Bradford Washburn

I'm reading Escape From Lucania: An Epic Story of Survival by David Roberts. I picked it up from the library and because it's a paperback, there's no dust jacket. Without a dust jacket, there's no author's photo or short synopsis to tell you what the book's about. The back cover has a photo of two guys standing atop a mountain with big grins on their faces. From the photo, one would surmise that the story of survival would probably have taken place after the photo and from a map located a couple of pages into the book one would also surmise the story takes place in Alaska or the Yukon Territory. Not a lot to go on when choosing a book but I like adventure stories and this one was less than two hundred pages, so why not?

So the story unfolds about two young guys, Henry Bradford Washburn, Jr., and Robert Hicks Bates, who are mountain climbers who met at Harvard. However, as soon as I saw the name Bradford Washburn, I immediately thought of a photograph I saw a few years back at an exhibition in Elkhart, Indiana. It was a large photograph of the Alps and it was absolutely stunning. When I got home I looked him up online and saw a few more images. Even though the photos were all phenomenal, that was about it as far as I pursued it. Now I find out while reading the book, that he and Vittorio Sella are the two finest mountain photographers of all time. Sella even hauled glass plates up the mountains and Washburn did a lot of scouting of his climbs by flying over the area and photographing it with a large format Fairfield camera.

Now the question becomes, how the hell come I don't know a lot more about Washburn and Sella? I'm interested in photography and have a pretty good selection of photo books. I'm interested in adventures and mountain climbing and know about Mallory and Hillary - I even read a book about a guy who rode his bicycle to Mt. Everest and then climbed it without oxygen. The Washburn and Bates story the book relates takes place in 1937, so it's not like I missed it on the nightly news. But if I don't know anything about them, how are the young people of today going to know about them? Should they know about them? Where do kids these days get their inspiration?

When I first started at my present job, a guy came in and put on a presentation about a round the world boat trip. I think that's about the one and only time in thirty some years of teaching that the student body was exposed to any kind of real adventurer/explorer type of individual. I've sat through all kinds of inspirational, informational and vocational presentations. Many of them quite good, actually. But never as a student did I have a guy come in and tell me about his exploits as a mountain climber. I did have a student teacher who was a spelunker. I still remember his slide show and the point he made that it was out there if I wanted to give it a try. But where were all the mountain climbers, rodeo clowns, race car drivers, and human cannonballs on career day? Joey Chitwood never showed up recruiting for the Thrill Show. We don't even have a career day at my school anymore and God help us if the students look to our milquetoast administrators for inspiration.

I'm not so sure I want to fight this battle or even if it's worth fighting. Maybe it's not the school's job to try and inspire them in this way. There are only so many hours in the day and our school does have a lot of different course offerings for the students to choose from. It just seems like the place would be more interesting and rewarding if the students were exposed to more career options - like a luthier, boatbuilder, potter or blacksmith - and more inspiration. It just seems a shame that most of what passes for career guidance boils down to being told to either take a shop class or go to college.