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Walter Wood and the legacies of science and alpinism in the St Elias Mountains
Walter Wood and the legacies of science and alpinism in the St Elias Mountains
This chapter explores how the American mountaineer and geographer Walter Abbott Wood built a personal and institutional legacy in the St Elias Mountains between Yukon and Alaska. After his early experience as part of the “golden age” of United States mountaineering in Alaska, Wood participated in cold-weather warfare research during World War II, followed by a research program in glaciology (Operation Snow Cornice) under the auspices of the Arctic Institute of North America (AINA). Wood’s personal connections to the region only deepened with the 1951 death of his wife and daughter in the mountains, and they took their most concrete form in the Icefield Ranges Research Programme, co-sponsored by AINA, which grew during the 1960s and early 1970s from a glacier-focused venture to a study of the total environment of the region from a base camp at Kluane Lake. The chapter examines how Wood’s personal attachment to the region mapped onto contemporary military imperatives, particularly for knowledge of human physiological reactions at high altitudes, and why this prompted speculation in Canada about connections to US military plans in south and east Asia. The creation of the Kluane Lake National Park in 1972 coincided with a shift toward research focused more on life than earth sciences and with Wood’s own retirement from active involvement at the site. A strand that runs throughout the chapter is the nature of Wood’s inscription of his own ambitions on to the mountains - and how that facilitated, and perhaps even necessitated, an erasure of the First Nations wholived in and around the Kluane Lake region. While the continuing AINA presence at Kluane Lake no longer ignores First Nations, the chapter concludes that reflecting on how legacies are made and personal connections inscribed on landscapes must involve consideration of structural visibility and invisibility. QC 20230614 ERC StG 716211
History, Historia
History, Historia
34 references, page 1 of 4
1 For an overview of this research, see Ryan K. Danby, Andrew Williams, and David S. Hik, “Fifty Years of Science at the Kluane Lake Research Station”, Arctic 67, supplement 1 (January 2014): iii-viii and Garry K.C. Clarke, “A Short and Somewhat Personal History of Yukon Glacier Studies in the Twentieth Century”, Arctic 67, supplement 1 (January 2014): 1-21.
2 No biography has been written of Wood, and the extant material on his personal life is slight. For an overview of his life, see, for instance, the obituary written by his son Peter Wood, “Walter Abbott Wood 1907-1993”, Arctic 47, no. 2 (June 1994): 203-204.
3 Maurice Isserman, Continental Divide: A History of American Mountaineering (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016), especially 230-251.
4 Peter Lloyd, “Noel Ewart Odell 1890-1987”, The Alpine Journal 93 (1988): 309.
5 Wood is barely mentioned in Continental Divide, Isserman's magisterial history of American mountaineering, something that I feel reflects Wood's status as it was perceived by his contemporaries rather than any oversight on the part of the author.
6 David Roberts, The Last of His Kind: The Life and Adventures of Bradford Washburn, America's Boldest Mountaineer (New York: Harper, 2010), especially pp. 66-67.
7 Wood, “The Ascent of Mt. Steele”, The American Alpine Journal 48, no. 252 (1936): 81-85.
8 Roberts, Last of His Kind, 66.
9 Wood was sufficiently well respected to be charged with leading the American Alpine Club's inquiry into the ill-fated 1939 K2 expedition, a report that criticized the authoritarian leadership style of its German-born leader Fritz Wiessner. Isserman, Continental Divide, 259.
10 Walter A. Wood, “The Wood Yukon Expedition of 1935: An Experiment in Photographic Mapping”, Geographical Review 26, no. 2 (1936): 228-246.
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