Exploring the Unknown

Historic Diaries of Bradford Washburn's Alaska/Yukon Expeditions : Mount Crillon, The Yukon, Mount McKinley

• Author(s): Lew Freedman,
• Publisher: Epicenter Press
• Pages: 128
• ISBN_10: 0945397968
  ISBN_13: 9780945397960
  
• Language: en
• Categories: Biography & Autobiography / Artists, Architects, Photographers , Biography & Autobiography / Entertainment & Performing Arts , Biography & Autobiography / Adventurers & Explorers , Family & Relationships / Family History & Genealogy , History / Canada / Provincial, Territorial & Local / Northern Territories (NT, NU, YT) , History / United States / State & Local / West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY) , Nature / Ecosystems & Habitats / Mountains , Sports & Recreation / Mountaineering , Travel / United States / West / Pacific (AK, CA, HI, OR, WA) ,

Description:... Dr. Bradford Washburn is one of the most extraordinary Alaskan figures of all time - despite never having lived in the north. Scaling unblimbed mountains in Alaska and the Yukon more than a half-century ago, Washburn recorded day-to-day details of his historic expeditins in personal diaries. He also took large-format black and white photographs as breath-taking today as the unworldly mountian and glacier terrain he explored then. The previously unpublished diaries convey wonderment, curiousity, and wit as well as a look inside the mind of a world-explorer. They cover three of Washburn's most significant northern expeditions: his 1934 first-ascent of Mount Crillon, then the highest unclimbed peak in the Fairweather Range of Southeast Alaska; his 1935 National Geographic mapping expedition of the Yukon in the area of Mount Hubbard on the boundary between Canada and Alaska, a pioneering exploration that revealed unknown mountains and glaciers; and his 1951 first ascent of the West Buttress route of Mount McKinely (Denali), now the most frequently traveled route to the summit. Exploring the Unknown takes readers back to a golden age of exploraiton when many of Alaska's mysteries remained hidden on the eve of the aviation age, when mountaineering and exploration were more vocation than vacation, adn wehn an expedition required months not weeks. This was no Sunday picnic in New England.