of inspiration but also a feeling of knowing there’s something they can do as their own next step,” he says. Maybe that next step is an enhanced vision of their own personal possibility. Maybe it’s a new action they can take to get involved in land conservation, wildlife protection, or environmental advocacy.
With the climate in crisis and wild places in dire need of protection, every ounce of individual inspiration plugs attendees into a bigger picture: that of a greater outdoor community capable of safeguarding generations to come.
“We now have longtime attendees bringing their own children along,” Stuart says. And in his moments away from the mic, he watches each viewing from the edges of the room. He sees those kids processing the sheer power of Patagonian rivers, the heights of alpine trail running, the adrenaline of mountain biking the foothills of the Himalaya.
Stuart has yet to climb the Seven Summits. But in these moments—having watched the films, now watching the viewers watch the films—there is a sense of completion
A young Stuart Derman stared at the infinite space that unfolded beyond the guardrailed nature paths of the national parks his family visited in the 1990s. Each scenic overlook served as more than a viewpoint—it expanded his still-developing mind’s grasp of space. Of nature. Of possibility.
When he first heard the term “mountaineering,” he didn’t know for certain what it meant. It wasn’t part of the typical parlance of West Windsor, New Jersey—it only conjured dramatized visions of K2 climbers. Risk, disaster, exhaustion, glory.
As foreign and far-away as mountaineering sounded, it sparked in him a bit of the thrill he’d felt at the national park overlooks. The thrill was bigger, in fact, because it implied access. Action. Setting foot in that great beyond.
Back at home, Stuart studied the few pieces of mountain media he could get his hands on—poring over Ed Vestieurs’ “No Shortcut to the Top” and rewinding the family VHS tape of Seven Years in Tibet for its umpteenth rewatch.
Still a teenager, Stuart begged his dad to learn to climb mountains with him. And sans mentors, gear, or even a plan, he started training. Hard. Long before anyone in the suburbs knew what a headlamp was, he ran nocturnal 10Ks to up his cardio capability. He got ahold of IMAX’s Everest and Kilimanjaro films and watched them on an elliptical machine for hours every week.
“Even though I wasn’t really clear about what my goal meant, I knew that if I started training anyway, I’d get into the mountains somehow,” says Stuart.
With a focus on starting with achievable steps, his father gamely agreed to try. They set their sights on Slide Mountain, a 4,000-foot summit in the Catskills. Soon after, a slightly bigger one. Stuart was hooked. He pegged Kilimanjaro as a goal. His dad was down.
Thus, despite their unlikely beginnings, Stuart and his pop soon stood atop Mt. Kilimanjaro—their first of the Seven Summits.
Stuart was hooked.
“I was like, ‘I love this.’ The experience sparked a dream that maybe someday I could even tackle the remaining Seven Summits,” he says.
He went all in on a 30-day National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) course on a glacier in the Waddington Range of British Columbia, opening up the skills and knowledge he’d need to start tackling summits on his own.
Stuart came home from NOLS fired up with fresh confidence. Stoked, inspired, ready for more.
It was this mindset that carried him headlong into his first scary experience: a simple gear failure with painful consequences.
“It was on Mt. Washington back east—a peak that is, of course, notorious for its terrible weather. We should have rethought the outing … winds were shrieking at 100 miles per hour, and temps hit -20 degrees,” he recounts.
One of his gloves froze solid—and then it shattered. With a glove in useless pieces, miles from the trailhead and at the complete mercy of Mother Nature—who seemed in no mood to bestow favors—Stuart suffered serious frostbite on his unprotected hand.
“It was the first time I thought, ‘God, I might be in over my head,’” he says. All the danger perpetuated by this smallest and oddest of gear failures brought the full severity of mountain risks into view.
Shaken by the scale of the realization, Stuart took a breather to recalibrate. But he couldn’t stay away for long.
Landing in the University of Utah’s Parks, Recreation, & Tourism program, he re-entered the outdoor scene in a spirit of curiosity and play. There, he fell in love with skiing, discovered the fine art of backpacking, and dove headlong into river rafting.
Keen to build a strong community of fellow outdoor lovers, Stuart searched for ways to connect with others. He attended a Banff Film Festival tour stop in Salt Lake with his friend Shane, and suddenly the next chapter of his life hit him straight on.
“Why didn’t the Wasatch have its own film festival? Why did we have such an incredible outdoor community, yet we were a mere stop on other festivals’ tours?” he asked. And so, Stuart and Shane set about founding the Wasatch Mountain Film Festival.
Stuart admittedly wasn’t a cinema expert. And he’d never undertaken something like this before. But he knew the power film had to plant new seeds of possibility in audiences’ minds. He owed much of his outdoor journey to the sweeping scenes of Seven Years in Tibet he’d rewatched on the floor of the family living room. Well-told stories of adventure had connected the dots between the Dermans’ park outings and the untamed wilds.
Impassioned about connecting those dots for future audiences and reveling in a shared love of adventure with the Salt Lake community, Stuart and Shane dug in. They held the first-ever Wasatch Mountain Film Festival as a small event within the Outdoor Retailer trade show—itself a major extravaganza, with the nascent film fest claiming just a little corner of the spotlight.
From these intrepid beginnings, the Wasatch Film Festival took root and steadily grew into a multi-day annual gathering that not only brings Salt Lake’s outdoor community together—it grows that community, too.
“I don’t have a ‘hardcore’ outdoor background myself,” says Stuart. “I’m not a big-name athlete–in fact, I adore skiing groomers. But isn’t that the point—to bring people in from the fringe, uniting the core athletes with the recreational folks? Sometimes I do feel stuck between multiple worlds. But maybe that’s a good thing—the friction and interplay of new people and new stories spark bigger ideas and cooler possibilities.”
Nine years in, the festival has grown to include an army of volunteers, planners, and sponsors, with Stuart and Shane remaining deeply hands-on to keep the spirit of the festival intact amid its expansion.
The 2023 Wasatch Film Festival will inhabit an indoor-outdoor space in Salt Lake’s funky-industrial Granary District, complete with a beer garden, vendor village, art booths, and workshops. Meanwhile the quality of the films themselves has matured as outdoor storytellers have garnered better support from industry players.
It feels big-time, and maybe it is. Maybe it’s arrived. But the impact Stuart aims for is still on the individual level.
“I want viewers to come away with a feeling of inspiration but also a feeling of knowing there’s something they can do as their own next step,” he says. Maybe that next step is an enhanced vision of their own personal possibility. Maybe it’s a new action they can take to get involved in land conservation, wildlife protection, or environmental advocacy.
With the climate in crisis and wild places in dire need of protection, every ounce of individual inspiration plugs attendees into a bigger picture: that of a greater outdoor community capable of safeguarding generations to come.
“We now have longtime attendees bringing their own children along,” Stuart says. And in his moments away from the mic, he watches each viewing from the edges of the room. He sees those kids processing the sheer power of Patagonian rivers, the heights of alpine trail running, the adrenaline of mountain biking the foothills of the Himalaya.
Stuart has yet to climb the Seven Summits. But in these moments—having watched the films, now watching the viewers watch the films—there is a sense of completion
The 2023 Wasatch Mountain Film Festival will be taking place in the Granary District in Salt Lake City, this April 20–23. We are excited to be working with them to present the inaugural Adventure Filmmaker Workshop.
The 2023 Wasatch Mountain Film Festival will be taking place in the Granary District in Salt Lake City, this April 20–23. We are excited to be working with them to present the inaugural Adventure Filmmaker Workshop.
info@HenceSupply.co
Park City, Utah 84098