Dennis Schmitt (born May 23, 1946) is a veteran explorer, adventurer and composer.

Early life

Schmitt grew up in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and E ...

, the son of mixed German and American parentage. His father was a plumber. Displaying early aptitude with languages, music and mathematics, Schmitt graduated from Berkeley High School in 1963, and went on to study linguistics at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

with

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...

in his late teens. Chomsky recruited Schmitt, aged 19, to travel to Alaska's

Brooks Range The Brooks Range ( Gwich'in: ''Gwazhał'') is a mountain range in far northern North America stretching some from west to east across northern Alaska into Canada's Yukon Territory. Reaching a peak elevation of on Mount Isto, the range is b ...

and attempt to learn the Nunamiut dialect.

Career

Schmitt lived for four years at an Alaskan Eskimo village named

Anaktuvuk Pass The Anaktuvuk Pass ("the place of caribou droppings", el. 2,200 ft.) is a mountain pass located in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve in North Slope Borough in northern Alaska. The Anaktuvuk Pass is in the Brooks Range which div ...

before leading expeditions, including the

Sierra Club The Sierra Club is an environmental organization with chapters in all 50 United States, Washington D.C., and Puerto Rico. The club was founded on May 28, 1892, in San Francisco, California, by Scottish-American preservationist John Muir, who b ...

. In 2003, Schmitt discovered one of the candidates of being the northernmost land in the world. Deciding that Greenland should name its own islands, he simply called it " 83-42", a name that has remained. Two years later, in 2005, Schmitt discovered a new island formed by the retreat of an ice shelf in East Greenland. Uunartoq Qeqertaq, Inuit for "The Warming Island", lies 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The

reported on a Schmitt quote to ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'': ::"We felt the exhilaration of discovery. We were exploring something new. But of course, there was also something scary about what we did there. We were looking in the face of these changes, and all of us were thinking of the dire consequences."

Expeditions

Schmitt is also credited with the July 2007 discovery of another of the candidates to the "northernmost island on Earth"-title, named Stray Dog West by expedition member Holly Wenger. Stray Dog West, at 83º40'30", belongs to a shifting, semi-permanent archipelago locked in the sea ice north of Peary Land in northeast Greenland, named the Stray Dog Islands. The first island of the archipelago was discovered on July 10, 1996 by Steve Gardiner and Jim Schaefer and is commonly known as the 1996 ATOW Island after the 1996 American - Top Of The World Expedition. Schmitt was the first person to climb the highest point of the Daly Range, part of the northernmost mountain chain on Earth,North America, Greenland, The Far North, Jensenland, Explorations of Most Northerly Land
/ref> as well as Alaska's

from Point Hope to the Mackenzie River, and made the first traverse of

Axel Heiberg Island Axel Heiberg Island ( iu, ᐅᒥᖕᒪᑦ ᓄᓈᑦ, ) is an uninhabited island in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada. Located in the Arctic Ocean, it is the 32nd largest island in the world and Canada's seventh largest island. Accordin ...

, northern Canada. He also crossed the sea ice of the Bering Straits to the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

, and travelled through Eskimo villages of eastern

Siberia Siberia ( ; rus, Сибирь, r=Sibir', p=sʲɪˈbʲirʲ, a=Ru-Сибирь.ogg) is an extensive geographical region, constituting all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has been a part ...

. Upon his return, the FBI detained and released Schmitt without charge.

Musical works

* ''Song Cycle I'' (Mental trash from warm bodies (plus extras)) * ''Prologue and Aurora'' (1977) * ''The Alaska Wilderness Adventure'' (1978)"The Alaska Wilderness Adventure"

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

Personal life

Schmitt speaks multiple languages, including Russian, Norwegian, Danish, and French. He lives in Berkeley and composes classical music, being credited for the soundtrack to the 1978 movie, ''The Alaska Wilderness Adventure''. Schmitt also writes

sonnet A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's inventio ...

s under the pen name D O'Farrell.

Notes

External links

*
The American Alpine Journal has many articles dating back several years on Dennis Schmitt's explorations
{{DEFAULTSORT:Schmitt, Dennis 1946 births American explorers American people of German descent Berkeley High School (Berkeley, California) alumni Living people University of California, Berkeley people