Fr. Bernard Hubbard, SJ, nurses a baby seal on Alaska's King Island in 1928. Explorer Hubbard was listed as a member of the geology department at Santa Clara University, but he spent most of his time trekking and photographing Alaskan wilderness. He also lectured widely on and wrote three books about his Alaskan expeditions: Mush, You Malamutes; Cradle of the Storms; and One Hundred Little Known Views of Alaska. Though Hubbard did have sponsors, including Agfa film and National Geographic; that can of Carnation milk was probably just incidental to the photo.

Half the year the highest paid lecturer in the world, the other half a wanderer among treacherous craters and glaciers" was the way Literary Digest described Fr. Bernard Hubbard, SJ, (1888 -1962) in 1937.

Fr. Hubbard was known to a national audience as "The Glacier Priest," a nickname he earned in the 1920s while a Jesuit in theology studies in Austria because he mounted geological expeditions into the Tyrolean Alps every weekend he could.

Hubbard was born and raised in California, hiking, exploring, and photographing the Santa Cruz mountains and the coast. His parents, Catholic converts, encouraged Bernard to attend Santa Clara University and enter the Jesuits, which he did in 1908.

Three King Island girls display crabs they caught through the ice; standing next to them is Hubbard's sled dog Mageik. Hubbard spent a year on King Island, a tiny, treeless place in the Bering Sea between Alaska and Siberia. He photographed the island's Inupiats, Eskimos who still practiced ancient ways of hunting and gathering. Hubbard's photos and films of Alaska drew 8 million visitors to his exhibit at the 1940 Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco.

Hubbard led annual expeditions to Alaska from 1927 until shortly before his death in 1962. In 1931, Hubbard and his party of Santa Clara University athletes, William Regan, Richard Douglas, and Kenneth Chisholm, begin a day of exploration of the Aniakchak Crater with mass, not long after the volcano had erupted in May of that year. Hubbard's fame spread when his journeys were described in National Geographic and serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. Lecture tours and NBC-sponsored radio broadcasts gave him an even larger audience.

Frank Elanna, an Inupiat, is surrounded by pans of "Eskimo ice cream" -- blackberries, reindeer fat, and seal oil -- shared in a qagri, a communal house, during a ceremony after a polar bear hunt on King Island in 1937. In addition to the thousands of such photographs his expeditions generated, the hundreds of thousands of feet of motion-picture film are priceless records of Native Alaskan culture in the 1930s.

After his years of formation and ordination, Hubbard returned to Santa Clara University in 1925 as an instructor in geology, Greek, and German. Shortly after, he was sent to Alaska to lead a retreat for the Sisters of St. Anne in Juneau. At that time Alaska was not a state but a territory, a remote frontier that most Americans thought of as an arctic wasteland. But to an explorer like Hubbard, Alaska's unmapped mountains, active volcanoes, glaciers, and rugged islands became a calling.

Hubbard's annual Alaskan expeditions featured scientific observations, thrills, wonders, and service to the cross. He explored Alaska by foot, dogsled, umiak (a walrus-hide boat), pontoon plane, and Coast Guard cutter, along with a professional prize fighter, a star football player, and his favorite sled dogs. He began each day with mass, carried 100 pounds of scientific and photographic equipment on his back, and said the rosary when confronted by danger.

Hubbard, filming at Alaska's Mendenhall Glacier in 1952, got his name "The Glacier Priest" not for his work in Alaska but while studying theology in Innsbruck, Austria, in the 1920s. On weekends he would mount geological expeditions into the Tyrolean Alps. His Austrian guides nicknamed him Der Gletscher Pfarrer, the glacier priest. Hubbard often called himself a "scholar in God's outdoors."

In Hubbard's time, only one Coast Guard cutter, the Northland, patrolled the entire Alaskan coast during open water. Hubbard and his groups relied on the cutter, which wintered in Seattle, for getting to and from Alaska as ice permitted.

Hubbard followed each expedition with an ambitious lecture tour featuring his photos, films, jokes, and stories. As a lecturer, Hubbard used his own superb photographs and films – and his legendary gifts as a storyteller and showman – to introduce Americans to Alaska's geological wonders, strategic position, and native peoples. By 1940, Hubbard was the star of the Father Hubbard Lectures, and his film shorts ran in movie houses across America.

Scientists did occasionally accompany Hubbard, who was largely self-trained in geology and other sciences, according to Fr. Gerald McKevitt, SJ, author of The University of Santa Clara: A History 1851-1977. "The overall scientific value of his thirty-odd expeditions to Alaska was not great," reports McKevitt. Hubbard's claims to expertise in many scientific fields chafed fellow Jesuits and scientists, but his work and the publicity he generated not only demystified Alaska for his readers and listeners but also made Santa Clara University's name known across the country, according to McKevitt.

While on King Island in 1938, Hubbard (center) organized a 2,000-mile umiak (walrus-hide boat) trip up the Bering Sea coast to Point Barrow. His crew posed in front of the umiak they used for the journey, flipped up for shelter. The group included a King Island chief, John Ollanna (fourth from right). Hubbard, testing the theory that all the Bering Strait Inupiaq Eskimos were related to one another through a mother tongue, was happy to learn that the King Islanders could understand the dialects of the people of other Bering Strait villages.

John Ollanna, an Inupiaq chief, with paddles and harpoon lines, 1937. Ollanna, whose blackened face is the result of vitiligo, a skin condition brought on by exposure to the sun, accompanied Hubbard on a walrus-boat journey up Alaska's coast. Hubbard also traveled by dogsled; one incredible solo trek he made in 1931 took him 1,600 miles from Alaska's interior to the Bering Sea.

Jeff Kunkel is an author, artist, ordained United Methodist pastor, and curator of Father Hubbard: Glacier Priest. He lives in Oakland, California.

With the coming of World War II, Hubbard consulted with the armed forces, befriended military officers, and entertained Alaskan troops. After the war, he photographed the devastated Jesuit communities of Europe and the construction of the Al-Can Highway. In 1962, while robing for mass, Hubbard died of a stroke; he is buried in Santa Clara Mission Cemetery.

His 11,000 photographic negatives and artifacts are stored in the Santa Clara University Archives. His 200,000 feet of raw film and 50 film shorts are at the Smithsonian Institution. A traveling exhibition Father Hubbard: Glacier Priest, premiered at Santa Clara University in January and will travel to other West Coast venues.

For information about future venues for the Hubbard exhibit, call the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University, (408) 554-6877.