In late 2015, Evans and his team set out on foot and camelback to become the first people in eighty-five years to cross the Rub’ al Khali—the largest sand desert on earth. Join Evans as he introduces this film about their grueling eight hundred-mile, forty-nine-day journey. Crossing the Empty Quarter also includes fascinating historical information about legendary explorers, including Bertram Thomas, in whose footsteps this team of contemporary adventurers followed. (Dir.: Simon Gallimore, United Kingdom/Oman, 2017, 55 min., DCP, English and Arabic with English subtitles)

The film screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Mark Evans, with a reception to follow.

Speaker's Biography

Mark Evans is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London, and an International Fellow of The Explorers Club. 55 years old, Evans is the Executive Director of Outward Bound Oman, the only Outward Bound School in the Arab world. He has a passion for historical exploration; recent expeditions have seen him leading a two man crossing the Greenland Ice-Cap on the trail of Nansen, being surrounded by Arctic Wolves on the uninhabited Melville Island in the NWT of Canada, on the trail of the first ever overland journey in the Arctic by the British Navy in 1827, an spending a year, including 4 months of total darkness living in small tents on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, home to the largest population of Polar Bears. For the past 20 years Evans has lived in the Middle East, where he has explored and travelled extensively in Saudi Arabia, on in Oman, where he recently completed a 55 day solo kayak journey along the coast from Musandam, near Iran, to the border with Yemen.