Bradford Washburn suffered from terrible hay fever as a child and long told friends that he became a mountain climber because the mountains were the only place he could breathe. Others might say he became a mountain climber because he was stubborn.
His first three Alaska expeditions were failures, although the second and third were better failures than the first. On the fourth, in 1934, his team summited Mount Crillon, a massive 12,726-foot peak off the Gulf of Alaska that had never been attempted or approached and is still rarely attempted today.
After his fourth try, he never failed in Alaska, revolutionizing mountaineering with the use of bush planes, radios, and air drops of supplies. He succeeded because he was smart and driven as a climber, but he also succeeded — and sometimes survived — because he was tough.
Born Henry Bradford Washburn, Jr., in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on June 7, 1910, he was the son of the Very Rev. Henry Bradford Washburn Sr., dean of the Episcopal Theological
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