Celebrating the Outdoors
Every year, the Kendal Mountain Festival gathers adventurers, athletes, storytellers, and creatives from around the world. It’s huge, and grows bigger and bigger every year as more people look to be inspired, to share, and to engage with the outdoor community. It’s more than a celebration of mountains now – the Festival is a gathering of ideas, voices, and values that shape how we engage with our outdoor environment.
ICC went along this year and we had a great time! The 2025 Festival theme of Hope was woven through films, talks, conversations, and community experiences. Here are our Top Five takeaways from a memorable weekend in the Lake District:
1. Hope Is More Than a Slogan
Kendal’s 2025 theme, Hope, wasn’t a surface-level slogan. It was a thread running through every talk, film and panel discussion.
Hope emerged as a kind of quiet discipline: choosing optimism because the beauty of the world is worth fighting for. Speakers reminded us that hope shows up in the small moments – in restored rivers, in people rebuilding community, in the way strangers share adventures and coffees.
Most importantly, we left feeling that hope isn’t passive. It’s a force that moves us towards action. It’s the spark that gets us outside, gets us involved, and keeps us believing that change is possible.
2. The Outdoors Is for Everyone
A recurring theme across the weekend was inclusivity – not as a buzz phrase, but in multiple lived examples.
Panels, films, books, and talks highlighted voices that haven’t always been centred in outdoor culture: adaptive athletes, people of colour, older adventurers, LGBTQ+ groups, beginners, and people from non-traditional outdoor backgrounds.
The message was unmistakable: the outdoors belongs to all of us. We don’t need a certain body type, passport, income level, identification, or skill set to find joy and freedom outside. Kendal amplified the fact that when the outdoor community broadens its lens, we don’t dilute the culture – we enrich it.
3. Stories Shape Adventure as Much as Any Mountain
One of the Festival’s greatest and enduring strengths is its storytelling – not just the 150+ breathtaking films (that then go on tour across the globe), but also books, talks, photography exhibitions, and casual conversations.
This year reinforced the idea that stories don’t just reflect adventure – they shape how we experience it.
A powerful narrative can:
• Change how we perceive a landscape
• Inspire us to take our first (or next) step
• Shift our understanding of what’s possible
At Kendal, stories became connective tissue. They act as grounds for inspiration, get passed on for others to enjoy, and might even prompt some planning of our own!
4. Community Enriches Adventure
Walking into the Brewery Arts Centre or ‘Basecamp’ during the Festival, the feeling was palpable: there was a hum of conversation; an instant camaraderie; a shared obsession with kit, maps, ridgelines, and weather windows.
KMF 2025 made it clearer than ever that adventure thrives thanks to community. Every talk, book, panel, film, and poster referenced the power and importance of community – find your ‘tribe’ and they will support you in your adventures. It was clear that every attendee was keen to take on an adventure with the friends and community around them. Even those who choose to tackle ‘solo’ adventures were quick to say that they couldn’t have done it without the ‘team’ in the background.
Mountains are magnificent. But the people who gather around them? They make the experience unforgettable.
5. Sustainability Must Be Embedded
It’s impossible to celebrate wild places while ignoring the pressures they face.
Kendal Mountain Festival has been upping its sustainability commitments for years, and in 2025 this went further than ever before:
• Encouraging travel that reduces emissions
• Reusable bottles and reduced single-use plastics
• Careful waste and recycling systems
• Panels discussing environmental change and responsibility
• Films exploring climate, restoration and stewardship
The key takeaway for us? Loving the outdoors means caring for it. We want to ‘leave no trace’ and where possible, leave a positive trace (remove someone else’s litter if you spot it!). The decisions we make today will ensure that future generations can enjoy the same wild landscapes that we are privileged to access.
The Kendal Mountain Festival 2025 reminded us that Hope is alive, that the outdoors welcomes everyone, that stories matter, and that community elevates adventure. It takes place every year, and we highly recommend that you put it on your hot list for 2026 and beyond!
