True-Life Adventures
June 18, 2018 6:12 PM Subscribe
Herb and Lois Crisler were a married team of wildlife photographers who spent much of their life together living in the backcountry of Olympic National Park. In 1973, two years after Lois' death, their old friend Don McQuade accompanied an 80-year-old Herb on a traverse of the Olympic Mountains and filmed it for a documentary about the Crislers. The film screened several times but all that's known to survive today is an 18-minute sample reel.
Highlights: footage from the nine months the Crislers spent perched on a mountaintop as part of the Aircraft Warning Service, Herb and McQuade retracing their steps 35 years after their first filming trip, spiffy '70s hair and backpacking gear, the time Herb fell and broke his arm and had to set it himself in the wilderness.
The first wildlife footage Herb and Lois sold was of Olympic elk to Disney for an episode of True-Life Adventures. Disney would later contract them to film grizzly bears, wolves, caribou, and bighorn sheep.
Herb built a series of shelters deep in the mountains they used while filming wildlife. The massive amounts of precipitation the Olympics receive has obliterated the shelters but you can still find traces of some of them. His cache tree still stands (search in page for "cache") (visit the world's largest subalpine fir while you're there). Crisler's favorite traverse of the mountains is today a somewhat popular off-trail trip in ONP known as the Crisler Traverse or Bailey Range Traverse.
Lois was an English instructor at the University of Washington before she married Herb. She wrote a number of books about their adventures, the most well-known being Arctic Wild, an account of their time with the wolves in Alaska.
Highlights: footage from the nine months the Crislers spent perched on a mountaintop as part of the Aircraft Warning Service, Herb and McQuade retracing their steps 35 years after their first filming trip, spiffy '70s hair and backpacking gear, the time Herb fell and broke his arm and had to set it himself in the wilderness.
The first wildlife footage Herb and Lois sold was of Olympic elk to Disney for an episode of True-Life Adventures. Disney would later contract them to film grizzly bears, wolves, caribou, and bighorn sheep.
Herb built a series of shelters deep in the mountains they used while filming wildlife. The massive amounts of precipitation the Olympics receive has obliterated the shelters but you can still find traces of some of them. His cache tree still stands (search in page for "cache") (visit the world's largest subalpine fir while you're there). Crisler's favorite traverse of the mountains is today a somewhat popular off-trail trip in ONP known as the Crisler Traverse or Bailey Range Traverse.
Lois was an English instructor at the University of Washington before she married Herb. She wrote a number of books about their adventures, the most well-known being Arctic Wild, an account of their time with the wolves in Alaska.
This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- frimble
This is great. I love the Olympics and had only just started exploring the back country before my kids were born. I’ve even been to one of their shelters. I’m hoping next year I’ll be able to take the 10 year old.
I’d never heard of the Crislers before now. Seems like they’d have some lake or visitor’s center named after them. Thank you for this post. It’s a nice piece of PNW history which is sadly being lost with all the Cobains and Gates and Bezos mythology. I’m talking about the Ira Springs, the Harry s. Trumans (Spirit Lake Lodge), and the Debbie Armstrongs. People who were Northwest through and through whose contributions to the good life here will probably be lost to history.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 8:25 PM on June 18, 2018 [5 favorites]
I’d never heard of the Crislers before now. Seems like they’d have some lake or visitor’s center named after them. Thank you for this post. It’s a nice piece of PNW history which is sadly being lost with all the Cobains and Gates and Bezos mythology. I’m talking about the Ira Springs, the Harry s. Trumans (Spirit Lake Lodge), and the Debbie Armstrongs. People who were Northwest through and through whose contributions to the good life here will probably be lost to history.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 8:25 PM on June 18, 2018 [5 favorites]
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