Alan Innes-Taylor was born at Birkhamstead, England on February 12, 1900. His family moved to the United States in 1906, and later to Ontario where he was educated. He first came to the Yukon in 1919 and joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in 1921, serving with them in the Yukon for five years. He was a purser on a steamship between Whitehorse and Dawson City. He organized the Yukon Airways and Exploration Company, which he ran until 1929 when he journeyed to New Zealand to join Admiral Byrd's Antarctic expeditions (1930 and 1935). He rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army during World War II, while retaining his Canadian citizenship. He was in command of a search and rescue station in Greenland, 1942-1943, and of Arctic Training Schools at Echo Lake, Colorado, 1943-1944, and at Chip Lake and Jasper, Alberta, 1944-1946. In 1948 he took on the task of constructing a joint Canada-US weather outpost on Isachsen Land, Ringnes Island, NWT. He then returned to the US Army as a lieutenant colonel in command of survival schools and other northern programs until about 1961. From 1957-1964 Innes-Taylor acted as Arctic Operations Consultant for several international airlines. Prior to his retirement, he served as a consultant to both the territorial and federal governments on rivers, maps and historic sites in the Yukon. He became General Manager of the 1962 Dawson City Festival Foundation and also helped to organize the Yukon Archives. He was awarded the Order of Canada in 1977 and in 1978 the Queen's Anniversary Medal. Alan Innes-Taylor died in 1983, leaving his wife Elizabeth and three children, Ranolf, Catherine and Kristin.