Frank Pitelka’s Alaska Images

My father, the late Frank Alois Pitelka, was a vertebrate zoologist in the Department of Zoology at University of California, Berkeley.  He studied small vertebrates, including the lemming.  For almost thirty years starting in 1951, Dad made annual summer trips to the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory at Barrow, Alaska and to other sites in the Alaskan Arctic to study lemmings and other small vertebrates.  He became a world expert on lemmings, and took on a personal quest later in life to fight misconceptions about lemmings perpetuated in Walt Disney’s “White Wilderness.” Those misconceptions continue to appear frequently today.  Lemmings have never committed mass suicide, jumping off cliffs.  That was an incorrect story falsely legitimized by the recreation staged in “White Wilderness.”

PDF of UC-Berkeley obituary for Frank Pitelka

PDF of Museum of Vertebrate Zoology obituary for Frank Pitelka, written by Walter D. Koenig and William Z. Lidicker Jr.

For reasons I cannot explain, Dad never shared much with us about his Alaskan adventures.  We had regular slide shows of images from family gatherings and trips, but dad never included any of his arctic slides.  After he passed away in October of 2003, I was faced with the task of going through approximately  3000 color slides from his professional collection, mostly shot in the Alaskan Arctic.  The entire collection was destined for the NARL archives at the University of Alaska.  Before sending it off, I wanted to see if there were images of value to the family archive.  Fortunately my brother-in-law John Steinmetz had a stack-feeder to fit a Kodak carousel projector, which greatly simplified the task of going through 3000 slides.

It is no surprise that the great majority of the slides are rather dry, clinical images of arctic tundra research sites and projects, only of value in relation to Dad’s work in northern Alaska.  But I did find many wonderful images, and made high-resolution digital scans of about 200 slides to share with my siblings and our offspring.  75 of those images are in the gallery below.  If anyone is interested in these images for professional use, I have high-resolution TIFF files.

The captions on the images are exactly as my father wrote them on the color slides.  The first number is the year, and the slides are arranged in chronological order, covering dad’s trips to the Arctic from 1951 to 1975.  I have included a few non-Arctic images from his collection, just because they were interesting photographs.

NOTE: The following collection of images includes indigenous peoples of northern coastal Alaska butchering whale, walrus, and polar bear. 

Click on the first thumbnail to see a larger image, and then use the arrows at the right hand edge of the enlarged image to advance to the next one, or use the arrow keys on your keyboard.  Please contact me if you have questions.