Pacemaker Crown Graphic Field Camera

Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in Southeast Alaska is known for one of the most rapid post-Little Ice Age glacial retreats on earth. Scientific interest in Glacier Bay began in the latter part of the 19th century, well before President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed the area a National Monument in 1925.

By the 1880s, several eminent scientists, including George F. Wright, John Muir, William S. Cooper, and Harry Fielding Reid, were regular visitors to Glacier Bay. In 1890, Reid established 31 photographic monitoring stations located at strategic points overlooking the bay’s principal glaciers. The young, inexperienced Harvard graduate William O. Field, Jr. took up the work of recording changes in these glaciers from 1926 until 1974. Braving the bay’s notoriously cold, soggy weather, navigating small boats through ice-choked fjords, and hiking miles over rocky terrain, Dr. Field carried this large format Graflex camera to each of the 31 photo stations to maintain an unbroken photographic record of glacial movements and the colonization of the first plants on newly exposed land.

NPS rangers, naturalists, and biologists of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve continued the 100 year record of glacial and landscape change under Dr. Field’s direction until 1994 . The venerable Graflex camera was “retired” in the 1980s in favor of smaller, more convenient 35mm camera formats and film.