This image shows Fury Finger, center, and the summit of Mt. Fury's east peak (lower right foreground), in the Northern Picket Range of North Cascades National Park. This region is aptly describe as one of the most remote locales in the lower 48 states. The image comes from a photographic flight conducted on November 10, 2010.
Beyond the Veil of Mystery
John Scurlock’s aerial mountain photography opened a window unseen and inspired a generation of climbers
In September 2018, as John Scurlock climbed into his small plane at the airport in Cody, Wyoming, a gust scattered his flight notes over the tarmac. He was near the end of an eleven-year project to photograph all the glaciers in the Lower 48, and that day he was headed into the Bighorn Mountains. A thunderstorm approached, earlier than the forecast predicted. If I don’t get up there and photograph the Bighorns, he thought, God knows when it will happen.
Many factors needed to line up for each of Scurlock’s flights: free time, available funding, reasonable weather. To capture the true margins of the glaciers, unconcealed beneath seasonal drifts, he had only a brief window between the melting of the previous winter’s snows and the return of autumn storms. The day before, he’d been just about to leave Colorado when he realized he’d forgotten to photograph a few patches of glacial ice in the Sierra Blanca Massif, so he’d flown back across the state, frantically collecting
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