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Jennifer Jordan: Women of K2

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Date and time
Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Award-winning journalist and filmmaker Jennifer Jordan shares stories from her research expeditions on *The Women of K2*. In 2000, Jordan joined an American expedition of women climbers attempting to summit K2 on the Pakistan-China border. At 28,250 feet, K2 is the second highest mountain in the world, and is widely regarded as the ultimate climb. Its giant pyramid peak towers in isolation, its sheer icy summit flanked by six equally steep ridges, each presenting climbers with a maze of precipices and treacherous overhangs. By the turn of the millennium, only 164 climbers, including just 12 Americans, had reached its summit. Of those, only a handful were women. Jordan discusses her forthcoming film and book about the women who pioneered, pursued, and perished on this most challenging mountain.

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Jennifer Jordan is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and screenwriter, with over twenty-five years experience as a journalist, broadcast producer, radio and television news anchor, voice-over/narration talent, and motivational speaker. Jordan spent most of the 1990s at WGBH-FM in Boston where she anchored National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. She also worked with public television’s most prolific production house—WGBH Channel 2—as an on-air talent, segment producer and host, researcher, and writer. She is the author of *Savage Summit: The Life and Death of the First Women of K2* and *The Last Man on The Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2*. *Savage Summit* won the 2005 National Outdoor Book Award for Best Mountain Literature and was selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review. She also has produced and written several documentaries, among them Kick Like a Girl, which won several international film festivals and was bought and aired by HBO. She co-owns Skyline Ventures Productions with her husband, cinematographer and adventurer Jeff Rhoads, in Salt Lake City, where she spends as much of her free time as possible exploring the backcountry of the Wasatch Mountains.