Behind the Scenes Minis: Mountains and Glaciers

Tracy shares her experiences watching the show "Molly of Denali." The discussion then turns to glacier surge. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy d Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. All this week we talked about
Walter Harper and the Summoning of Denali, and also a

(00:21):
lot about Hudson Stuck, who was a big source of
the information about that expedition, and about Harper's life, and
so much cold weather, So much cold weather. I want
to talk about Molly of DOANEI. Okay, So I knew
about Malli of DONLLEI before. I don't have kids, I'm
not around a lot of kids, so like, I've never
really watched a lot of Malli of Denali. But after

(00:42):
getting served this clip about Halloween on Halloween and being
inspired for this episode, I discovered totally by accident and
just trying I was like trying to confirm the details
of this clip, so I was going to describe it correctly.
There is also a whole episode that's an hour long

(01:02):
special episode of Molly of Danali, which is called Molly
and the Great One, and the story of that one
is that Molly finds out that her grandfather wanted to
summit Denali when he was a young man and things
happened and he had not been able to do it.
So Molly and her friends start trying to find a
way for her grandfather to summit do Nali. And so

(01:24):
this story of Molly and her family is interspersed with
the story of Walter Harper and the expedition in the
world of Molly of d Nali. Molly's father is named
Walter and is named for Walter Harper and is Koyacon.
Molly's best friend Touey is also Coyacon, and then Molly

(01:44):
has like multiple Native Alaska lineages from the two sides
of her family. I was like, well, I obviously need
to go watch this episode of Molly of d Nali now,
And since I contribute to PBS, I have the PBS
app and the PBS Kids App, and the episode was

(02:05):
not on either of those two things, and so I
used the search function on the smart TV to try
to find it, and what I wound up finding was
it was on YouTube with ASL interpretation, and I realized
that YouTube on the smart TV was signed in under

(02:26):
Patrick's account, and I was like, well, Patrick, I'm just
gonna I'm gonna mess up your YouTube algorithm by watching
Mally of Denali locked in as you he was not,
or I just texted him to be like, hey, by
the way, if you're suddenly getting Alaska programming or children's
programming in your YouTube, it's my fault. Malli of Denali

(02:50):
has very sadly been canceled. I think it has one
more season that is coming out, and it also has
been canceled for multiple reasons. The people that are involved
with the show have made it clear that like, it's
not any one thing, but one of the things is
the gutting of PBS funding by the federal government, so

(03:14):
like that's part of it. I have heard so many
great things about that show, despite of the fact that
I haven't personally watched any of it, And so this
clip and then watching Molly in the Great One on
Patrick's YouTube account. There are a ton of books about
this expedition to Denali, and then there are also books

(03:34):
about some of the people involved, none of which I
read while researching this, but I did just want to
say they exist if people are interested in learning more.
There's a biography of Harry Carston's which is called The
Seventy Mile Kid, The Lost Legacy of Harry Carston's and
the First Ascent of Mount McKinley that is by Tom Walker.
It came out in I think twenty thirteen. And then

(03:56):
there's a pretty new book about Walter Harper called Walter
Harper Alaska Native Son that is by Mary F. Erlander.
I don't know of a biography that is specifically about
Hudson Stuck. Some of the books about the expedition are
focused largely on him, but I think all of his

(04:18):
books that are about Alaska, they are all in the
public domain, and I think all of them are available
at archive dot org, so they are easy to get
to if you want to read more of his reading.
So I will say a the language that he uses
about like the Native peoples of Alaska, some of it
is language that was commonly used at the time and

(04:40):
is really not Native Nation's own preferred terminology today, right.
And some of it is stuff that was like that
was insensitive at the time and it's still insensitive. But
as we said in the episode, in a lot of ways,
I feel like he was more progressive and more focused
on autonomy and preservation of indigenous customs and life ways
than a lot of other people. Random side note, the

(05:03):
Muldro Glacier that they climbed to get up to Danali
continued to be a primary route to get to the
summit until it surged. And I think it surged in
the nineteen fifties and there was like a sort of
a temporary stoppage and people using it as much to
try to get to the summit. It also surged very recently,

(05:25):
like within the last couple of years, and I think
people are not using that glacier as a route to
the Summit of Danali at the moment. Yeah, I mean,
I imagine it, like many things, is being affected by
the warmer temperatures for sure. You know, when we were
in Iceland last year, a lot of our guides when

(05:46):
we would do various excursions, pointed out like, hey, if
you had been here a few years ago, these glaciers
were a lot bigger. And our trip on a glacier
was canceled because it was melting because it was so soft.
We couldn't do what we wanted to do there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, anyway,
but yeah, it is what it is. I went to
a natural history museum we were in Iceland on the

(06:06):
day that we arrived because it was the earliest thing
that was open, and Patrick and I had landed at
like four in the morning or something. Perlin I think
was the name of the Natural History Museum, and they
had a whole display that was about the loss of
glaciers in Iceland. Yeah, And in addition to the glaciers melting,
how the weight of the glaciers not being there causes

(06:29):
the land to lift, causing multiple intersecting problems a giant bummer.
Climate change is real. It is largely caused by human activity,
including the burning of fossil fuels. And yes, sometimes glaciers
do surge for other reasons. But there are a lot

(06:50):
of glaciers that have surged in recent years, all at
the same time, Yeah, and are receding in various ways
as they melt all kinds of stuff. As from what
I understand, a lot of people in Alaska, and a
lot of Alaska Native people see Walter Harper as a
hero as his life, as we said, was very tragically

(07:12):
cut short. The author Mary f. Erlander, who wrote a
biography of him, I watched a talk that she gave,
and she talked about a lot of the changes that
came to Alaska after the nineteen teens, and a lot
of which were really monumental for the Alaska Native population.
Some of these are things that we've talked about on
the show before, like the Indian Reorganization Act that tried

(07:36):
to enable Indigenous nations to have more self governance and
more autonomy. And some of it was like the land
read distributions that happened in Alaska, and how influential and
important he could have been to all of that, given
his personality being a big part of it, because he

(07:56):
was extremely personable and charismatic and kind and devoted and
people really admired him. And then also the fact that
he had been raised in Quoi kon Athabaskan traditions and
also had so much experience with like Hudson Stuck in
his missionary work and the white religious community in Alaska,

(08:19):
and had the potential to like really be a connecting
point in a way that would hopefully help the Native
peoples of Alaska. Yeah, it's a pity. We mentioned at
the end of the show that there has been a
lot of speculation about what he would have been and
it's like, yeah, just a sad, a sad. Yeah. Yeah,

(08:44):
As I was writing it, I got to that point
and I was like, wow, this like, I mean, it
came out of nowhere in real life. But we know
that people listen to our podcast because they enjoy it,
and so I don't like writing an episode in which
everything just seems to be trucking along and then somebody
dies tragically out of nowhere, which is why I put
that heads up at the beginning of part two. Yeah,

(09:08):
which is not something that you know when someone when
the subject of a podcast dies at the age of
eighty safe in their bed. That's not something we warn
about at the beginning, since that is sort of a
sad note. Do you want a ridiculous thing to end on?
I absolutely do. When I was looking over your outline,
I specifically because often what I will do if it

(09:31):
involves a person or something that I'm not familiar with,
I will do a quick Internet search just so I
have a visual in my head, okay, And I specifically
did not on this one because as I read through it,
in my head, the picture that formed of Hudson stuck
was an Episcopalian version of Yukon Cornelius, and I was like,

(09:51):
that's funny. I would like to hang onto this as
long as possible. I love that, And now that I
have googled him, I'm like, oh, you are sadly gaunt. Yeah,
you don't look like you can Cornelius at all. Like
it's his fault somehow. Yeah, they needed a bumble on
this mission and then everything would have been fine. Yeah.

(10:13):
It is. Of all the various expeditions to a place,
you know, polar environments, things like that, that we've talked
about on the show, it does seem to have gone
better than any of the rest of them, Yes, because
they were all experienced people who understood what was happening. Yeah,

(10:33):
and it seems like they were all like mutually dedicated
to the safety of the whole expedition. Yeah, which has
not been the case in every expedition we had ever
talked about. So yeah, that was Walter Harper. We will
have the SS Princess Sofia episode as a classic tomorrow
because it's been some years since that came out. I

(10:55):
didn't remember that. When I wrote that episode, I mentioned
that Walter Harper had died in it. So if folks
have heard that episode recently enough, they did not need
the heads up at the beginning of part two. So anyway,
hoping whatever's happening on your weekend, I hope it's going great.

(11:16):
If you are going into some cold weather hiking camping situations,
I hope you have gear that's maybe a little more
lightweight but also but also serviceable than some of what
they were hauling around on that trip. I hope you
can find appropriate shoes or footwear that, to me is

(11:43):
so miserable to contemplate. Yeah, yeah, well, and it made
sense to me that what they wound up working with
was like the shoes that local people have been wearing
for generations. Like that totally makes sense. But the idea
that they were having out pine boots that we're going
to be way too tight with that many socks would

(12:03):
it'd be awful. So I hope if you're hiking you
have great footwear that's working for you doing its job.
We will be back with that Saturday Classic tomorrow, and
we have something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more

(12:23):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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