Explorer, mountaineer, photographer, and cartographer extraordinaire.
Chronology his life, glimpse of his photos and radio report (real player) about him (6min).
Bradford Wasburn, named one of the last great explorers, even at an age of almost 90 he still was busy trying to correct the right height of the Mount Everest. Besides the adventures, telling them and showing them as Director of the Boston Museum of Science was an equal love of him.
Washburn took some 15,000 pictures with negatives so large that the prints can be enlarged to landscapes themselves. He showed me one such print, of Mount Blanc in the Alps, in 1986. He suggested I climb the mountain for a story that celebrated the first ascent by Michel-Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat 200 years earlier. Then with a wax pencil, he drew the climbers’ route directly on the gorgeous print that he gave me. [Boston Globe]
