Walter Abbott Wood (1907 – 1993)
Walter Wood was born in Hoosick Falls, New York, near the Vermont border. He studied in the States and in Switzerland and graduated from the American Geographical Society's School of Surveying in 1932. He received an honorary science doctorate from the University of Alaska in 1955. Over his career, Wood took part in more than 100 ascents on four continents, scaling the Rockies, the Alps, the Andes, and the Himalayas. In 1935, he was one of four climbers that conquered Mount Steele, one of the highest and most inaccessible mountains in the Yukon.1)
Scientific explorations in the St Elias Mountains were an annual event led by Dr. Wood between 1935 and 1940. The expeditions were based out of Burwash Landing and parties travelled overland across the Donjek River flood plain and into the Steele Glacier and Hodgson Glacier complex. Horse transport, guiding, and local expertise was provided to these expeditions by the residents of Burwash.2)
Wood led teams in 1939 and 1962 that explored the St. Elias Mountains. The first expedition mapped the range by aerial photography and the second included long-term studies of the region's ice, weather, and geography.3)
Wood was commissioned as an officer in the United States Army Specialist Corps during the Second World War and he took on various cold-weather assignments in Canada, and the Aleutian chain. He trained mountain troops and a commando unit in winter warfare and was a colonel when discharged in 1947.4)
From 1949 to 1951, Wood led Project Snow Cornice, an Arctic Institute of North America (AINA) science project on the Seward Glacier south of Mount Logan. This project was air-supported and based out of Yakutat on the Alaskan southeast coast.5) In 1951, Wood and his son Peter were marooned on Malaspina Glacier at Mount Hubbard when their supply plane failed to arrive. Wood's daughter and his first wife, the former Foresta Hodgson, were on the plane and it was never found.6) The plane was a Norseman aircraft flown by Maurice King.7)
In 1961, Wood, with AINA, returned to the Yukon to explore the eastern side of the St. Elias range. Wood was instrumental is setting up an AINA base camp, the Kluane Lake Research Station (KLRS) established at an abandoned airstrip at Silver City, and a major field facility located at 2800m in the interior of the range between the easterly and westerly flowing glaciers. Subsidiary camps were established across the range to investigate glaciology, climatology, and geomorphology. The effort was a scientific project, but it also trained researchers in an Arctic environment without travelling to the high Arctic, and Silver City’s proximity to a variety of landscapes attracted other research opportunities. AINA drilled and extracted the first ice core in the northwest of the continent to investigate historical climate data and the incidence of airborne pollutants. Some small projects developed into the Boreal Forest Research Project to study the dynamics and interrelationships of plants and animals in the forest ecosystem. The study was the largest of its kind in Canada and dominated KLRS from 1988 – 1998. In later years, KLRS demonstrated its multi-disciplinary nature with a broad range of investigations in the natural and engineering sciences.8)
Walter Wood was interviewed in 1984 and discussed Yukon mountaineering and exploration from the 1930s to date.9)