Baird of Caithness, Scotland and was educated at Edinburgh Academy and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, graduating in Geology.
In 1939 he crossed Bylot Island and sailed in the Hudson's Bay Company ship Nascopie to join the Royal Canadian Artillery.
He achieved a measure of celebrity status in 1945/1946 when he successfully led the main party in "Exercise Muskox" on a 3400-mile expedition around the Canadian Arctic from Churchill via Victoria Island and Coppermine to the Peace River.
During his time there he organised and led two major expeditions to Baffin Island, one in 1950 to the Barnes Ice Cap region and one in 1953 to the Pangnirtung Pass and Penny Highlands area, which carried out the first glaciological investigations in the Canadian Arctic.
In 1959 he returned to Canada as director of the Gault Estate of McGill University, a 2,600-acre property at Mont-St-Hilaire, Quebec, and as supervisor of Northern Field Studies in the Department of Geography.