The North: Dartmouth Outpost
No one who looks into the matter can think of those Dartmouth men who are interested in the Far North as taking a purely academic approach to the subject. Studying the Arctic and its numerous scientific facets during the winter, many of its students leave for the actual reality as soon as weather or other conditions permit. Last summer, Dartmouth was well represented in the near and far North.
On the oceanographic vessel BlueDolphin, Comdr. David C. Nutt '41, Arctic Specialist on the staff of the College Museum, made his annual trip from Boothbay Harbor, Me., in the spring to undertake hydrographic research for the U. S. Navy and the Arctic Institute of North America, along the Labrador coast. Working with him as crew and fellow researchers were Lawrence K. Coachman '47, Research Assistant in Dartmouth's Northern Studies program; John T. Tangerman '53, McGill-Carnegie Foundation scholar, also Research Assistant in Northern Studies at the Museum; Joseph C. Smutnik Jr. '54, Teaching Fellow in Geography; John Moran '54 of Jamestown, N. D., a second-year student in the Medical School; Stephen Wilson '55 of Westport, Conn.; and John K. Meyer '54 of Yonkers, N. Y.
Four members of the Dartmouth Outing Club, which maintains an active program in survival techniques under arctic conditions, worked for the U. S. Weather Bureau. Stationed for the most part at Resolute in northern Canada, these four undergraduates put their interest in the North to the test: Roy Dixon '56 of New Canaan, Conn.; William Gavitt '55 of Westerly, R. I.; Stephen Brand '56 of Glencoe, Ill.; and Herbert Wahl '57 of Trenton, N. J.
Herbert R. Drury '52 and Alden M. Taylor '43 were members of an eightman expedition headed by John J. Teal Jr. '42 to the tundras of northern Canada, where the rare musk oxen still roam in scattered herds. The successful efforts of the group to capture three musk ox calves, as the start of a herd to be domesticated on Teal's farm near Huntington Center, Vt., were recently recorded in an impressive series of pictures in Life magazine. Under Teal's leadership more expeditions are being planned.
A. Lincoln Washburn '35, Dartmouth's Professor of Northern Geology and former director of the U. S. Army's Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment in Winnetka, Ill., worked as a consultant to the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, meeting a variety of conditions on ice caps and marginal regions out of Thule, in Greenland. In the same area, also with the U. S. Engineers, was Richard P. Goldthwait '33, Professor of Geology at Ohio State University and an authority on glaciers and glaciation. Bill Marshall '48, who has worked for several summers with the U. S. Geological Survey, studied glaciers and ice formations at Ellsmere Island. Bill Mattox '52, on a Dartmouth-Iceland scholarship, worked in Iceland on evaluations of climatic changes in that northern country. Leslie A. Vierick '51, a member of the four-man party that climbed Mt. McKinley in May, took up his studies with the McGill Arctic Center, at its Knob Lake Sub-Arctic Research Laboratory. Larry Taylor '54 worked in connection with activities of the U. S. Corps of Engineers at Thule in Greenland, where Wes Blake '51, a private with the U. S. Transportation service, also spent the summer.
Alan Cooke '55 of Sunapee, N. H., went on a free-lance tour, mostly by hitchhiking: to James Bay where he joined an eclipse expedition in order to return south to the Trans-Canada Highway, thence to Edmonton and Great Slave Lake; and ultimately floating by barge down the Mackenzie River, his special geographic interest.
Substituting "North" for Horace Greeley's "West," Dartmouth men would seem still to be looking for the frontier, in study and strenuous actuality.
