Body of Arctic scientist found in river where he went missing

The body of well-known Arctic scientist Craig George has been found in Alaska’s Chulitna River, confirming his death in a July 5 rafting accident, the Alaska State Troopers reported.

George, 70, was a retired senior biologist with the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management and an expert on bowhead whales. He had been rafting with companions near Cantwell, a community at the edge of Denali National Park, when he went into the water. Companions said he was knocked off his raft by a logjam, according to the Anchorage Daily News.

On Sunday, a group of rafters found George’s body about 7.5 miles downstream from the original search locations, the Troopers said. A wildlife trooper recovered the body and brought it to Fairbanks for release to a funeral home, the Trooper statement said.

George, whose full name was John Craighead George, moved in the 1970s to Utqiagvik, then known as Barrow. He was an internationally recognized scientist and a pillar of the local community.

As news of his disappearance and death spread, so have tributes to him. Ned Rozelle, a science writer for the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute, called him a “remarkable man” and reposted a 2010 article about a trip he made with George onto the ice off Point Barrow to monitor bowhead whales.

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