He would eventually join a team of researchers on Vancouver Island, where the distance between several mountain peaks was being resurveyed to find out whether continental drift was shoving them closer together as well. My first impression of Schmidt was that he’d rather climb a big rock pile than stand there and look at it. He’s a bearded bear of a guy who seems to have chosen the right career. In 1992 he led a team of Canadian scientists to the top of Mount Logan, Canada’s highest peak and its fastest rising mountain. Fast in geologic terms, it grows by several fractions of an inch each year. As a mountain climber, geophysicist, and surveying engineer, Schmidt wanted to establish new geodetic markers near the summit and try out some brand new and allegedly portable GPS technology, which was still in the experimental stage at the time, to trace the peak’s constant movement. Logan, which occupies a big chunk of the southwestern corner of the Yukon, is poking up and creeping horizontally for the same reason that mountains in Puget Sound near Seattle are getting squeezed together.
