Wilderness Committee features Arctic explorer Dennis Schmitt

Tuesday, March 18; committee meeting starts 7 pm, program at 7:45, at Sierra Club Headquarters, 85 Second St., San Francisco (near Montgomery BART/Muni station).

Arctic explorer and former Sierra Club trip leader Dennis Schmitt returns with a new program on his recent Arctic expeditions and discoveries.

Last winter Schmitt described to us his historic discovery of "Uunartoq Qeqertoq" or "Warming Island", a former peninsula that was exposed and newly separated from the mainland of Greenland due to melting of the connecting ice shelf. Although equipment failure didn't allow showing of his slides, he held listeners spellbound.

Last summer Schmitt and Sierra Club outing leader Holly Wenger conducted an expedition to North Greenland to discover a new island at 83° 40" 37'. This island is called "Kitaa Qeqertoq" (the western isle) or "Stray Dog West", and is the northernmost known island. Writer John Richardson and photographer Jeff Shea tell of it in the October Esquire. Schmitt also went with Anderson Cooper of CNN to East Greenland for a film project concerning the earth's changing climate. The resulting four-hour documentary titled "Planet in Peril" was aired worldwide by CNN in October.

Schmitt's Warming Island discovery evoked a wave of media fascination during 2007, led off by a New York Times article early in the year. The discovery was reported through newspapers, radio, television, web sites, and magazines, on seven continents. Warming Island became a poster child for global warming. Last March, the Frankfurt, Germany, Allgemeine Zeitung featured Warming Island on the front page of a seven-page section on climate change. In April Jeff Shea's full-page image of Warming Island pushed the story of Boris Yeltsin's death off the front page of the London Independent. In October, the new Oxford Atlas of the World recognized Uunartoq Qeqertoq as its first-ever "Place of the Year" in its 14th edition.

Schmitt has long familiarity with Arctic peoples and issues. In 1965 he began his residence in Arctic Village and Anaktuvuk Pass in Alaska's Brooks Range. As a caribou hunter he learned to run dogs and speak the Nunamiut and other Eskimo dialects. He became a member of Anaktuvuk's Village Council, mapped Inupiat territory on the North Slope, worked on Bible translation at Point Barrow, and wrote an ethnographic paper "The Origin of the Nunamiut" for the Smithsonian Institute. In February 1966 he made the first recorded winter ascents in Alaska's Brooks Range.

In April 1966 the teen-age Schmitt's crossing of the Bering Straits on the spring sea ice into the Soviet Union led to his interrogation by the FBI - which ended in the request for his autograph as "the boy who crossed the Bering straits". From 1968 on, he turned to the Brooks Range, with hundreds of exploratory ascents of peaks, glaciers, passes, and rivers, including first descents of the Echooka, Kugururok, and Ipewik Rivers. In the 1980s he aimed at the then-unexplored mountain ranges, peninsulas, ice shelves, and islands of the whole North American polar rim. Highlights of his travels there were North Baffin and North Ellesmere Islands, where he discovered an unfossilized Paleocene tree with intact root system and encountered miniature caribou. He also crossed the Marvin Peninsula and Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, and climbed the northern rim of British Empire Range. In 1995 with Dr. Ruthmary Deuel he made the first crossing of Axel Heiberg Island through the ice fields of the Princess Margaret Range and also embarked on his first expedition into North Greenland out of Resolute.

For more information, contact Wilderness Committee chair Patricia Jones at (510) 548-2204 or email protectwildplaces -at- yahoo.com or program coordinator Vicky Hoover at (415) 977-5527 or email Vicky.hoover -at- sierraclub.org