Walter Wood and the legacies of science and alpinism in the St Elias Mountains

Abstract

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.