Wasfia Nazreen, the Agnes Scott College graduate from Bangladesh, who is preparing to climb Carstensz Pyramid in the Papua Province of Indonesia, has been selected by National Geographic to be one of its 10 “Adventurers of the Year” designation and is offering the opportunity for you to vote for her if you think that she should receive the “2015 People’s Choice Adventurer of the Year Award.”
Ms. Nazreen returned to Atlanta to speak at Agnes Scott in October during which she reviewed parts of her remarkable career since graduating in 2006. To read a complete biography and in-depth interview, click here. For a Global Atlanta article about her visit to Agnes Scott, click here.
Aside from her ambition to climb the highest mountain on each of seven continents — she’s reached the summits of six, including Mount Everest — she has been an activist for women’s and children’s rights around the world.
As founder of Osel Bangladesh, she started a foundation that develops education programs and outdoor training to encourage marginalized adolescent girls to choose a lifestyle outside traditional gender roles.
She also is a youth ambassador for the JAAGO Foundation in Bangladesh to provide schools for underprivileged children and supports the countrywide “Volunteer for Bangladesh” program.
And she has worked for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues including human rights work on behalf of Tibetans.
The other 2015 Adventurers of the Year and Candidates for the “People’s Choice Award” are:
Tommy Caldwell, a climber from Colorado, who completed the first traverse of the Fitz Roy massif, the iconic skyline in Patagonia, Argentina, in February with previous Adventurer of the Year Alex Honnold;
Liz Clark, an exploratory surfer from southern California, who has spent the last nine years living on a small sailboat and traveling across 25,000 nautical miles of the Pacific Ocean in search of remote swells;
Kit DesLauriers of Wyoming, ski mountaineer, National Geographic grantee and first person to ski the Seven Summits (the highest peaks on each continent), who recently led a team of skiers and scientists to Alaska’s Brooks Range to measure the change in glaciers and establish baseline data for the region;
Aleksander Doba, a Polish kayaker who, at age 67, spent more than six months paddling 7,716 miles across the Atlantic Ocean in what is believed to be the longest open-water kayak crossing in history;
Will Gadd of Canada and Gavin McClurg of Idaho, who paraglided 400 miles over the Canadian Rockies to complete the longest-known journey covered in the air by a paraglider;
Ben Knight and Travis Rummel of Colorado and Matt Stoecker of California, a filmmaking team whose documentary “DamNation” brought the topic of dam removal to the forefront of conservation efforts;
Briton Lewis Pugh, a long-distance swimmer who aims to bring attention to the deterioration of marine ecosystems and who this year swam the Seven Seas (Mediterranean, Adriatic, Aegean, Black, Red, Arabian and North Seas), choosing extreme locales plagued by overfishing and invasive species;
Ueli Steck of Switzerland, who set a new route in record-setting time climbing, solo, the south face of Annapurna in the Himalayas; and
Blind kayakers Erik Weihenmayer and Lonnie Bedwell, who paddled 277 miles of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, relying on their sense of touch and sound.
To learn more about each adventurer through photos, interviews and a video, and to vote for the People’s Choice Adventurer of the Year, click here.
Online voting runs through Jan. 31, 2015. Fans click here to vote for their favorite honoree. The adventurer with the most votes at the end of the voting period will be announced in February as the 2015 People’s Choice Adventurer of the Year.
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