Miss Isobel Wylie Hutchison: daughter of Thomas Hutchison of Carlowrie in the West Lothians and of Jeanie Wylie. She never married. She frequented the Rothesay House School of Edinburgh and the Studley Horticultural College for girls. Miss Hutchison was a botanical explorer who contributed considerably to our knowledge of Arctic plants. Her first explorations began in 1927 and were carried out in west Greenland. They continued in 1928 in Umanak in north Greenland, where the explorer stayed for one year. In 1934 she left for Alaska, travelling on a steamship initially along the Vancouver coast at Skagway, and then overland up to Nome. Here she travelled on a tiny boat which took her along the north coast of Alaska where she covered 120 miles on a dog-drawn sledge. She later took a letter transport plane to Alberta. The story of this trip was later published by Miss Hutchison in 1934 entitled North to the Rime-Ringed Sun. In 1936 she returned to Alaska with a permit to visit the Aleutian isles, which she circumnavigated on the Chelan, an American coast-guard boat – she was the only woman on board. This trip was described in Stepping Stones form Alaska to Asia, which was reprinted in 1943 entitled The Aleutian Islands.
Her travel books include On Greenland’s Closed Shore, published in 1930, and Arctic Nights Entertainments. She published a novel Original Companions and four volumes of verse. The plants she brought home were given to the Royal Horticultural Society Royal Herbarium of Kew and to the British Museum (Natural History department). Her contribution to the science of horticulture was acknowledged by the University of St Andrews who presented her with an honorary degree L.L.D.
She then had a long relationship with the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, which awarded her with the Society’s Mungo Park Medal in recognition of her explorations and her original and important discoveries in Iceland, Greenland and in arctic Alaska. She held numerous conferences, showing films and slides of her trips; in particular on those she made on foot in 1959 and 1960, which she wrote about in the National Geographic.