Alaska and the Yukon. Cold. Mysterious. Distant. Imagine how empty and forbidding the region seemed in the 1930s when Bradford Washburn began a series of exploratory expeditions. With its glorious black and white, large format photographs, EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN contains previously unpublished diaries kept during Washburn's 1934 first ascent of Alaska's Mt. Crillon; the 1935 National Geographic Society-sponsored exploration of wilderness region's of Canada's Yukon; and the 1951 first climb of Mt. McKinley's West Buttress.