The Last of An Adventuring Kind: Brad Washburn

We talk a lot about various kinds of adventure on this site, from entrepreneurial efforts to  viewing all of life as a challenging and rewarding hero’s journey. Our writers also often look at physical adventure as a metaphor for lessons that are applicable to many other aspects of life.
But David Roberts has a new book out that provides an engrossing and entertaining profile of an adventurer and explorer for whom adventure was far more than just a metaphor. The Last of His Kind: The Life and Adventures of Bradford Washburn, America’s Boldest Mountaineer opens, in fact, with Washburn and a friend, age 27,  lost in a literally uncharted section of the upper Yukon Territory. Searching for a way to cross the Donjek River, they have to find their way without a map or guide … or food, as it turns out. That they survived was as much due to luck as skill, and later we discover that it was youthful brashness that got them in that fix in the first place.
But youthful brashness is perhaps a necessary ingredient to great adventurers and explorers. And Washburn was nothing if not one of the greatest of that class. Was he really the “last of his kind”? Hard to say. Perhaps, out there somewhere, there is someone else cut from the same cloth, but Roberts is right that Brad Washburn was a Renaissance man of an order not often found on the earth anymore.
Born to a patrician Boston family, Washburn went to Harvard. But Washburn made his mark outside the university, in an astonishing number of fields with an impressive array of talents. He was, first and foremost, one of the leading mountain climbers of his time. But he was also an accomplished writer, penning several books for George Putnam’s “Boys Books By Boys” series before the age of 20. He also became a pilot and an astoundingly talented aerial and adventure photographer (his black and white photos alone make the book worth reading). In addition, he took over the ailing New England Museum of Natural History, turning it into the impressive Museum of Science that remains one of the top tourist sites in Boston today.
There were all kinds of missteps along the way, lost friends, accidents, and failures. But there were also great triumphs, laughter, love … and always, a burning curiosity for the next great and wondrous thing the world might have to show, teach, or share. When Washburn was in his 90s, Roberts took him for a flight over the peak and glacier where the misadventures that open the book took place. Washburn and his wife and fellow climber, Barbara, looked out the windows at a landscape Washburn hadn’t seen in 60 years.
“Throughout the flight,” Roberts says, “Brad stared out the passenger-side window, whistling softly to himself, muttering ‘Will you look at that?’ and ‘I’ll be darned.’ It was then that I recognized, as if for the first time, Brad Washburn’s finest quality. Throughout his long life, he had never lost his quenchless, almost childlike sense of wonder about the world. That was, I thought, the key to one of the greatest explorers of the twentieth century.”
Indeed. And that kind of observation is the key to why Roberts’ profile is such an insightful and compelling window into not just one particular man, but into those rare and exceptional people who are almost constitutionally incapable of living life as anything short of a great adventure.
 
Lane Wallace is the Editor and Founder of No Map. No Guide. No Limits.
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