Helen Schreider, intrepid world traveler, dies at 98

Boston Globe

10-03-2025

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It wasn't until 2015 — 59 years after her husband was inducted — that Helen Schreider was belatedly inducted into the Explorers Club herself, once it had dropped its gender barrier. Faanya Rose, the club's first woman president, told her: 'You went exploring knowing there was no accolade for women. It was just the pure passion and the pure curiosity.'
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Ms. Schreider, a former art student who always traveled with drawing pad and colored pencils to record her wide-ranging explorations, died Feb. 6 in Santa Rosa, Calif. She was 98.
A niece, Camille Armstrong, said the cause was a stroke.
The Schreiders — along with raft-maker Thor Heyerdahl, deep-sea mariner Jacques Piccard, and others — were part of a semi-golden era of exploration, when bold transits could still be plotted across a globe not entirely subdued by technology.
On the often harrowing trip that the Schreiders made from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, from 1954 to 1956, they navigated angry stretches of the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean to skirt roadless mountains in their amphibious jeep, which they christened La Tortuga (The Turtle) and which had a propeller and a rudder.
The journey was recounted in a book, '20,000 Miles South' (1957), with text by Frank Schreider and drawings by Helen Schreider, that was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post.
While on a US tour with footage they had shot of their trip, the Schreiders met the president of the National Geographic Society, Melville Bell Grosvenor, who hired them as a writer-photographer team. They completed six long assignments for National Geographic magazine from 1957 to 1969, beginning with a second trip by amphibious jeep along the Ganges River in India.
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They followed up with a 13-month journey through the Indonesian archipelago, which they recounted in their book "The Drums of Tonkin" (1963).
Trips by Land Rover followed: first in the Great Rift Valley of Africa and then along a 24,000-mile route from Greece to India in the footsteps of Alexander the Great.
Their last expedition, in 1969, was to map the Amazon River from its headwaters in the Peruvian Andes, which they navigated in a small boat they built themselves. Their National Geographic book 'Exploring the Amazon' (1970) made the disputed claim that the Amazon, not the Nile, is the world's longest river. (The Schreiders added the Para River in the Amazon's mouth to its overall length, although others considered the Para part of another system; most cartographers today agree that the Nile is longer.)
That same year, 1970, the couple parted ways with the magazine. They divorced a few years later and pursued individual careers.
Frank Schreider became a freelance writer and crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his 40-foot sailboat, Sassafras. He was on a lengthy cruise of the Greek islands in 1994 when he died of a heart attack at the age of 79 aboard his sloop.
Helen Schreider joined the National Park Service as a museum designer. She created exhibitions within the Statue of Liberty for the US bicentennial in 1976 and at Yellowstone National Park.
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Throughout her life, she painted portraits and landscapes in oil, inspired by her travels, which were shown in several solo exhibitions. She was included in the book "Women Photographers at National Geographic" (2000).
'She was voracious to discover the world and the beauty,' Armstrong said in an interview, adding that she always had her drawing supplies close at hand. 'She could literally with 10 swipes of the pencil get the whole drawing. She could capture the moments right as they were moving through villages.'
Helen Jane Armstrong was born May 3, 1926, in Coalinga, Calif., in the Central Valley, to Breckenridge Armstrong, who managed water districts, and Ina Bell (Brubaker) Armstrong, a farmer and artist.
She earned a bachelor of fine arts from UCLA, where she met Schreider, an engineering student. They married in 1947 while they were still undergraduates.
She is survived by a brother, Donald B. Armstrong, and her partner of 25 years, John Ryan, a retired professor of geography at the University of Winnipeg. A second marriage, to Russ Hendrickson, ended in divorce in 1983.
The Schreiders' plans for a delayed honeymoon road trip grew more and more ambitious, until Frank Schreider suggested driving all the way from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America.
Helen Schreider agreed, and the couple departed from Circle, Alaska, in the treeless tundra, on June 21, 1954. Along for the journey was their German shepherd, Dinah.
Because the Pan-American Highway had not yet been completed over some mountain ranges in Central America, the Schreiders rebuilt an amphibious Ford jeep that had been manufactured during World War II, which Frank Schreider described as a 'bathtub with wheels,' to take to the sea.
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The ungainly La Tortuga first entered the Pacific Ocean in Costa Rica in 10-foot surf, a terrifying experience for the couple that nearly ended their journey.
'La Tortuga reared like a horse, Helen grabbed for the dash, Dinah was thrown to the back, and I held grimly to the wheel,' Frank Schreider wrote in '20,000 Miles South.'
The jeep later passed through locks of the Panama Canal to the Caribbean, where the Schreiders steered south, provisioned with a month's supply of Army C-rations. They island-hopped for 250 miles, coming ashore onto pristine beaches where children covered La Tortuga in flowers.
After 30 seagoing days, they landed in Turbo, Colombia, where a customs official asked, "Is it a boat or a car?"
'It's both,' Ms. Schreider replied.
At the southernmost tip of the continent, there was a final amphibious crossing in a 10-knot current of the Strait of Magellan to Tierra del Fuego, where they completed their journey Jan. 23, 1956.
Back home in the United States, Helen Schreider told a newspaper reporter that she had been 'game for anything.'
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