Exploring the Unknown: Historic Diaries of Bradford Washburn's Alaska/Yukon Expeditions Unknown - 2001

Dr. Bradford Washburn is one of the most extraordinary Alaskan figures of all time - dispite never having lived in the north. Scaling unclimbed mountains in Alaska and the Yukon more than half a century ago, Washburn recorded details of his historic expeditions in personal diaries. The pages are filled with wonderment, wit, and curiousity of this renowned mountaineer, explorer, and cartographer, photographer, and long-time director of the Boston Museum of Science. Washburn also took spectacular large-scale black and white photographs of the mountains and glaciers he explored. The diaries are drawn from 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 undiscovered mountains and glaciers. His 1951 first-ascent of the West Buttress route of Mount McKinley (Denali), now the most frequently traveled route to the summit. EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN takes readers back in time to a golden age of exploration when many of Alaska's mysteries remained hidden on the eve of the aviation age and when mountaineering and exploration were more vocations than vacations.