“How the Thelon trip of '73 helped change my life: a personal odyssey”

METCALF, FRANK – lives in Vancouver, BC, and has been a traveller and adventurer all his life. His degrees are from Harvard, but his academic career has had little to do with his travels or photography. Serious photography came later in life, but it's now nudging Southern Appalachian fiddle-playing as Frank’s leading passion. Long ago he left English literature and New York City for six years in Yellowknife, in Canada's Northwest Territories, a move motivated by canoeing the great Barren Land rivers while doing archaeological surveys. Helping to found a Pan-Arctic folk festival led Frank to become a performer known as "Grizzly Frank, Canada's Master of Bones," which led in turn to gigs all over Canada, and to a European tour with a French-Canadian dance troupe. Music then brought him from Yellowknife to Vancouver, where he became a contra dance harmonica player and banjo player for many years before the fiddle finally claimed his soul. Frank’s life of travel has included thousands of kilometres of paddling canoes through the taiga and the Barren Lands of far northern Canada; being a rafting company naturalist on rivers as diverse as the Tatshenshini, the Chilcotin, and the Rio Grande; and working as an Appalachian Volunteer in Bloody Creek, Kentucky, where many had died in recent times but few of natural causes. Frank’s an owl caller, with a palette of seven species that I call in by voice in the beautiful Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, where he has a cabin on a bird sanctuary lake. In the last decade Frank blossomed into an amazing wild-life photographer and has been travelling all over the map, especially in South America, Africa, and Australia, shooting photos of wonderful animals.