Charles Alan Kenneth Innes-Taylor, 1900-1983

Abstract

... Though self-educated, Innes-Taylor understood the difficulties and challenges of scientific research, having so often critically supported it. He valued new scientific techniques and encouraged newcomers in their application. He was especially helpful in pointing out unforeseen problems. As one biologist from this period has remarked, Innes-Taylor was an inspiration in the practical solution of applied research problems. After 1956, Innes-Taylor applied his knowledge of polar survival as a consultant to international airline companies, especially Scandinavian Airlines which pioneered the transpolar air route in 1957. He trained many air crews for this mission, and wrote for SAS the highly acclaimed manual "This is the Arctic." He also introduced special survival gear such as exposure suits and circular, multi-person sleeping bags. ... [His vast knowledge was acquired through his experiences while living in Eagle, Alaska, and later in Dawson and Whitehorse, Yukon, running Yukon River trips.] ... It was this northern experience which uniquely qualified Innes-Taylor to journey south in 1929, providing fresh sled dogs to BAE I [the expedition on which] Admiral Byrd, piloted by Bernt Balchen, made the first flight over the South Pole. ... Innes-Taylor returned to Antarctica in 1933 as chief of field operations for BAE II. ... At the start of World War II, Innes-Taylor was commissioned, by Special Act of Congress, as a captain in the U.S. Army Air Force. His first assignment was to southeastern Greenland where he helped to rescue air crews downed on the ice sheet. After mid-1942 and for the remainder of the war, he trained arctic and mountain troops in Colorado and Canada. ... his most dispiriting experience, ... was his service as executive officer at Isachsen land, latitude 78° N on Ellef Ringnes Island in the Canadian Arctic. ... Innes-Taylor and his party of six spent almost a year at this station, which had been visited only once before - by Stefansson, thirty years earlier - and which was inaccessible during the summer. In addition to supervising daily weather observations, Innes-Taylor banded birds and observed tidal and sea ice fluctuation. But he lamented the loss of simplicity, almost of innocence, that this new, spiritless, mechanized exploration brought to the unchanged land. ... In 1950 he was recalled by the U.S. Air Force to command survival training schools for Korean War flight crews .... This work eventually brought him to ... Fairbanks, where in October 1953 he became a researcher in charge of the Environmental Protection Section of the USAF Arctic Aeromedical Lab. ... [In addition to his many accomplishments, he was awarded a medal for heroism, documented historical sites all along the Yukon's rivers, was instrumental in saving the Dawson archives when they were flooded in 1966, received the Order of Canada in 1977, and the Yukon Commissioner's Medal in 1982, and as a Fellow of the Arctic Institute acted as factotum for the Arctic Institute's field operations out of Whitehorse and later Kluane Lake.] ... Innes-Taylor [has been described as] a remarkable mixture of the practical and theoretical, domestic and exotic, realistic and romantic, old and new.