Behind the Scenes Minis: Mountains and Glaciers

Tracy shares her experiences watching the show "Molly of Denali." The discussion then turns to glacier surge. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:04Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 1:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. All this week, we talked about Walter Harper and the summing of Denali, and also a 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. And so much cold weather. I want to talk about Molly of Denali. Okay. So I knew about Molly of Denali before. I don't have kids. I'm not around a lot of kids. Like, I've never really watched a lot of Molly of Denali. But after getting served this clip about Halloween on Halloween and being inspired for this episode, I discovered totally by accident and just try, I was like trying to

• 1:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 special episode of Molly of Denali, 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. Oh. And things, 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 Denali. And so the story of Molly and her family is interspersed with the story of Walter Harper and the expedition. In the world of Molly of Denali, Molly's father is named Walter and is named for Walter

• 2:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  Harper and is Koyakon. Molly's best friend, Tui, is also Koyakon. And then Molly has like multiple Alask- the 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 Denali now. And since I contribute to PBS, I have the PBS app and the PBS Kids app, and the episode was 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

• 3:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  that YouTube on the smart TV was signed in under Patrick's account. And I was like, well, Patrick, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna mess up your YouTube algorithm by watching Molly of Denali locked in as you. He was, 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. Molly of Denali 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, the people that are involved

• 4:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  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. Yeah. Like, that's part of it. I have heard so many great things about that show, in spite of the fact that I haven't personally watched any of it, and so this clip, and then watching Molly and 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 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. Uh, there's a biography of Harry Carstens,

• 4:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  which is called The Seventy Mile Kid: The Lost Legacy of Harry Carstens and the First Ascent of Mount McKinley. That is by Tom Walker. It came out in, I think, 2013. And then there's a pretty new book about Walter Harper called Walter Harper: Alaska Native Son. That is by Mary F. Ehrlander. 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, I think all of his books that are about Alaska, they are all in the public domain. And I think all of them are available at like archive.org. So, uh, they are easy to get to if you want to read more of his reading.

• 5:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  But I will say 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 is really not Native Nation's own preferred terminology today.

• 5:48Holly Frey?

  Right.

• 5:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 6:03Holly Frey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  Random side note, the Moldro Glacier that they climbed to get up to Denali continued to be a primary route to get to the summit until it surged. And I think it surged in the 1950s and there was like a sort of a, a temporary stoppage and people using it as much to try to get to the summit. It also surged very recently, like within the last couple of years. And I think people are not using that glacier as a route to the summit of Denali at the moment.

• 6:36Holly Frey?

  Yeah, I mean, I imagine it, like many things, is being affected by the warmer temperatures.

• 6:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  For sure.

• 6:44Holly Frey?

  You know, we, when we were in Iceland last year. A lot of our guides, when we would do various excursions, pointed out like, hey, if you had been here a few years ago, these glaciers were a lot bigger.

• 6:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  And our trip on a glacier was canceled because it was melting.

• 6:58Holly Frey?

  Because it was so soft, we couldn't do what we wanted to do there. Yeah.

• 7:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Holly Frey?

  Yeah. Anyway, so I'm a ruseles, but yeah, it is what it is.

• 7:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  I went to a natural history museum while we were in Iceland on like the 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.

• 7:25Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 7:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  And, and in addition to the glaciers melting, how the weight of the glaciers not being there causes the lands 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 yeah, sometimes glaciers do surge for other reasons, but.

• 7:53Holly Frey?

  There are a lot of glaciers that have surged in recent years, all at the same time.

• 7:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 cut short. The author, Mary F. Erlender, 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 19 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

• 8:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Act that tried to enable Indigenous nations to have more self governance and more autonomy. And some of it was like the land redistributions 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 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 Koi Kona Thabasian traditions and also.

• 9:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  Had so much experience with like Hudson Stuck and his missionary work and the the white religious community in Alaska and had the potential to like really be a connecting point in a way that would hopefully help the the native peoples of Alaska.

• 9:33Holly Frey?

  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,

• 9:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 9:44Holly Frey?

  Just a sad, a sad.

• 9:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. Yeah. 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.

• 10:11Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 10:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Which is not something that, you know, when someone, when the subject of a podcast dies at the age of 80, safe in their bed, that's not something we warn about at the beginning.

• 10:22Holly Frey?

  Since that is sort of a sad note, do you want a ridiculous thing to end on?

• 10:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  I absolutely do.

• 10:28Holly Frey?

  When I was looking over your outline, I specifically, because often what I will do, if it's 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.

• 10:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  Okay.

• 10:42Holly Frey?

  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,

• 10:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  That's funny.

• 10:56Holly Frey?

  I would like to hang on to this as long as possible.

• 10:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  I love that.

• 11:00Holly Frey?

  And now that I have Googled him, I'm like, oh, you are sadly gaunt.

• 11:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Holly Frey?

  You don't look like Yukon Cornelius at all. Like it's his fault somehow.

• 11:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah.

• 11:12Holly Frey?

  They needed a bumble on this mission and then everything would have been fine.

• 11:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. 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.

• 11:30Holly Frey?

  Yes, because they were all experienced people who understood what was happening.

• 11:36Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. And it seems like they were all like mutually dedicated to the safety of the whole expedition.

• 11:43Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 11:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 11:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  Cause it's been some years since that came out. I 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.

• 12:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  So, anyway, hoping whatever's happening on your weekend, I hope it's going great. 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.

• 12:38Holly Frey?

  I hope you can find appropriate shoes or footwear. That, to me, is so miserable to contemplate.

• 12:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and it made sense to me that what they wound up working with was like the shoes that local people had been wearing for generations. Like, that totally makes sense. But the idea that they were having Alpine boots that were going to be way too tight with that many socks, would it 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.

• 13:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 13:39Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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