Andy Williams is quick to deflect attention away from his contributions to scientific research in the Yukon. He'll tell a story or defer to the countless academics and researchers he's piloted around the Kluane region.

But Williams isn't your average bush pilot -- he's worked alongside dozens of highly accomplished, internationally renowned researchers, and it turns out he himself has a few peer-reviewed scientific credits to his name.

For three decades, Williams has flown throughout the St. Elias Mountains and worked for the Arctic Institute of North America at their Kluane Lake research base. In addition to managing the base and supporting the ongoing research of several universities, Williams has been the pilot of choice for most researchers conducting projects in the area.

"I started flying in the area over thirty years ago. Most of the flying back then was for scientific purposes -- glaciology, physiology, high altitude research -- so over time I got to watch the country closely."

"For a time I was flying regularly up to the high Mount Logan Camp, and that required you to be at 16,000 feet by the time you got to Mount Queen Mary. You have an absolutely splendid view of the country, and I could really see what was going on."

"You have to get comfortable with the country you're working in," adds Williams. And that means being a keen observer of the land -- or in his case, icefields -- stretched out below.

"Pilots are the same as farmers," says Williams, "We need to watch our environment constantly for our work. It's a very dynamic environment -- sometimes it changes as much between April and September as it does from year to year."

"These observations often alert scientists to interesting things."

In his early years of flying in the St. Elias Icefields, Williams noticed changes in the minor glaciers that feed into giant Hubbard Glacier.

"A glacier surge is pretty dramatic once it starts going," says Williams. "You can usually spot changes, and evidence of a surge might develop over just a couple months."

"You notice the surface starting to break up, then slumping, and earth getting churned up like a massive bulldozer along the medial moraines. And you watch your known landing sites get churned up!"

"The second time it happened was in the mid-eighties. The same sequence occurred as before, with a surging of these smaller glaciers followed by a major surge of the Hubbard."

Over the years, Williams has regularly shared his glacier observations with Keith Echelmeyer, a professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. In 2001, Williams again observed the movement of these tributary glaciers, and he predicted a surge would occur the following year.

Building on Williams' observations, Echelmeyer delivered a paper on the Hubbard to the International Glaciological Society at a June 2002 conference in Yakutat, Alaska for the aptly named International Symposium on Fast Glacier Flow. Williams was given co-authorship of the paper.

The Hubbard is a tidewater glacier. At 125 kilometres in length, it's one of the longest glaciers in the Saint Elias range. It begins near Mount Logan in the heart of the icefields and flows south past some of the range's great peaks -- Vancouver, Hubbard and Seattle -- and out to Russell Fiord in the Pacific Ocean.

Just a month after the meeting of glaciologists, the Hubbard surged across Yakutat Bay and cut off the fiord from the ocean for several weeks. Hydrostatic pressure eventually overpowered the glacier, and the rising waters of the resulting lake burst the ice dam open.

Williams points out that Echelmeyer's paper is full of algorithms and algebraic functions that make absolutely no sense to a pilot.

"But I will say I'm pretty sure I'm right in this instance," he adds.

"It's rather like traditional knowledge in a sense," notes Williams. "The proof lies in the work of these scientists, but it's these observations that lead them to their proving."

Williams has contributed to a great number of research projects through the years, and has been recognized for his observations with co-authorship before. He's also been very involved in land use planning in the Kluane region.

In September 2003, the Canadian Geographical Journal will be putting out a special issue recognizing the International Year of the Mountain. Included will be a paper titled Science and the St. Elias: An Evolving Framework for Sustainable Development in North America's Highest Mountains. Ryan Danby, David Hik, Scott Slocombe and Andrew Williams are the authors.