the explorers journalbackup.explorers.org/publications/journal/Winter2009-10 FINAL.pdf · journal...

the explorers

journal EST. 1921

the bipolar issue

winTEr 2009 /2010

k r i S T i n l a r S on Antarctic dreams: a journey into an ephemeral world

jon bo w E r m a S T E rAntarctica: exploring the white continent by kayak

n i c k Sm i T h90° north the easy way

v ol . 87 no . 4 i $ 8 . 0 0 i w w w. E x p l or E r S . org i

90 º North the e asy Waytext and images by Nick Smith, p. 24

aNtarctica : exploriNg the White coNtiNeNt by KayaK by Jon Bowermaster, images by Fiona Stewart, p. 30

a N ta rc t i c D r e a mstext and images by Kristin Larson, p. 38

a D at e W i t h V i r g i N e a r t htext and images by Mike Libecki, p. 46

t r i e s t e at 5 0Jim Clash chats with Don Walsh about his historic voyage to the bottom of the sea, p. 14

f iNDiNg saNctuary iN the pacif ictext and images by Jean Kenyon, p. 20

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the explorers journalW iN t e r 2 0 09 / 2010

the bipolar issue

When the concept of The Explorers Club first took root in 1904, the poles epitomized the expedition goal of greatest allure. A few years later, when the Club’s members and colleagues conquered these, this achievement only served to further augment the furor and enthrallment relating to these extreme destinations. Still con-sidered among the world’s most mystical and magical places, the poles represent its axis of rotation, where the Earth’s meridians meet and its time zones meld together. Today, the polar ice caps are in jeopardy, portending potential environmental imbalances and the unknown consequences that these may yield. This en-vironmental predicament has garnered the poles an even more substantial role than originally envisioned, serving to motivate exploration and field research in a manner such as never before.

What is clear from this research—much of it carried out by mem-bers of The Explorers Club—is that the extensive climatic changes that the Earth has undergone have greatly impacted overall weather and temperature conditions, abetting the extinction of numerous species of flora and fauna. As Darwin pointed out, long-term changes in atmospheric conditions can have far-reaching implica-tions. What this will mean and to what extent the current warming may be caused by human versus natural factors, in addition to what these changes will bring, are still topics of intense debate.

A warming Earth, albeit detrimental to many species, has proven beneficial to others. Impacts on fragile ecosystems, an-thropogenic effects on wilderness and the environment, research on climate change, and how this and contributors such as acid rain, PCBs, and other pollutants are affecting species and their habitats are being evaluated from the field to the bench. The increased knowledge of environmental shifts also significantly impacts resource-based activities and industries, the planning of urban areas, and the development and maintenance of infrastruc-ture, including the sourcing and sustaining of energy needs.

Today, the stakes for exploration are ever higher.

Lorie Karnath, President


president’s letter

polar impetus

For detailed information on these and other journeys contact us at:

800-856-8951Toll line: 603-756-4004 Fax: 603-756-2922

Email: [email protected] Website: www.explorers.org

The Best of IndonesiaPort Moresby to Manado

February 15–March 6, 2010 (20 days) Manado to Bali

March 2–18, 2010 (17 days)with Mike Messick (MN ‘96)

The Mighty AmazonApril 4–20, 2010 (17 days)

with Margaret Lowman (FN ‘97)Explore the heart of Amazonia on thisremarkable, 2,000-mile journey thatencompasses virtually the entire navigablelength of the River, from the Peruvianrainforest to its delta on the Atlantic Ocean,aboard the all-suite, 50-cabin Clelia II.

Highlights include the largest colony of puffinsand the first European settlement in NorthAmerica, established by Vikings some 1,000 yearsago; and Gros Morne National Park, a geologicalwonderland and UNESCO World Heritage Site,in the comfort of the all-suite, 50-cabin Clelia II.

Circumnavigation of NewfoundlandMay 29-June 7, 2010 (10 days)

with Alfred McLaren (FE ‘71 & EC Past President)

"This was the best group of lecturers I've ever had.""One of my all time favorite trips!"

"Program was very balanced and full.""Beautiful scenery - excellent lectures."

"The attention to detail was remarkable.”"The itinerary was extremely well thought out and planned.”

THE EXPLORERS CLUB TRAVELERSTM

Discover extraordinarily diverse cultures andwildlife amidst tropical islands such as NewGuinea, Ternate, Sulawesi, Komodo,Sumbawa and Bali aboard the luxurious 64-cabin expedition vessel Clipper Odyssey.

As the winter chill sets in for us in the Northern Hemisphere, the Austral summer in Antarctica is well underway with more than 1,000 researchers setting foot on the White Continent from the U.S. Antarctic Program alone—up from the average 150 who live there during the dark winter months. While each season brings new insights into the workings of Earth’s southernmost landmass, this season marks a particular milestone. For it was on November 12, 1969, that six women stepped off the ramp of a ski-equipped LC-130 Hercules, becom-ing the first to set foot onto the three-kilometer-thick ice cap at the South Pole. Much has changed in the 40 years since women researchers began working there. Just ask Kristin Larson, whose story appears on page 38. Larson has spent the better part of two decades traveling to Antarctica—at first as Winter-over for the U.S. Antarctic Program and most recently as an attorney specializing in international environmental policy. Complementing Larson’s stunning imagery, we have a report in from Jon Bowermaster, who recently wrapped up his multiyear Oceans 8 Expedition there.

Venturing to our planet’s northernmost reaches, big wall climber Mike Libecki shares with us his harrowing first ascent of Greenland’s Discovery Wall, while con-tributing editor Nick Smith reflects on a rather sublime journey to the North Pole and contemplates what the fu-ture may hold for such fragile environments with illustrious pasts. We also raise a toast to Don Walsh, who in January will mark the fiftieth anniversary of his historic dive into Challenger Deep. At some 10,924 meters (35,840 feet) it is the deepest place on Earth and a place to which no human has dared return.

This issue we offer a world of extremes. Enjoy!

angeLa M.h. SchuSter, Editor-in-Chief

a world of extremes


editor’s note

A lEoPArd sEAl bAsks in thE sunlight, oblivious to thE oCEAns 8 ExPE-dition kAyAkErs nEArby. PhotogrAPh by FionA stEwArt.

experience the thrill of

underwater flight

flight training in maui, hawaiiBegins feBruary 20101, 2, & 3-day courses

w w w.suBav iators .com | 8 88 -809 -7 948

dr. don walsh with sas flight

instructor captain alfred s.

mclaren, usn (ret.)

“As an aircraft and submersible pilot since the 1960s, I was excited to fly the Super Aviator. This is truly a new direction in submersible development.”—Don Wa L Sh

Pr e S iDen t

Lorie M.L. Karnath, MBA, Ph.D. hon.

honor a ry Pr e S iDen t

Don Walsh, Ph.D.

honor a ry D ir ec torS

Robert D. Ballard, Ph.D.George F. Bass, Ph.D.Eugenie Clark, Ph.D.Sylvia A. Earle, Ph.D.James M. FowlerCol. John H. Glenn Jr., USMC (Ret.)Gilbert M. Grosvenor Donald C. Johanson, Ph.D.Richard E. Leakey, D.Sc. Roland R. Puton Johan Reinhard, Ph.D.George B. Schaller, Ph.D.Don Walsh, Ph.D.

SPec i a L D ir ec tor

E.O. WIlson, Ph.D.

B o a r D o f D i r ec t or S

cL a S S of 2 0 10

Anne L. DoubiletWilliam S. HarteMark S. Kassner, CPADaniel A. Kobal, Ph.D. R. Scott Winters, Ph.D.

cL a S S of 2 0 11

Capt. Norman L. BakerJonathan M. ConradConstance DifedeKristin Larson, Esq.Margaret D. Lowman, Ph.D.

cL a S S of 2 0 12

Josh BernsteinJoseph G. Frey, C.D.Gary “Doc” Hermalyn, Ed.D.Lorie M.L. Karnath, MBA, Ph.D. hon. William F. Vartorella, Ph.D., C.B.C.

of f i ce r S

V ice Pr e S iDen t, ch a P t erS

Joseph G. Frey, C.D.

V i ce Pr e S iDen t, MeMBerSh iP

Daniel A. Kobal, Ph.D.

V i ce Pr e S iDen t, oPer at ionS

Col. Donald T. Morley

Vice PreSiDent, reSearch & eDucation

Julianne M. Chase, Ph.D.

t r e a Sur er

Mark S. Kassner, CPA

a S S i S ta n t t r e a Sur er

William S. Harte

Secr e ta ry

Robert M.T. Jutson, Jr.

a S S i S ta n t Secr e ta ry

Kristin Larson, Esq.

Pat ron S & S P on S or S

L e a Der of e x PL or at ion

($500,000+)Mabel Dorn Reader*

Benefac torS of e x PL or at ion

($250,000+)Richard H. Olsen*Robert H. Rose*Michael W. Thoresen

Pat ronS of e x PL or at ion

($100,000+)Daniel A. BennettDonald L. Segur

cor Por at e Pat ron of e x PL or at ion

Rolex Watch U.S.A., Inc.

corPorate SuPPorter of exPLoration

National Geographic Society

* dECEAsEd

e D i t or S

Pr e S iDen t & PuBL i Sher

Lorie M. L. Karnath, MBA, Ph.D. hon.

eD i tor - i n - ch i e f

Angela M.H. Schuster

con t r iBu t ing eD i torS

Jeff BlumenfeldJim ClashMichael J. Manyak, M.D., FACSMilbry C. PolkKristin RomeyCarl G. SchusterNick SmithLinda Frederick Yaffe

coP y ch i e f

Valerie Saint-Rossy

a r t De Pa r t Me n t

a rt D ir ec tor

Jesse Alexander

the explorers journal© (ISSN 0014-5025) is published quarterly for $29.95 by the explorers cluB, 46 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to the explorers journal , 46 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021.

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One year, $29.95; two years, $54.95; three years, $74.95; single numbers, $8.00; foreign orders, add $8.00 per year. Members of the explorers cluB receive the explorers journal as a perquisite of membership. Subscriptions should be addressed to: Subscription Services, the explorers journal , 46 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021.

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Manuscripts, books for review, and advertising inquiries should be sent to the Editor, the explorers journal , 46 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021, telephone: 212-628-8383, fax: 212-288-4449, e-mail: [email protected]. All manuscripts are subject to review. the explorers journal is not responsible for unsolic-ited materials. The views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the explorers cluB or the explorers journal .

the explorers cluB, the explorers journal , the explorers cluB travelers, world center for exploration, and The Explorers Club Flag and Seal are registered trademarks of the explorers cluB, inc., in the United States and elsewhere. All rights reserved. © The Explorers Club, 2009.


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the explorers journal

MADE FROM 15% POST-CONSUMER WASTE50% RECYCLED PAPER

All paper used to manufacture this magazine comes from well-managed sources. The printing of this magazine is FSC certified and uses vegetable-based inks.

save the date

the president, directors, and officers of the explorers cluB&

dinner co-chairs

leroy chiao fn’05 and richard garriott mn’98present

the 106th explorers cluB annual dinner

on the cusp of infinityExploring the Universes Out There

master of ceremonies dan aykroyd

award winnersdonald c. johanson, maBel purkerson, james m. chester, steven squyres

march 20, 2010 the waldorf-astoria

an “out of this world” eventticKets oN sale NoW at WWW.explorers.org

(ticKets aND seatiNg requests are oN a first come first serVeD basis.)

image courtesy Nasa / esa / hubble collect ioN

8

Eric Larsen has left for the South Pole to begin his “Save the Poles” expedition, the first ever to the North Pole, South Pole, and summit of Mt. Everest in a continuous 365-day period. His goal is to document the changes occur-ring in these last great frozen places. Larsen will also use the expedition as a platform to advocate strategies for re-ducing carbon emissions and collect scientific data.

To help tell the story, Larsen is partnering with the Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center and the Protect Our Winters Foundation. Together they will produce 12 hours of environmental awareness

curriculum for classroom use. Larsen will also team up with the Center for Biological Diversity to petition the senate and president on the need for stronger environmental leg-islation. For information and to follow Larsen’s progress: www.savethepoles.com

a N t a r c t i c a i s t h e p l a c e t o b e

education a priority

Chilean kayakers and explor-ers Cristian Donoso and Mario Sepúlveda have embarked on a 1,600-kilometer (994-mile) journey during which they plan to follow a maritime and terrestrial route from the coast

to the highest summits of the Antarctic Andes. It’s a land and sea expedition covering a never-before navigated sec-tion of the Antarctic Peninsula. “The main goal of this expedi-tion will be to alert the public about the effects of global warming on the Antarctic coast,” Donoso said.

Donoso and Sepúlveda have gained notoriety for their self-supported kayak ex-peditions across Antarctica and Patagonia, paddling wa-ters not previously plied by man. For more information: www.andesantarticos.com

e s c a p e f r o m D e a t h V a l l e y

on the trail of the lost ‘49ers

Allan Smith, a 47-year-old film producer from Lancaster, CA, is planning a solo expedition to retrace the escape route of the “Lost 49ers” out of Death Valley to Barrel Springs, near Palmdale, CA. This 30-day expedition, planned for late December, will involve a 442-kilometer (275-mile) trek on foot in the dead of winter, crossing the Mojave Desert, and into some of harshest ter-rain known to man.

Smith, president of the Los Angeles Adventurers’ Club, and member of The Explorers Club, hopes to generate awareness among schoolchil-dren and the general public about a band of pioneers who

e xplor at ion ne wsedited by Jeff BLuMenfeLD, www.expedit ionnews.com

“s av e t he pol e s” de pa r t s

Eric Larsen steps out for the environment in Antarctica

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have been all but forgotten. “This trek will highlight the tri-als and tribulations that these pioneers went through and tell people the story of Juliet Brier, who led several of the the pioneers out of Death Valley.” In the Western classic, Death Valley in ’49, William Lewis Manly, himself one of the great heroes of the West, said of Brier, “All agreed she was the best man of the party.”

Smith plans to cross the Panamint Mountain Range and China Lake Navel Weapons Base before head-ing across the Mojave Desert and into Barrel Springs where the last pioneer died after drinking copiously from the spring. The expedition will be filmed with a state-of-the-art Trius 4K/3D camera system,

one of the most advanced digital cameras in the world. For more information: Allan R. Smith, [email protected].

a c r o s s t h e W h i t e c o N t i N e N t i N s t y l e

concept vehicle off and rolling

Andrew Moon, 50, and Andrew Regan, 45, long-time fellow explorers from the Cayman Islands and Geneva respectively, have set off on the Moon-Regan TransAntarctic Expedition, a 5,556-kilometer (3,000-mile) motorized tra-verse of the White Continent using two Science Support Vehicles and a bizarre-looking Concept Ice Vehicle, a cross between a snowmobile and an ultralight airplane. Departing from Patriot Hills, they plan to

ascend nearly 3,000 meters to the Polar Plateau en route to the South Pole. From there, the team will travel north to McMurdo Station on the coast.

Whille polar researchers often rely on planes and tracked vehicles, Moon and Regan hope to demonstrate that wheeled utility vehicles powered by biofuels can provide an effective means of transport for research teams working on the ice. Developed by Lotus, the Ice Vehicle travels atop three in-dependently suspended skids and is powered by a modified, rear-mounted, bio-fueled en-gine that reduces emissions by 70 percent. It is capable of operating in temperatures as low as -72ºC (-98º F).

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following up on Franklin’s fate

A few snippets of copper may be a vital clue toward solving one of Arctic explora-tion’s most haunting myster-ies: what happened to Sir John Franklin’s two superbly equipped ships—Erebus and Terror—when he and the 150 members of his expedition perished while searching for the Northwest Passage more than 160 years ago.

Costly rescue expeditions continued for almost 20 years after his disappearance, urged on by Franklin’s formidable widow, Jane Griffin. However, evidence confirming Franklin’s death was only discovered in 1859. Dumped supplies were recovered along with personal possessions, letters describing his death and those of many of his senior officers, and finally bodies—later studies would confirm that Franklin’s men prolonged life as long as possible by resorting to can-nibalism—but his twin ships,

Erebus and the Terror, have never been located.

Now Robert Grenier, a Canadian archaeologist who has led the hunt for the ships for the past 30 years, believes he can close in on the Terror at last—if only he can borrow a Canadian government ice-breaker for next summer’s div-ing season. Analysis of sheet metal and clippings of copper, which he recovered last year from nineteenth-century Inuit summer hunting camps, have convinced him that they once formed the protective plating over the Terror’s hull and that the ship lies deep beneath the icy waters of a narrow inlet south of King William Island.

a m u N D s e N s e a r c h u N D e r W a y

vanished plane sought

Norway’s navy has headed to the Barents Sea where they will scour more than 90 square kilometers of seabed close to the island of Bjørnøya in hope of finding the missing seaplane of legendary polar

explorer Roald Amundsen, who disappeared in the vacin-ity 81 years ago.

The first explorer to navi-gate the Northwest Passage that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in 1903–1906 and the first to reach the South Pole in 1911 after an epic con-test with Englishman Robert Falcon Scott, Amundsen is, together with Fridtjof Nansen, Norway’s biggest name in polar exploration.

In 1926, Amundsen flew over the North Pole in an air-ship, the Norge, with Italian explorer Umberto Nobile and American adventurer Lincoln Ellsworth. Despite grow-ing contension with Nobile, Amundsen offered two years later to rescue him and his crew. They had flown to the pole again on the airship Italia and crash-landed on the sea ice on the way back. For the unprecedented international rescue effort, the French government made available to Amundsen a twin-engine Latham 47—at the time an ultramodern aircraft.

On June 18, 1928, around 4:00 p.m., Amundsen, Nor-wegian pilot Leif Dietrichson, and four French nationals took off from the town of Tromsø. Between 6:45 and 6:55 p.m., the crew sent a radio mes-sage, then nothing more: the seaplane and its crew disappeared, probably off of Bjørnøya, the southernmost island of the cluster that make up the Svalbard archipelago.

Since his disappearance, only a pontoon and a fuel tank from the Latham 47 have been recovered. The circumstances

10


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of the crew’s disappearance have never been established and their bodies have never been found. The Norwegian Navy vessel KNM Tyr, equipped with two underwater robots, is searching the seabed for the seaplane’s engines.

t i m e t o e a t t h e D o g s ?

a new exploration blog

Fans of exploration usu-ally can’t get their hands on enough material about the heroes of yesteryear and the modern-era adventurers and explorers who continue in their footsteps. We recently became aware of the blog Timetoeat thedogs.com—a wealth of information about

exploration and its place with-in the cultural imagination. It’s written by Michael Robinson, a historian of exploration and assistant professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. The author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006), which covers the American heyday of Arctic exploration, from 1850 to 1910, Robinson studies the role of exploration in American culture. His website contains book reviews, film reviews (in-cluding an analysis of explora-tion themes in the animated movie, Up), links to numerous exploration resources, an easy-to-read four-minute dis-sertation on Darwin, and even

a look at why expeditions fail. As for its name? In 1907,

Arctic explorer Robert Peary declared that, “man and the Eskimo dog are the only two mechanisms capable of meet-ing all the varying contingen-cies of Arctic work.” Men, he contended, were tricky mecha-nisms to control. Dogs, on the other hand, were powerful and reliable. And, of course, edible. When they broke down, they were fed to healthier dogs. And when these healthy dogs failed, or when provisions ran low, they were fed to the men. Sometimes this happened as a last resort. More often than not, however, it was a part of the plan, a calculation of food, weight, and distance, Robinson tells us.

over, under, sideways, down

“Jim, if I say ‘eject’ three times and you don’t pull this chord immediately, nothing but a smoking hole will be left in the space next to you.”

Test pilot Dave Stock is pointing to the yellow-striped ejection loop under my seat, just between my legs. Grinning, he quickly confides he wouldn’t eject his seat first (and leave that smoking hole next to me!), but he is trying to re-inforce urgency in the event that, God forbid, our Cold War-era Electric Lightning aircraft should get into trouble.

In fact, Stock goes on to tell me, I’m safer here than in a commercial jetliner precisely because of the ejection seat, which has a parachute at-tached to it. In a 747, there’s no backup if things go suddenly wrong.

While Stock is prepping me on emergency evacuation procedure, his ground crew straps me into the cramped two-seat cockpit. We are about to fly side by side to Overberg, the once-secretive South African airbase that wasn’t of-ficially on maps until the mid-1990s.

When I signed on for this, I knew it wasn’t go-ing to be first class in a Lear Jet, but emergency ejection wasn’t something I thought much about. No matter, here I am perspiring wildly, outfitted in a black flight suit, heavy boots, helmet, and oxygen mask. Is this how Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier, felt before his historic flight in 1947? We are scheduled to

break the sound barrier, too—probably go faster than Yeager—but do it in a plane built later to go much faster than Yeager’s Bell X-1.

We’ve gathered at Thunder City, the private Cape Town airbase founded in the early 1990s by entrepreneur-pilot Mike Beachy Head and co-owned by British billionaire John Caudwell. The place is famous for thrilling wealthy tourists in ex-military aircraft. A few hundred brave souls before me, many from the U.S., have tested their intestinal fortitudes in old jets, including the Strikemaster, Hawker Hunter, Buccaneer, and Electric Lightning. The most expensive flight ($17,000) is the Lightning, considered the crown jewel of the British Cold War air fleet.

Civilians can’t do these stunts in the U.S. or Western Europe; private aircraft are prohibited from breaking the sound barrier over land. That’s why the Concorde could only fly over the ocean and the main reason for its ultimate demise.

I had flown supersonic before, twice, so I’m no stranger to exotic aircraft. In 1999, Russian pilot Alexander Garnaev took me to 84,000 feet above Moscow at Mach 2.6 in a MiG-25 Foxbat, with Space Adventures. Then in 2003, on the last flight of the British Airways’ Concorde, I was served champagne and chocolates in a much more comfortable environment at 60,000 feet traveling Mach 2.

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nor as high, as the MiG or Concorde, but it will do something potentially more unsettling: rapid vertical ascent coupled with aerobatics. Because I am susceptible to motion sickness, I am particu-larly apprehensive. Stock, an ex-South African Air Force veteran with over 15,000 hours in the air, tells me that if I do get sick, just pull my oxygen mask to the side and unzip the top part of my flight suit (and vomit there). I force a weak smile.

Stock, 46, holds numerous air records, some in this very plane (registration: ZU-BEX). In 2006, he attempted to break his own dead-start-to-9,000-meter vertical climb record of 102 seconds, with Sir Richard Branson aboard, only to fall short by two seconds when an afterburner on one engine failed.

At my preflight briefing earlier, I learned that the Lightning is quite an aircraft. Built in the late 1950s/early 1960s, it can fly to more than 75,000 feet and hit Mach 2.2. But it is best known for the ability to climb vertically at an astounding 50,000 feet per minute. Less than a dozen of the original fleet of 337 built (including prototypes) are still in operation.

After a smooth takeoff we pivot to vertical then, with full afterburners, climb to 10,000 feet within seconds. I fight intense G forces and maneuver my head to the right to watch the ground below quickly recede, as if we are in a rocket. Then we do a mild roll, level off and begin a gradual climb. So far, so good.

Though Stock and I are seated next to one anoth-er under the same transparent canopy (he is on my left), we still must communicate via radio because of engine noise and our oxygen masks. At 30,000 feet, the height at which passenger jets cruise, Stock gets radio clearance and we begin to accelerate again. Supersonic speed can only be achieved up high because a sonic boom near the ground would break too many windows in Cape Town.

As the Earth and clouds continue to recede, the sensation of speed becomes hard to judge; the frame of reference is gone. When we approach the speed of sound—about 678 mph at 30,000 feet—Stock gives me the stick (since we are in a trainer, I have controls, too).

I ease it forward. The dashboard gauges and plane immediately react. When the gauge flashes Mach 1, there’s slight turbulence, then the ride be-comes incredibly smooth. I can only imagine what the sonic boom outside the aircraft sounded like.

We hold steady at Mach 1.07 most of the way to Overberg. The flight is fun, even easy—and I enjoy

a bird’s-eye view from the cockpit. I leisurely take video of the dashboard instruments and Cape Agulhas, the southern tip of Africa, clearly visible from 40,000 feet up.

Twenty minutes into our flight, we near Overberg and slow to subsonic speed. The ground is up, the sky down as Stock does another 360º roll. Then we descend rapidly and, 20 feet above the runway, I brace for landing. But we don’t land; just continue evenly above the pavement.

What happens next is somewhat of a blur. Stock suddenly pulls the aircraft up, and we go into a se-ries of gut-wrenching rolls, turns, dives, and I-don’t-know-whats. My body is wracked with 5-G jolts that alternately pin my head to my lap, then against my seatback, then back to my lap, etc.

There’s an old saying about God and riding shotgun on aerobatic flights. Your first thought is, “Oh God, I’m going to die.” Once you get sick, “Oh God, please let me die.” And, at the end of the flight, “Oh God, I’m so glad that’s over.” I can honestly tell you I experienced all three in the span of just seven minutes, the length of time the aerobatics went on, though to me it felt like hours. Stock did things in that aircraft (and to my stom-ach!) I couldn’t believe. I dry-heaved repeatedly.

Safely back on the ground, we climb from the aircraft and shake hands. I’m a bit wobbly, to say the least. Stock tells me that to qualify for the air show here he had to prove the plane, and himself, airworthy by performing a full aerobatic dress re-hearsal of tomorrow’s stunts. “You may not realize it now,” he continued with a glint in his eyes, “but in a week you’ll understand that this was a life-changing experience.”

At the time I’m sure he had no idea how that statement would play out, nor did I. I didn’t stick around for the air show. My next adventure—a 360-foot rappel off Table Mountain—was calling.

On November 15, I noticed an article in the Cape Town Sunday Times about a fatality at Overberg the previous day. A fighter jet developed problems with its hydraulics system, the lifeblood of an air-craft. Its pilot steered clear of the crowd, dumped fuel, and attempted to eject. After three tries, he said, “Ejection seat failure,” and crashed in a ball of flames. The article said an investigation had been launched into what happened with the hydraulics and why the canopy release/ejector seat failed.

The pilot was Dave Stock and the aircraft was the Lightning I had flown in only hours before.


trieste at 50Don Walsh on the ultimate

voyage to the bottom of the sea

on January 23, 1960, Don WaLSh anD the Late JacqueS

PiccarD tooK the BathyScaPhe trieSte to the DeePeSt

PLace on earth, chaLLenger DeeP at the BottoM of the

MarianaS trench, Setting a WorLD DiVing recorD of 35,840

feet BeLoW Sea LeVeL. in the haLf-century Since, no hu-

Man haS returneD to chaLLenger DeeP—the onLy foreign

ViSitorS haVe Been the unManneD roVS KaiKo anD nereuS.

Since that hiStoric DiVe, WaLSh haS Been DoWn Many

tiMeS—naMeLy in the ruSSian Mir SuBMerSiBLeS. he haS

V iSiteD the WrecKS of the titanic anD the BiSMarcK, aS

WeLL aS the atLantic ocean therMaL VentS. he WaS eVen

inVoLVeD in PLanning the 2007 ruSSian Mir DiVe to the

north PoLe fLoor. WaLSh’S Big DreaM noW, hoWeVer, iS

to go the other Way—uP. aSKeD if he WouLD taKe a coMP

triP into SuBorBitaL SPace on SPaceShiPtWo, the next

generation of PriVate SPacecraft Being BuiLt By Burt

rutan (anD MarKeteD to rich touriStS at $200,000 a PoP

By V irgin gaLactic a irWayS), he rePLieD Without heSita-

tion, “of courSe! ” are you L iStening, richarD BranSon?

on the eVe of the fiftieth anniVerSary of that faMeD

foray into the DeeP, explorers JourNal contriButing eDitor

JiM cLaSh caught uP With WaLSh, noW 78 anD a retireD

uSn caPtain Who runS internationaL MaritiMe inc. out of

MyrtLe Point, oregon, anD SerVeS aS honorary PreSiDent

of the exPLorerS cLuB. on the anniVerSary itSeLf, WaLSh

PLanS to Be in the antarctic, Where he haS a Mountain—

the WaLSh SPur near caPe haLLett—naMeD after hiM.

jim clash: Let’s begin with the months leading up to January 23, 1960. liE

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don walsh: We had been doing increasingly deeper test dives since getting to Guam in August 1959. We started in the harbor there at just 400 feet, then by November, had gotten down to 18,500 feet, and by January 24,000 feet. For the [deepest] dive, we had Trieste pulled out with a baby tug from Guam, more than 200 miles away. Our mothership was a destroyer escort. We went out with the escort for a few days before, making soundings for the deepest point. We used blocks of TNT, measuring the time from explosion until we heard the echo come back from the seafloor. So nine seconds is deeper than seven seconds, that kind of thing. Trieste was then towed out at 5 knots, because it’s pretty delicate. If they went much faster, things would start to fall off. We were able to race out in the escort at 14 knots.

jc: Tell us about the dive.dw: It was a long day. I’d guess we worked 15 hours. We started early, when the sea state was about 7, so it was bumpy. The Trieste doesn’t have a lot of free-board and floats very low in the water. Then it was just another day at the office. My office happened to be a very special place, the cabin of the Trieste. The point is that operating one of these things is a lot like flying an airplane. Whether you fly around in a short pattern, or fly to the other side of the continent, you have to pre-flight it, check off a list, take off, and get to al-titude. Then, no matter how long a distance to the end point, you have the same things with landing. A longer day just means the time between takeoff and landing is greater. In the Guam harbor, we had to do all the same things as at Challenger Deep, but the harbor dive was only to 400 feet, a few minutes. Our big dive lasted nine hours!

jc: What did you see on the way down?dw: It’s absolute darkness with lots of critters out there—invertebrates. How do I know that? Many are bioluminescent. They generate light for feed-ing. So there was that light show outside. And we just kept going down. We knew somewhere around 36,000 feet we would find bottom and, when we finally did, the depth gauge read some 37,800 feet. We thought, “Wow, we’ve really found something no one else knows about.” Turns

out we had calibrated the depth gauge in fresh-water, and the difference in density between salt and freshwater made that [gauge discrepancy]. Anyway, it was a bit of a thrill!

jc: Describe the bottom.dw: It was yellowish-white and didn’t look quite like sediments we had seen before. It’s diatomaceous ooze, the skeletons of diatoms. Because calcare-ous ooze is shells of small critters in the sea, and calcium-based, it dissolves at great depths. So we were left with bottom sediment inert to pres-sure—just little balls of glass, if you look at them microscopically. To me, it was like being in a big bowl of milk. We couldn’t really feel the bottom,

but we did see it coming up. Once we landed, the bottom sediment stirred up this big cloud. That normally happens on dives, so we weren’t surprised. But usually by the time we tidy up everything and get out the cameras, the cloud drifts away. In this case, it never did, so we didn’t get any clear pictures of the deepest part of the ocean.

jc: How long did you stay there?dw: Forty minutes. It became apparent that the cloud wouldn’t go away for a long time, and we had to get back to the surface to hook the tow to the tugboat in daylight because it’s pretty hazard-ous. It requires somebody to lean down in front of Trieste and pick up a towing wire, the other end of which is connected to a 1,200-ton, seagoing tug—a good way to lose a hand. Plus conditions had moved up to sea state 8. It was January too, so even at that tropical latitude, days are shorter.

jc: Before you were in the milky ooze, encounter anything alive down there?dw: Just before we landed, a flat fish was seen—like a sole or miniature halibut. Now that’s important because it’s a fairly high-order marine vertebrate and, because of the nature of the fish, it is a bottom-dweller. It isn’t just something that had swum down there to rest. It’s something that lives there. So if you see one, there are more. Now that’s been a matter of controversy. Many people told us we didn’t see it. The first to get pictures at that depth were the Japanese with ROV Kaiko—its


t h e D e e p e s t p l a c e o N e a r t h

ar tist David Batson’s depiction of the Bathyscaphe trieste “‘ touching down” on the floor of challenger Deep, 35,840 feet below the sur face. image © exploretheabyss.com

name is Japanese for “trench.” They were able to park it for a while and, sure enough, the cloud did go away eventually. We knew it would, too. But the current at the deepest place is very subtle and wasn’t going to make a lot of difference for the amount of time we could spend there. Kaiko did get pictures of critters, but no one apparently has seen that elusive flatfish.

jc: Being first to go so deep, were you worried about the enormous pressure crushing Trieste?dw: No, it was well engineered and tested before-hand. Old man [Auguste] Piccard did scale model tests of the hull, and it was actually good for 50,000 feet. So we were prepared for a lot greater depth, had a pretty good safety factor built in.

jc: Are you surprised that no human has returned to Challenger Deep since your dive?dw: Actually, yes. When Jacques and I surfaced that January day, we thought it might be a year or two before there would be other expeditions exploring the deepest place on Earth. But it just didn’t happen.

jc: You’re not worried about your record falling?dw: Only if somebody gets to a point 10 to 20 meters deeper—or unless somebody goes faster. If you go faster, you’ll bury yourself deeper in the bottom sediment. It’s not like quicksand, and we’d done it before with dives in other places where mud is up to your view-port and you have to work yourself out of it. Our dive was not re-ally about making a record. Anybody who thinks that doesn’t understand what we were trying to do. Oceanographers are a pretty conservative bunch. Like most scientists, they’re not too keen on getting into some strange contraption wearing red berets and suits of lights with the American flag on one side and patches all over it. That’s all

machismo, bravo-bravo stuff. Most want to use these things as a platform, a tool for their work. They don’t want adventure. So what better way than to take one of only two such craft in the world to a record depth to get people interested. Our max-depth dive was to prove the reliability of the platform in the deepest place—now let’s fill the depths in between.

jc: Feel any terror down there?dw: Every day in the office was a challenge. But terrifying is putting too strong a point on it. I had been in submarines for years before that. You

can drown in a bath-tub. Depth really is irrelevant unless you’re a scuba diver and have to worry about decompression. But in enclosed environments like submarines and submersibles, you have to be a person who doesn’t have claustro-phobic feelings and be able to understand what you’re doing. There is risk in all of it. What you work on is the skill/luck ratio, and hope that skill is more than 50 percent. Frightened or terrified, nah, none of that.

jc: In 2007, the Russians sent a Mir submersible to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and claimed to be first to the “true North Pole.”dw: You have to get a good geographer to define North Pole. It is just the axis that goes to the cen-ter of our Earth. It’s got a south and north end but where are you, on the outer skin of the planet or somewhere in space? I’ve never troubled myself to find out what that means. But the dive to the real North Pole was a nice hook. What if [Robert] Peary and the others were walking around on frozen water at the North Geographic Pole, but actually it is the floor of the Arctic Ocean 14,500 feet below the ice surface? Maybe that’s splitting hairs. But when you’re trying to get attention and raise financing, it’s a good device. And it may be th

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true. It certainly was an achievement, but to com-pare it to man landing on the Moon and things like that, it’s a bit over the top. Their PR machine ran overtime on that one!

jc: You’ve been down in the Mirs yourself, to see Titanic. What’s that like?dw: I like to say Russian Mir pilots have spent more time on Titanic than Capt. [Edward John] Smith. Smith was on it what, 48 to 51 hours? These pi-lots have done 100 dives. Usually the dive lasts 9 to 12 hours, with five hours spent at the wreck, so that’s 500 hours right there. To me, the dive was quite interesting. The Russians really know where everything is. You want to see the champagne cel-lar, well, that’s over here. The kitchen galley with pots, pans, crockery? That’s over there. Personal goods, shoes and so on, that’s in this area. These guys can really whip around on the seafloor, so people going on the later trips get a real benefit because the Russian pilots don’t waste time. The thing is falling apart rapidly, though. I think Bob Ballard wants to blame it on tourists, but nature is doing quite a job on it.

jc: How did you feel when your partner Jacques’ son, Bertrand, became first to circumnavigate Earth nonstop in 2000 in the Breitling Orbiter balloon?dw: I’ve known Bertrand since he was two. I’m kind of an extended family member. I was happy for him, to say the least. I was the one who nominated the Piccards for the Explorers Medal (2001). In the history of exploration, I can’t think of another family where you’ve had three generations doing world-record things. [Jacques’ father] Auguste went up to 70,000 feet in a balloon in 1930, a time when prevailing wisdom in the medical community was that above 20,000 feet you surely would die. There was Jacques, of course, with me in Trieste, and then Bertrand. By the way, Bertrand is build-ing a solar-powered airplane to navigate the world nonstop at an airfield near Zurich.

jc: Where will the next great ocean discoveries be made?dw: The more we look, the more we see, and be prepared for the unexpected—and the ability to be surprised. That’s one problem with unmanned vehicles. As Roger Revelle once said, “You can’t surprise an instrument.” There’s always going to

be a need for man, even though the ROV systems are much cheaper. You probably know why most submersibles’ maximum range is 20,000 feet? At that depth, you can see 97 percent of the seafloor. That means only 3 percent is between 20,000 and 36,000 feet. If you’re a bean counter and engineer, it’s easy to see why you’d design something for two-thirds the depth capability at less cost and get a 97 percent on return, if you will. I do believe there’s a need for maximum depth exploration systems to cover that 3 percent. As Sylvia Earle has said, that 3 percent is equal to the area of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, and half of Mexico. It’s a big number.

jc: What’s left on your “bucket list”?dw: As I told former President Clinton, I want to go into space. They had an event at the White House celebrating explorers. I was sitting next to Bob Ballard, Sylvia Earle, and Buzz Aldrin—all the usual suspects. Clinton asked some of us to stand up. Since I was in the front row, he said to me, “You look like you’re ready to go again.” I said, “Mr. President, I’d rather go to space next time.” He forced a weak smile and went on to something else.

jc: What do you remember most, 50 years later, about being on the bottom?dw: A sense of accomplishment. That was the sum of all our feelings. We told our seniors in the Navy—and to some extent, the world—that this was what we were going to do, and we went out and did it—and with a very small team of 14 people. We put the whole thing together, and planned and executed it with U.S. Navy funding. There was a great sense of satisfaction because here I am, sole representative of those 14 people, sitting on the bottom of the ocean with a reasonable expec-tation of getting back up. “Well, guys, we did it, and I am here to tell you that.”

jc: Anything else you want to add?dw: I’m sure you wanted more, “And there I was upside down, 10,000 feet, my seatbelt broken, and my parachute isn’t on,” and all that stuff. Our dive wasn’t a search for press or fame. We had a job to do, and we were successful. It set in mo-tion a lot of things that came about over the years. More than 250 manned submersibles were built after Trieste. It’s all part of the tool kit of oceanog-raphers working the deep sea.


finding sanctuary in the

pa c i f i c

In January 2009, former U.S. President George W. Bush designated three remote Pacific Island areas as national monu-ments, protecting them from energy extraction and commer-cial fishing. It was an important move for conservation. The pro-tected areas, which represent the largest marine conservation effort in history, extend nearly 100 kilometers (50 nautical miles) off the coral reefs and atolls within the three monuments, totaling more than 500,000 square kilometers (195,280 square miles). Each

location harbors unique species and some of the world’s rarest geological formations, from a bird that incubates its eggs in the heat of underwater volca-noes to pools of boiling sulfur. At a White House ceremony, Bush stated, “For seabirds and marine life, they will be sanc-tuaries to grow and thrive. For scientists, they will be places to extend the frontiers of discovery.

And for the American people, they will be places that honor our duty to be good stewards of the Almighty’s creation.” di

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Located within the territory of American Samoa, Rose Atoll Marine National Monument protects the lands and water of Rose Atoll, the world’s smallest coral atoll and one of the most remote. A striking feature of Rose Atoll is the pink hue of the fringing reef, caused by the dominance of elabo-rate formations of crustose coralline algae that are the primary reef-building agents in shallow waters. Despite its small size, Rose Atoll supports the largest populations of giant clams, nesting sea turtles, nesting seabirds, and rare species of reef fish in the territory of American Samoa. The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument includes seven atolls and islands scattered throughout the central Pacific that are farther from human population centers than any other U.S. area: Johnston Atoll; Howland, Baker, and Jarvis Islands; Kingman Reef; Palmyra Atoll; and Wake Island. They represent one of the last frontiers and havens for wildlife in the world, and comprise the most widespread collection of protected areas for coral reefs, seabirds, and shorebird under a single nation’s jurisdiction on the planet.

The Marianas Trench Marine National Monument in the western Pacific consists of three units. The Islands Unit includes the coral reef eco-system of the three northernmost islands of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands: Farallon de Pajaros, Maug, and Asunción. The second unit is the Marianas Trench, the site of Challenger Deep, the deepest place on Earth. It is approximately 1,740 kilometers (940 nautical miles) long and 70 kilometers (38 miles) wide and lies within the Exclusive Economic Zone of the United States. The Volcanic Unit is a series of 21 active hydrothermal submarine volcanoes and vents that support unusual life-forms in conditions of extreme heat and acidity. The for-mer president’s actions build on his designation in June 2006 of the 362,000-square-kilometer Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, a portion of the Hawaiian Archipelago that extends more than 2,222 kilometers (1,200 miles) from the populated main Hawaiian Islands to Kure Atoll, the northernmost atoll in the world.

As a marine ecologist working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Ecosystem Division based in Honolulu, Hawaii, I have been privileged over the past eight years to conduct more than 500 scientific SCUBA

dives on the reefs encompassed within these four U.S. marine national monuments. While my particular specialty is corals, I work with a multi-disciplinary team of other biologists, oceanogra-phers, ocean engineers, mapping specialists, and data managers to establish baseline integrated ecosystem assessments and conduct long-term monitoring at more than 50 islands, atolls, and reefs throughout the U.S. Pacific. Our goal is to provide sound scientific data that increase un-derstanding of processes on coral reefs that are relevant to developing sound management strate-gies at local, regional, and global scales.

Our field surveys, conducted at annual or bien-nial intervals, have increased our knowledge of the biological composition and ecological processes characterizing these remote reefs, most of which had received little in situ investigation prior to our studies. In the early years of our program, virtually every dive was at a site that had never been seen by human eyes before.

Our surveys have substantially increased awareness of the diversity of scleractinian (hard) corals in numerous remote locations throughout the U.S. Pacific, including the four new marine national monuments. We have documented at least 103 new coral records at Rose Atoll, where few surveys had been conducted. At Baker, Howland, Jarvis, Palmyra, Kingman, Wake, and the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, coral species records have increased at least 36 percent, 72 percent, 26 percent, 63 percent, 52 percent, 104 percent, and 160 percent, respectively, relative to records existing before our surveys. Optical habitat mapping surveys have revealed meso-photic coral ecosystems occurring at intermedi-ate depths of 30 to more than 150 meters in the Hawaiian and Mariana Archipelago, American Samoa, and the Pacific Remote Island areas. With high abundance and biodiversity of reef re-sources, these mesophotic coral ecosystems may serve as refugia for shallow-water reef organisms as they increasingly become more affected by hu-man activities and ocean warming.

Similar to corals, limited lists of algal species existed for the majority of coral reef ecosystems of the U.S. Pacific before our surveys. Knowledge of algal biodiversity has increased from 90 to 327 species in the northern Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, from 20 to 104 at Howland and Baker Islands, from 0 to 115 at


Jarvis Island and Kingman Reef, from 40 to 121 at Wake Atoll, from 104 to 184 at Johnston Atoll, and from 41 to 157 at French Frigate Shoals in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Moreover, contrary to many stereotypes about healthy coral reef ecosystems being dominated by corals, many near pristine reefs of the U.S. Pacific contain mac-roalgal populations that cover as much substrate as coral does. These native macroalgal popula-tions play an important role as a food source, and macroalgal meadows may provide critical habitat for juvenile fish and invertebrate populations. When implementing ecosystem approaches to management, these algal-rich habitats need to be included for effective conservation.

Our program’s surveys of coral reef fish popu-lations suggest potential overexploitation of this resource. Comparative analyses throughout the U.S. Pacific show a strong decreasing trend in fish abundance from remote to populated islands. Fish biomass density is more than 260 percent greater in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands than in the urbanized main Hawaiian Islands; more than half of the total fish biomass in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands consists of apex predators (mainly sharks and jacks), whereas this trophic level accounts for less than 3 percent of the fish biomass in the main Hawaiian Islands. Similarly, the coral reef ecosystems within the Islands Unit of the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument have high numbers of apex fish predators, greater than anywhere else along the Mariana Archipelago. These northern islands also have the highest biomass of large fish in the Mariana Islands. The rare bumphead parrotfish, the largest parrotfish species, thrives in these waters and at Wake Atoll, but has been depleted throughout much of its range and is included on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

When I meet new people and tell them about my work, their first question is often, “How are the reefs doing?” My report card is a mixed one. Even these remote locations, so distant from popula-tion centers, have suffered from the far-reaching effects of human carelessness and lack of fore-sight. At Rose Atoll, iron leaching from the metallic debris of a Taiwanese long-line fishing vessel that went aground in 1993 triggered a bloom of cya-nobacteria (commonly though erroneously called blue-green algae) that has spread over the years from the grounding site along an extensive area of

the outer reef, killing corals and the rose-colored coralline algae for which the atoll is named. The fish fauna, characterized in undamaged parts of the outer reef by a trophic pyramid of herbivores, planktivores, piscivores, and apex predators, has subsequently become dominated by large schools of grazing herbivores. At Wake Atoll, cyanobacteria similarly flourish around the metal-lic remains of a shipwreck, and unexploded ord-nance poses a hazard to divers. At Johnston Atoll, the site of a chemical munitions disposal facility until 2000, many large, old colonies of table coral that provided shelter and food for butterflyfish and other reef fishes have succumbed in the past few years to a wasting disease of unknown etiology. At Palmyra Atoll, World War II-era military con-struction destroyed lagoonal coral communities, which have failed to recover in the subsequent 70 years. In the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, derelict fishing gear, much of it originating from north Pacific fisheries and driven south by prevail-ing oceanographic currents, entangles sea turtles and endangered endemic Hawaiian Monk seals, and destroys corals. Two episodes of mass coral bleaching in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, in 2002 and 2004, were triggered by prolonged periods of elevated sea surface temperature, which in turn may be linked to the hovering specter of climate change. Despite these and other human threats, the reef ecosystems now contained within these four new marine national monuments remain the most pristine to be found within U.S. waters. In a world of shifting baselines, they provide us with a reminder of how reefs should look and function and, as natural reservoirs of biodiversity, they improve the planet’s resilience to climate change. From these protected waters we can gain knowledge that can be applied elsewhere to im-prove coral reef management in more populated areas. Thanks to this unprecedented conservation achievement, future generations of marine explor-ers will have the opportunity to unravel the tangled mysteries of nature in the midst of the Pacific.

b i o g r a p h y

a fellow of the explorers club since 2007 and the author of more than two dozen scientific publications on coral reefs, Jean Kenyon, Ph.D., has been a lecturer, naturalist, and dive guide on expedition travel cruises throughout the caribbean, Pacific, and indian oceans and to antarctica, including several hosted by the explorers club.gi

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For more than a decade I’ve been writing about North Pole affairs, the history of the region’s exploration, its climate, ice cover, and biodiversity. And although I’ve interviewed climatologists, photographers, conservationists, and sea captains, the people associated with the pole that I’ve enjoyed listening to most are those explorers who have traveled in the region on foot. These are the people who seem to instinctively understand the big picture, the people with ice in their blood. I’ve learned much about the Arctic from classic explorers such as the late, great

Wally Herbert to today’s nota-bles, including Pen Hadow. Over the years I’ve become fascinated by what draws human beings to this desolate frozen desert at the end of the Earth, but never once thought I’d go there myself.

Before the twentieth century, no one had even seen the North Pole, much less set foot on it. We know that a century ago—in 1909—U.S.

naval Commander Robert E. Peary and his col-league Matthew Henson might have gotten there on foot with a team of dogs. Peary certainly be-lieved he’d achieved his goal, but some commen-tators think he may have fallen short by as much as 100 kilometers. Richard Byrd may or may not have reached 90º North in an airplane in 1926. In 1948, Russian Alexandr Kuznetsov set off under the instructions of Joseph Stalin to fly north for scientific and strategic purposes, and in so doing became the first person to undisputedly set foot A

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on the pole. In 1968, Ralph Plaisted reached it from Canada by a combination of snow scooter and air. In 1969, Briton Wally Herbert broke new ground, and his arrival at the North Pole by dog-sledge was the crowning moment of one of the greatest ice journeys of the century.

Since these landmark expeditions, there have been many successful arrivals at the pole by fixed-wing aircraft, helicopter, and even parachute; by surface traverse, whether complete, one way, or partial; by submarine (USS Skate was the first in 1959) or surface vessel. Of these, the first was the Soviet icebreaker Arktika, which reached the pole on August 17, 1977. Since then, there have been 65 Soviet or Russian voyages to the pole, of which 64 have been in nuclear-powered ships. Twelve other icebreakers from five nations have made token expeditions to the top of the world, but the Russians are the experts.

The reason for this, according to Captain Dmitry Lobusov of the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker 50 Years of Victory, is simply that there is a need. Of those countries with extensive Arctic Ocean shorelines, only Russia relies on the com-mercial transportation of goods through the sea ice. “We have a very vast country from west to east and there is need to carry cargo by sea and so we need an ice fleet.” Lobusov explained how the development of nuclear technology has led to icebreakers of increasing power and range, with the ability to remain at sea for long periods without refueling. In the Arctic summer, when the atomic fleet is less in demand for keeping commercial seaways open, the 50 Years of Victory becomes available to adventure tourism companies such as Quark Expeditions, which commissions the ship in order to make the armchair explorer’s dream of going to the North Pole a reality.

I joined the Victory at Murmansk on the extreme northwest of Russia, on Kola Bay. Way inside the Arctic Circle, the world’s northernmost city consists almost entirely of glum Communist tene-ments hastily thrown up after the Second World War. After near annihilation by the Germans, who had an airbase only eight minutes away, Murmansk was designated one of only 12 “hero cities” in Russia. In 1943, Harper’s published an article about Murmansk by Dave Marlow, called “How It Looked to a Merchant Seaman,” in which he quotes a Scots-Canadian mess-man saying, “They’ve took a beating here.” The mosquitoes are

like flying fortresses and the only dabs of color are the buttercups and dandelions that seem to grow everywhere in Murmansk.

We sailed for a week via Franz Josef Land, the northernmost Russian archipelago, and landed at Cape Tegetthof, where we saw the wind-blasted remains of explorers’ huts. Then to Cape Fligley on Rudolf Island, from which Kuznetsov departed on his successful flight to the pole. We saw polar bears, kittiwakes, walruses, ivory gulls, and memo-rials to dead explorers. As we reached the higher latitudes, we navigated through the last of the open water before crunching our way through the pack ice that got denser and denser as we approached the pole. Were there any ice conditions that the Victory couldn’t negotiate, I asked the captain through his interpreter Irena. “No!” was the reply.

When I set foot on the ice at the North Pole, I was the 22,500th person to do so, give or take a small margin for error created by the possibility of unrecorded military expeditions reaching 90º North. The pole is, of course, an imaginary place, a point on a grid of invented geometry, that in real-ity is no more or less impressive than a thin mem-brane of ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean. The ice that is here today is not the ice that was here yesterday or will be here tomorrow. There is no marker other than one you may bring yourself, and the sapphire blue pools of water that lie on the surface of the multiyear ice here are just as beautiful here as they are at 89°N.

In his poem “Burnt Norton,” T. S. Eliot wrote of what he called “the still point of the turning world.” At the Earth’s “axle-tree,” he imagines the past and future to coalesce in a place where the spiritual and terrestrial worlds meet. And although it may be too fanciful to say that to stand at the pole is to stand with one foot in another world, if you look directly upward along the Earth’s axis, you will come to Polaris, the North Star, the so-called celestial pole. Look down and, after a couple of meters of sea ice, there are 4,000 meters of sea beneath your feet. Then, after 14,000 kilometers of planetary mass, you will reach sea level at the South Pole, after which there are another few hundred meters of rock, followed by 2,835 meters of ice. If you have managed to maintain a straight line down through the globe, you will end up almost in the middle of the geodesic dome of the Amundsen-Scott Science Research Base at the South Pole.

The significance of the intersection of all lines


b r e a K i N g t h e i c e

the russian nuclear icebreaker 50 years of Victory parked in a pan of multiyear ice at a ceremonial nor th Pole close to 90º nor th.

of longitude depends as much on who you are and how you got there as anything else. I arrived at 11:57 p.m. on July 15, 2009, sitting in the bridge bar of the world’s largest nuclear-powered ice-breaker, with a glass of ice-cold Russian vodka in my hand. Something like a hundred passengers from 24 countries had gathered below me on the bow deck in the bright midnight sun to wander around with their global positioning systems, anx-ious to be the first to claim that theirs read “90°N” exactly. Of course, any such claims were irrelevant because the icebreaker was only at the pole when the Captain said so, and his GPS on the bridge was the only one that mattered.

As champagne corks popped, we cheered and congratulated each other on our passive achieve-ment, as if we’d arrived on skis after weeks of doing battle with pressure ridges, half-starved, frostbitten, and with exhausted dogs. A ringed seal popped its head out of a channel of inky black

water to see what the commotion was about and to find out what was breaking the rhythm of the creaking ice. There were no birds and despite the razzmatazz that goes with this extraordinary ad-venture tourism, it was possible to detect some-thing of the deep primal spirituality that has lured the great explorers of the past to this pinprick of nothingness in the middle of nowhere.

Accounts by explorers who arrive on foot after weeks of man-hauling sledges over pressure ridges vary wildly on how time at the pole is spent. Some scrape together the last of their tobacco and alcohol for an all too brief party, while others become stranded while waiting for the Twin Otter to get in to pick them up. Tom Avery describes how, in 2005, he arrived at the pole with four other humans and 16 dogs only to see an immaculately dressed woman step off a helicopter with a bottle of champagne. She was leading a small group of tourists who had flown to the pole (presumably

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from an icebreaker) on a once-in-a-lifetime ulti-mate tourist experience, as marketed by high-end adventure travel companies.

The jury will probably remain out forever on whether tourists should be allowed to travel to ecologically sensitive destinations such as the higher latitudes of the polar regions. The prevail-ing sentiment on the 50 Years of Victory was that—provided the operator transacted its busi-ness responsibly—the environment came first and we didn’t cause any unnecessary stress to the wildlife. That being the case, we not only had a right to enter this pristine world, but we had the opportunity to come home as ambassadors, to write articles, and tell our friends exactly what it is we’re supposed to be protecting.

As we returned from the pole, the sense of an-ticlimax was inevitable, but on July 20, I reminded some of my fellow travelers that we should cel-ebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11

lunar landing. After all, we had more in common with one of the astronauts than most of us might have suspected. In 1998, Buzz Aldrin traveled to the North Pole on a Russian nuclear icebreaker. He too went with Quark, only he sailed on the Sovetsky Soyuz, on a trip organized by The Explorers Club and headed by Mike McDowell and its former president, Alfred S. McLaren. Aldrin’s experiences were remarkably similar to ours aboard the Victory, and indeed, “except for comments about the cold, I never heard a negative word.” While at sea, Buzz spent much of his time skipping lectures and designing a new rocket on the ship’s stationery, and like me he kept a journal. “There’s something about being at the top of the world that’s exhilarating,” Buzz told me recently. “We set up a baseball diamond and played a game of softball at the North Pole, and a group of younger passengers even took an extremely brief swim. The adventure was priceless.” to

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a n ta r c t i c aexploring the White Continent by kayak

The Antarctic affects our lives through forces so deep and elemental that we are not even aware of them. Each Austral winter, a halo of sea ice forms around the White Continent, and each spring trillions of tons of freshwater are released into the world’s ocean as it thaws. Because Antarctica is essentially uninhabited and without industry—save for a few research stations—any ecological and climate distur-bances there are wrought by global forces. More than two decades ago, scientists prophesied that one of the first signs of human-influenced climate change would be the collapse of the Antarctic Peninsula’s ice sheets. Today, this is precisely

what is happening. For the past decade I’ve

been circling the world by kayak, one continent at a time, looking at both the health of the world’s seas and the lives of people who depend on them. I knew I would com-plete my OCEANS 8 project in Antarctica, along its 1,111- kilometer-long peninsula.

Some of you may ask, “Why Antarctica? Isn’t its story well known? What more is there

to learn?” The reality is that as the ice along the Antarctic Peninsula changes—and it is changing fast due to record warming temperatures—it af-fects the climate and weather of the entire planet, as well as the condition of our one big ocean. An

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Our plan was straightforward: Get as far south as possible—by kayak, sailboat, and on foot—until the ice stopped us, to see firsthand just how the ice is changing and what the impact of humanity is on this fragile landscape.

For this six-week expedition, on which we are carrying Explorer’s Club Flag #51, I am joined by an experienced international team of seven: New Zealander Graham Charles, who’s spent more time in a kayak in Antarctica than any person alive; Chilean Rodrigo Jordan, who’s climbed Everest (twice) and K2, and runs the South American equivalent of Outward Bound; Tasmanian natural-ist Fiona Stewart; round-the-world sailing cham-pion Skip Novak; and a trio of longtime OCEANS 8 team members—Orange County-based lawyer and navigator Sean Farrell, photographer Peter McBride, and filmmaker John Armstrong. As ex-perienced adventurers and storytellers, we had a common goal to bring back a record of the penin-sula today that will stand for many years to come, in words, photographs, and video.

We will be traveling there by boat, though not the standard cruise version but a private, ice-ready yacht. While it would have been easier (and far less expensive) to travel on one of the 30 cruise boats that prowl the peninsula each Austral summer, the Antarctic Treaty, which governs activities on the continent, requires that any pri-vate expedition that gains approval from its home country must be responsible for its own search and rescue. Further permits were required from the U.S. State Department, the National Science Foundation, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Collectively, these agencies make it dif-ficult to arrange a private adventure here, and for good reason. Antarctica is one of the last places on the planet one would want to find oneself in trouble.

After a rather calm five-day crossing of the Drake Passage aboard Skip Novak’s 74-foot Pelagic Australis, we take our first paddle strokes on a grey day, circumnavigating Enterprise Island about 275 kilometers down the west coast of the peninsula. It is a relief to be off the Australis and tucked snuggly into our kayaks. The sea is calm as we pull around the first corner to find the chan-nel leading out to the Gerlache Strait, which is chocked with icebergs. Near shore we work the kayaks through thick brash ice; it’s like paddling through a field of bucket-size ice cubes. Big,

spectacularly blue icebergs, temporarily ground-ed in their journey out to sea, stud the heart of the channel. While the sky above is clear and windless, the far horizon is dark and foreboding. A snowstorm is on its way.

Rodrigo nervously pulls alongside my boat. Although he has traveled in Antarctica—hav-ing pulled heavily laden sleds through the Thiel Mountains deep in the continent’s interior a few years back—he has spent relatively little time trav-eling by sea, especially in a small boat, and is a bit apprehensive about this kind of travel. I assure him that although we are separated from the cold ocean by just millimeters of kevlar, fiberglass, and carbon fiber, we’ll be fine. Collectively, we have dozens of years of experience and will stick to-gether, just in case. I tell him that the beauty of traveling by kayak, especially here in this over-sized, ice-chocked place, is in the independence it allows and the feeling of aloneness it offers, which is why virtually every cruise boat coming to Antarctica now carries a few kayaks on board.

He nods in agreement, but I’m not sure he’s completely convinced. “What happens, huevón, if you end up swimming for your life in this cold water?” he asks me. “Are you still going to feel so thankful for your ‘independence’?”

“If that should happen, my friend, and I’m convinced it will not,” I tell him, “my only counsel is don’t let go of your boat…and be glad you’ve already lived a full life.”

We spend our days coming and going from the Australis—camping, climbing, exploring by kayak and on foot. Ten days into our expedition, we pull our kayaks up onto Peterman Island about 500 kilometers south of the peninsula’s tip, where we’ve spied a big yellow tent. This modest shelter is the base of operations for biologist Melissa Rider, who has spent the past five summers here monitoring wildlife, along with two colleagues from the Washington, D.C.-based environmental group, Oceanites. While temperatures have been relative-ly warm—30ºs during the day, teens at night—we’ve paddled through some heavy rains, which have turned the ice and snow along the coast to slush.

Upon our arrival, Rider crawls out of her tent under a light snowfall. Pulling up the hood of her red parka, she motions to follow her alongside a penguin trail etched deep into the snow, for one of her thrice-daily countings of the Adelie and Gentoo penguins and blue-eyed cormorants that


nest here. According to Rider, it is clear from her data that Adelies on Peterman are disappearing.

“French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot was here 100 years ago and photographed the island covered with penguins,” says Rider as we walk along the trail, “so we know exactly how much things have changed. In the past five years, the Adelie population has declined dramatically.”

“Dying?” I ask. “Not necessarily,” she says, “they may just be moving further south. They are a cold-loving bird and are having a hard time ‘making a living’ here, which means building nests, having chicks, and feeding them. It has simply gotten too warm for them, which I can’t believe I’m saying since it is Antarctica. What we don’t know is where they are going. Unfortunately, there aren’t many scien-tists working south of here to monitor them.”

“I was surprised when I started coming here four years ago; I had worked previously in other, colder parts of Antarctica. One hour after the first time I arrived, it started to rain and didn’t stop for 14 days. I was shocked. All this warming means that just since last year we’ve lost 20 percent of the Adelie population on Peterman. If the trend continues, the island will be devoid of them by 2020.”

More than a week after leaving Peterman Island, we have paddled our way to a small archipelago known as the Fish Islands, where we make camp. The following morning, I wake to frost covering the inside of our tent wall; snow has replaced the rain and sleet we’ve endured for the past week. I peek out our big two-man tent and the kayak anchoring it is sheathed in ice. We hoped to climb nearby Sharp Peak today, which looms 1,200 meters above our camp. Instead, it looks like we may be stuck in our tents, picking lint out of our Velcro. Another downside to all the rain is that it’s far too wet and slushy for safe climbing.

In the late morning, Rodrigo and I hike to the top of a 150-meter ridge to scout the terrain. A wet snow is falling and we sink into soft, knee-deep snow. We carry a crevasse probe for the dim light makes cracks in the surface difficult to see. From the top of the slope, Sharp Peak fades in and out of cloud cover. Although Rodrigo can visualize the route to the top, he is not optimistic about our chances of getting there.

“In a perfect world we would make a second camp just beneath that col,” he shouts over the wind, pointing to exposed rock just below the peak. “But this is not a perfect world. It’s going to take us

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r i p p l e s i N t h e W a t e r

in antarctica, the most powerful sounds are the plop-plop-plopping of porpoising penguins all around and the drip-drip-drip of melting ice.

b l u e s K i e s

We had a nine-day stretch of incredible, blue-sky weather, with temperatures climbing into the 40ºs f— increasingly common at the height of summer along the peninsula. the weather is good for paddlers but bad for antarctic ice.

ages to cross that stuff; we certainly can’t attempt it today, too dangerous. We need to wait for a clear day; we need to be able to see. Of course, on a sunny day the snow will get even softer. If we are to climb that we’ll need to stay at least a week.”

As we walk back downhill, a giant glacier calves with a thundering roar, filling the ice-chocked bay with even more large chunks of ice. Leopard seals asleep on several floes in the middle of the bay barely notice. I have been to Antarctica a dozen times and it is the sounds of the continent—the crack of that glacier or the blow of a humpback whale (you most often hear it before you see it) and the constant screech of hundreds of thou-sands of penguin parents imprinting their voices on their young—that stick with me most powerfully when I’m back home.

Given the poor climbing conditions, we decide to get back on the water. We break camp and drag our heavily laden kayaks back out to the sea over a field of meter-high ice cubes that line the beach.

A week south of Sharp Peak we paddle up to a small dock that leads to the Ukrainian science base called Vernadsky. Formerly the British base Faraday, Vernadsky was turned over to the Ukrainians a decade ago when the UK decided to abandon it. We pull into the base on a sunny day, knowing it will be the last contact we’ll have with humankind for the next 370 kilometers, so we drop anchor for a day. South of here, Antarctica grows more exposed, windier, and wilder, and becomes even less forgiving.

Fourteen Ukrainian men—most from Kiev—live and work at Vernadsky year-round, continuing what may be the best meteorological record on the continent, which stretches back more than 50 years. It was at this metal-and-cement-block sta-tion that the ozone hole growing above Antarctica was first discovered 20 years ago.

A rudimentary wooden ladder leads up to a tiny bedroom where, five times a day, Dennis—a geo-physicist known here simply as Ozone Man—slides back a small square panel in the roof and pushes the scope of his oblong measuring machine out into the sky. Someone has been doing this every day for more than 20 years from this very same small room and that is how the world knows about the ozone hole, which was created by man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere.

Ozone Man—a black ponytail hanging down his back and wearing light blue overalls over a


heavy wool sweater—shows us graphs pinned to the wall that charts the monthly variations in ozone coverage going back two decades. It was at its thinnest in 1993–1994 and he explains how proud he is to be the sole monitor of the hole for the world. The ozone has rethickened during the past decade, due in part to the worldwide ban on new CFCs.

When I tell him how amazed I am that such a seemingly simple machine, jammed up through a small hole in the roof, is responsible for such an important discovery, he jumps back at me, smiling. “It is not a simple machine! There are complicated optics inside! There is nothing auto-matic about it, it is all manual. It is the very best!” When the Brits first discovered the ozone hole, they thought their measurements were off so they replaced the machine. When the new machine produced the same results, they reinstalled the original one.

Vernadsky is also known for unfurling the fin-est red carpet on the continent and we’ve arrived on a party night. A sailboat carrying a team of elite British soldiers—17 men and 1 woman on a training mission—have been invited in for home-brewed vodka (its recipe tightly guarded by its maker, the same man who oversees the base’s diesel engines) and shortly after we join them in the bar, trays filled with shots are being passed around. Suffice it to say, a long night follows and the specifics of what happens in Antarctica, I’m afraid, must stay in Antarctica…though some-where we do have photographs of McBride in full dance mode modeling an oversize bra over his fleece and a certain skipper being carried out of the southernmost bar in the world.

A week after paddling away from Vernadsky, on a sunshine-filled January day, we reach nearly 68º South, the southernmost point of Crystal Sound. We are two degrees south of the Antarctic Circle and the temperatures reach into the 40ºs; sunburn becomes the biggest concern of the day.

Our map shows a pair of channels leading to Marguerite Bay. We attempt to thread our way by kayak through the meter-thick pancake ice before running into solid ice that runs several kilometers to shore. Through powerful binoculars we can see that the two channels we’d hoped to navigate are frozen solid. Clambering onto an ice floe, we pull our kayaks up and consider our options. One is to drag the kayaks some 50 kilometers over the ice

to Marguerite Bay, which might allow us to keep paddling south. The downside is we would most likely have to drag them back again, requiring a weeklong journey we simply can’t afford. Sadly, like every visitor to Antarctica, we’ve reached our turnaround point.

The end of our expedition fills me with both joy and regret. The former, because I know I will keep coming back to Antarctica as often as I can; the lat-ter, because the camaraderie and teamwork of this exploration will be hard to match. I believe it is im-portant that we keep coming back, that Antarctica—especially its evolving peninsula—be closely studied and watched. Although on many days the land looks impenetrable, covered by snow, ice, and glaciers, like Alaska piled on top of Alaska piled on top of Alaska, I know from the scientists who have worked here for decades that it is changing fast, perhaps faster than anywhere else on the planet. Just as the world is seeing a new Arctic as its ice disappears, very soon the Antarctic Peninsula will also take on a new meaning as its ice recedes.

What I have learned during my ten years of ex-ploring the world from sea level is that although all of the planet’s coastlines may look different, they are linked by a changing climate and a small hand-ful of serious environmental challenges. Now, after Antarctica, I have been privileged to see them all, and will keep a close eye on them as they continue to evolve.

a c K N o W l e D g m e N t s

our antarctic expedition was made possible by grants from the national geographic expeditions council, the Will Steger foundation, Ver tical Sa (chile), the Mark Paul terk trust , and by corporate funding from Mountain hardwear, necky Kayaks, Kokatat , Werner Paddles, and timberland/ear thkeepers.

b i o g r a p h y

a six-time grantee of the national geographic expeditions council and award-winning writer and filmmaker, Jon Bowermaster, Mn’06, is author of ten books and producer of more than a dozen documentary films. his website and blog (notes from Sea Level, www.jonbower master.com) reports on the world’s coastlines, the people who live along them, and issues of importance to anyone interested in and concerned about the planet’s ocean. his companion book to oceans, the new Disney nature film, will be published to coincide with the film’s premiere on earth Day, april 2010. Bowermaster lives in Stone ridge, new york.

m o N u m e N t a l i c e

nowhere on the planet has warmed more during the past 50 years than the antarctic Peninsula. Despite the increase in average temperatures, a lot of awe-inspiring glaciers still line the coast.

antarctic dreamsa journey into an ephemeral world text and images by KriStin LarSon

Throughout time, Antarctica has remained al-most as remote and untouched as the Moon. It wasn’t until 1773 that James Cook first wandered into the Southern Ocean, and another 50 years before Antarctica was touched by human hands. Yet Antarctica has long resided in our collective imaginations. Even the Ancient Greeks sensed its presence, calling the South Polar Region Anti-arktos, or the “Place Opposite the Bear,” in con-trast to the Far North, which they knew as Arktos, or the Great Bear, after the constellation that rode above it.

As a kid, I knew Antarctica only as the white fringe along the bottom of maps, but all that changed when, as an aspiring photographer, I first laid eyes on the striking images of the White Continent by American landscape photographer, Elliot Porter. It was Porter’s photo from Bull Pass, high atop the snow-free Dry Valleys of Antarctica—with its subtle gradations of light and broad, naked sweep of desolation that captured my imagina-tion. I vowed to one day see that place for myself, and, as if by fate, only five years later I too joined the small group of humans that have spent time in the spectacular geographic maze known as the McMurdo Dry Valleys, formed by katabatic winds plunging off the vast Antarctic Plateau to the ice-strewn waters of the Ross Sea. It was 1988 and I had traveled there as Winter-over Science Manager for the United States Antarctic Program. The winter research program focuses primarily on astrophysics and upper atmospheric processes, including ozone density over the pole.

As a photographer, I relished the winter months of total darkness capped on either end by weeks of gorgeous 24-hour twilight, a luminous landscape bathed in pink and butterscotch. I learned to love the dreadful ferocity unleashed in Antarctica dur-ing its winter isolation. Quite simply, it terrifies and captivates all who experience it.

After two winter seasons, I was asked to man-age the much busier and highly diverse summer science program, a transition that coincided with

the opening of a new 4,000 square-meter state-of-the-art science laboratory in McMurdo. As part of my work, I traveled into the “deep field”—Antarctic parlance for the interior of the continent, accessible only by ski-equipped Twin Otters and LC-130 Hercules aircraft or tractor-trains.

During these forays, I observed scientists ex-tracting ice cores to understand Earth’s climate history, and working to identify Antarctica’s tectonic connection to other continents. I also camped among thousands of Emperor Penguins as I assisted researchers in determining how the birds survive foraging trips of more than 500 me-ters underwater and for more than 20 minutes at a time.

The late 1980s was a time of increasing aware-ness of Antarctica’s precarious ecosystem and its importance for understanding global processes, which spurred the adoption of new environmen-tal protection protocols by the Antarctic Treaty parties. I soon found myself at the center of dis-cussions, debates, and strategy sessions about science and environmental protection, with a little bit of domestic and international law thrown in for good measure. Ultimately, I would exchange my parka and ice ax for a business suit and law degree in Washington, DC.

I still cannot fully explain my attraction to Antarctica. Initially, I went there out of curiosity but soon I was hooked. But why? Perhaps it is the quality of perpetual renewal that lies at the heart of Antarctica’s attraction. The intense activities of each season are erased by the shifting sugar-fine snow, the annual disintegration of the vast sea ice, and borne away on ceaseless winds. Except for the few “permanent stations”—a term that acknowledges the transitory nature of man’s toe-hold in Antarctica—everything else disappears. Antarcticans are not distracted by the footprints of their predecessors. Rather, each sojourner to the vast Seventh Continent is presented with an untrodden path and a trackless horizon—the very things that drive us to explore.

b i o g r a p h y

Kristin Larson, fn’02, who has logged more than 50 months of “ice time” in antarctica, including two winter-overs, practices environmental and transactional law in Washington, D.c. a member of the explorers club’s Board of Directors and co-chair of its Legal commit tee, Larson has penned several scholar ly ar ticles as well as fiction and non-fiction pieces, drawing on her antarctic experiences. Kristin Peak, on ross island, antarctica, was named in her honorA

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Most glacial melt in the McMurdo Dry Valleys sublimes directly to air, adding very lit t le liquid water to this largely ice-free region of antarctica. it was thus surprising to come across this frozen water fall in the upper taylor Valley. the force and volume of this now frozen torrent formed a tunnel through a large hanging glacier in the otherwise barren landscape.

m u m m i f i e D s e a l

Mummified seals in the Dry Valley regions of McMurdo were first repor ted by rober t falcon Scot t ’s team in 1905, and have been found as much as 50 kilometers inland over extremely rugged rocky landscapes and more than 1,500 meters above sea level. the Dry Valleys suppor t very lit t le in the way of life due to their ar id, cold, Mars-like conditions, which however are per fect for mummification. recently, car-bon dating of seal mummies revealed that some of the dozens of seal carcasses are in excess of 2,500 years old. there are no generally accepted explanations for the presence of these grisly relics in the otherworldly Dry Valley landscapes.

s u m m e r m e l t p o o l s

at 77.88° South, McMurdo Station is the southernmost ship-accessible point on the continent and well below the antarctic circle. as such, the station is subject to a single long polar day and a single long polar night, each lasting approximately f ive months, capped on either end by a month of prolonged crepuscular light. During these seasonal transit ions, the entire landscape is transformed; awash in spectacular color and unusual cloud formations. this image was taken from hut Point , near McMurdo Station in late January.

a d at e w i t h v i r g i n e a r t h

a first ascent of Greenland’s Discovery Wall

I have a love-hate relationship with gravity. It is my friend as well as my foe, and its dual form—the good and bad, the negative and positive—makes this beautiful relationship possible. The chal-lenges of big-wall climbing would not lure me without the possibil-ity of being blown off a wall by hurricane-force winds while aim-ing to stand on a virgin summit.

This pairing of man and stone and obsession with big-wall as-cents has gone on for nearly two decades, during which I have undertaken five expeditions to the unknown peaks of East Greenland, most recently this past summer.

My love affair with Greenland began quite by chance. Shortly after I returned home from a trip jo

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to Baffin Island in 1998, I listened to more than a month’s worth of messages on my answering machine and was intrigued by one from David Briggs, someone I had never met. He had seen granite towers that “resembled large canine teeth” while endeavoring to ski across Greenland from continent’s east coast. Eager to return, he was looking for a partner for his expedition. Three weeks later, I found myself on a plane to Chicago where I would finally meet Briggs and head north to climb the Fox Molar, a beautiful white granite tower 150 kilometers north of the town of Tasiilaq in east Greenland—the cracks there superb, clean, and dry.

Little did I know that this expedition would lead to a decade-long love affair with one of the most glorious places on Earth. Greenland offers a wondrous world of whales, polar bears, foxes, and seals; endless wildflowers of every color of the rainbow—many edible; traditional hunting and fishing with the local Inuit; and magical boat rides in harsh, ice-choked seas; with the glorious bonus of 24-hour sunlight reflecting off glassy, blue-white icebergs of every shape and size.

For last summer’s expedition, I was joined by my closest and most trustworthy climbing partner, Josh Helling. From our early training days on El Cap through punishing ascents on Baffin Island and in Antarctica, our partnership has grown as solid as the granite we often hang from. We have an unspoken, shared focus on safety, respect, and the conviction that success means coming home alive; standing on the summit is icing on the cake. A climbing partnership is one of the most impor-tant relationships in life. It is handing over your heart and breath, your fate and future, the hope you will get see your family and friends again.

In August, Josh flew out to meet me in Utah, where we boarded the first of three flights that would take us through New York to Iceland, then to Tasiilaq, Greenland. From there, we would travel some 425 kilometers in an eight-meter-long Arctic fishing boat to Skjoldungen, the gateway to virgin granite walls.

Making our way toward Skjoldungen, we passed through a maze of electric blue icebergs, which bobbed up and down in the rolling sea swells, and white geometric plates of frozen ocean dotted with black-and-gray-spotted ring seals oblivious to our presence. As I gazed out over the dark blue sea and endless floes that sparkled like diamonds, I could see steep black mountains in the distance striped with white couloirs. My nostrils numbed from the Arctic air as I took in long deep breaths.

After 35 hours, we reached the giant mouth of the Skjoldungen Passage, where serpentine gla-ciers snaked their way down the mountains, like huge white tongues reaching to taste the ocean. “Skjoldungen” means a “Shield for the Children.”

Yet the terrain before us could hardly be consid-ered child’s play.

Once inside the passage we were em-braced by rock walls and pointed towers re-sembling witches’ hats. We spent the morning looking for potential routes, inspecting each through binoculars and riflescopes as we

looked for systems of cracks that led to summits. Waterfalls slithered and hissed from icecaps hun-dreds of meters down to the ocean.

When the captain of the boat let us know he was nearing the halfway point of fuel capacity, we had to decide where to be dropped off so he could turn back toward home.

Unfortunately, two routes that we fancied showed sections of rotten, loose rock on close inspection, which almost certainly meant disaster. Then, Josh and I spotted a system of superthin cracks on an hourglass-shaped section of granite near the back of the 75-kilometer-long passage. We had found our destination. After making a date with the captain to be picked up a month later, we unloaded six huge duffels and haul bags containing more than 300 pounds of fuel, food, supplies, and survival gear, including a satellite phone and rifles just in case a random polar bear was desperate for dinner and we did not feel like being digested.

As our boat pulled away, the familiar smell of rain was in the air. Lenticular clouds rushed high into the sky like long, white brushstrokes; angry


weather could very well be on the way. Above our drop-off point on a rocky shore, steep slabs and talus formed a 300-meter-long ramp up to the base of the face of granite we wanted to climb. Within moments, we found ourselves under siege as a swarm of mosqui-toes declared war. We noticed there were two different species of mosquitoes and one kind of gnat or fly. When the gnat found bare skin, it left a small spot of blood where it had bitten off a chunk of flesh. We had to wear head nets from that point on.

If there is one thing I have learned over the years on my expeditions to Greenland, is that the wind gods like to play games. I have endured plenty of rain, snow, and wind—nothing much over the 40-mph range—so I expected to have similar, fairly casual weather. I was dead wrong.

We had just set up camp when short gusts of wind caused enough concern for us to double-check our tent anchors. Suddenly, out of nowhere, came stronger gusts that tried to lift our tent and snap the cords an-choring it to the ground. Within moments, the tent walls began to cave in from horrific gusts that bent the poles down far enough to touch our sleeping bags. We quickly repacked everything we had just unpacked, put on our Gore-tex, and stood with our backs against the interior tent walls, trying to help the tent withstand the severe lashing.

The wind roared with the sound of a rum-bling freight train as it came in off the ocean and walls around us. Both Josh and I were blown down and our tent exploded and ripped in two. With tent poles flailing like slashing swords, our dwelling had turned into a savage monster. We dove out of the tent-beast and watched as its broken poles and nylon limbs thrashed around. Luckily, we had our bivy sacks ready and huddled behind boulders and a wall of haul bags. The blast of wind that destroyed our tent was a pitaraq, an Inuit word for katabatic wind. In less than an hour, the wind calmed to a lazy breeze.

Later that morning, we made coffee and oatmeal in the rain and started shuttling loads

s K J o l D u N g e N p a s s a g e

Walls of granite with serpentine glaciers embrace the icy waters of Skjoldungen Passage. the peak in the distance is Skjoldungen island, just off the greenland coast.

J u m a r i N g t o W a r D t h e s u m m i t

Josh helling jumars to our high point before the summit push. glaciers in the distance snake their way down the mountains like giant tongues to taste the water.

to the base of the wall. The only good thing about the wind was that it had blown the vi-cious bugs away. As soon as the wind died down, however, the bugs were back in full force looking for any morsel of human flesh.

Rain moved in for several days after the windstorm, slowing our progress. Over the course of a week, we managed to get our gear to the wall and fix a few pitches while the bugs continued their banquet.

The sun poked its head out now and then, allowing us to climb 250 meters up, where the splitter cracks we had spied from the boat began. From there, a finger crack the thickness of a Clif Bar split the gold face as far as we could see. We set up our por-taledge, on which we put up another tent.

The view below was nothing short of magical, a turquoise ocean passage dot-ted with white icebergs drifting in the fjord currents. Shadows of neighboring towers moved across the valley.

Josh gracefully moved up the first section of 5.11 finger cracks. I was envious; it was one of the best unclimbed pitches I have ever seen. His pitch ended after 60 or so meters under an arching corner that went up 20 meters more. I had to take him off be-lay so he could stretch the rope to reach his desired anchor point. Cleaning pitches can also be glorious: getting to see the pitch for the first time, realizing how much fun it must have been to lead.

The next pitch was up into a blank face that ran for six or so meters, then continued into another hairline, pencil-drawn crack that led up further than we could see. Soon I was on lead, nailing in blades, arrows, and the eensie-weensiest Black Diamond cams.

I called down to Josh, “Send up the hooks!” On each daisy chain, I clipped a small selection of hooks, so that each end offered a Swiss-Army-knife selection. After finishing this delicate ballet-like pitch, we set up our portaledge, hung up our stove, and talked about life the way friends as close as brothers will do.

The following day, it was time to make a push for the summit, we probably had about

300 meters to go from our high point. The next pitch, the crux pitch, began with a mixture of overhanging off-width/squeeze. The only way Josh could fit into it was by taking off his helmet and his rack of gear, clipping them below the squeeze opening, then, climbing in. After fixing a few pieces of gear into the wider chimney above, he low-ered to retrieve his helmet and rack, hauling it below him as he climbed back up so it would all fit. Sixty meters of rope stretched up from my harness when I faintly heard Josh yell, “Off belay.” I could see that if Josh had fallen, most likely the gear would have stopped him, but only after rope-stretch, turning Josh into the little metal ball inside of a Pachinko machine bouncing off jagged stone chimney walls as he fell. Josh finished the climb—the last pitch, a loose, spicy 5.9 covered with lichen and moss—while the sun played hide-and-seek behind the dis-tant mountains.

Three weeks after being dropped off by our gracious captain on the windy shore, we found ourselves on the summit looking west over the massive Greenland Icecap. We could see many arrowhead-tipped towers I had never seen before, more virgin towers waiting. To the east, we could see over the tops of mountains that made up fjord walls and ridges; beyond that lay the open Arctic Sea and icebergs the size of cruise ships.

On the summit, we explored flat, glacier-carved stone fields and shallow ponds of water so clear the water was invisible. The melted icecap water was cold and pure. With this fulfilling ascent, I found closure for my obsession with the Arctic and felt ready to focus my energy on other remote lands rumored to contain more virgin summits.

b i o g r a p h y

Mountain hardwear athlete Mike Libecki pursues his passion for exploring the world to find untouched summits, which has taken him to all seven continents. Libecki lives with his wife, daughter, several dogs and cats, and potbelly pig near the mouth of Little cottonwood canyon in utah. he has been named “father of the year” at his daughter’s school two years in a row.

a V i e W f r o m o N t o p

the sun plays hide-and-seek behind distant mountains. the pristine landscape and 24 hours of summer sunlight make this corner of greenland a climber’s paradise.

54

e x t r e m e m e d i c i n e your health and safety in the field

jack frost n ipp ing at your toes

best be vigilant when the cold wind blows

by MichaeL J. ManyaK, M.D., facS

Explorers have often been subjected to cold environments either by design or by accident. Beyond survival itself, the prevention and treat-ment of cold-related injuries should be of great concern. Chief among these is frostbite, but non-freezing cold injuries such as chilblain, pernio, and trenchfoot can be significant. Breathing problems due to increased secretions and de-creased pulmonary function can be caused by cold air.

Frostbite occurs when tissue freezes, forming

ice crystals. Skin freezes at 21ºF but can occur more rapidly and at higher temperatures if wind and moisture are present. Cells can survive freezing and thawing but small blood vessel damage causes clots to obstruct circulation, leading to tissue death. Researchers in Finland reported that while the annual incidence of mild (13%) and severe frostbite (1%) tends to be more common in men and people with exposure to cold at work, such cases are also associated with leisure activities. Among the factors that to

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increase frostbite risk are diabetes, cardiac con-ditions, peripheral vascular spasm (Raynaud’s phenomenon), and heavy alcohol consumption.

The surface areas of structures farthest from the heart—ears, nose, fingers, and toes—are most susceptible because the body conserves heat by first constricting vessels to organs non-essential to life. Feet are par-ticularly susceptible through mechani-cal trauma and moisture condensa-tion. According to Swedish research, moisture in footwear is the most impor-tant variable that affects thermal insu-lation and comfort. Moisture in combination with motion may reduce insulation and thus protection against cold by 45 percent. So foot protection and comfort is essential.

The first principle in management of cold injuries is to prevent hypothermia, which starts the cascade of physiological responses leading to tissue injury. Maintenance of heat production requires proper attention to food, exercise, and insulation with nonconstrictive clothing and pro-tection from moisture.

If frostbite develops, the best treatment is rapid and continued submersion in warm water (40º–41ºC/104–107ºF) for at least 30 min-utes. But this is often very difficult in the field because it requires sufficient fuel and water for a complete thaw and the temperature must be tightly controlled, which is best managed with a thermometer. Too much heat or the dry heat from a fire can desiccate tissue and extend the dam-age. It is much better not to thaw the body part if there is a chance of a refreeze, which will result in even greater damage. Do not massage the body part to minimize further trauma to the dam-aged tissue. As the body part thaws, it will turn red as blood flow returns but nerve reactivation will cause pain and strong medication may be needed. Blister formation after thawing suggests

more severe injury, especially if filled with blood. The body part should be wrapped with sterile bandages with pads between digits and elevat-ed. Rapid evacuation should be initiated. If you are in a location with access to the Internet or a

satellite phone, digi-tal images can allow immediate access to hospital-based specialists who can assess cold injuries and advise on early field care.

Tissue is also susceptible to non-freezing cold injury. Chilblain is a condi-tion characterized by itchy, painful, swollen skin after a few hours of ex-posure. Pernio is a similar condition af-

ter longer exposure and presents with reddened skin in addition to the other symptoms. Early administration of analgesia and the avoidance of secondary exposure are important. Both these conditions resolve after drying and rewarming with no prolonged damage.

Trenchfoot is a much more serious condi-tion that results from several days of cold, wet feet. The white, cold feet become red, hot, and painful after warming and these symptoms intensify over the next few weeks; permanent hypersensitivity and disability is possible. All of these conditions emphasize the need to keep feet warm and dry.

Frostbitten areas may take weeks to reveal dead tissue. The condition from which tissue recovers within a few days without permanent damage is sometimes called frostnip. With ac-tual frostbite, the salvaged tissue may remain cold-sensitive for years. This was impressed upon me by a patient who, as a young Marine decades ago, fought his way out of the Choisin Reservoir in deep winter during the Korean War. He complained more about the continued ef-fects of his frostbite than the surgical problem that required my services.

So bundle up, keep your feet dry and warm, and come inside for the spirits!

56

“…one Strong cuP of tea iS Better than tWenty

WeaK oneS . …the tea ShouLD Be Put Stra ight into

the Pot…if the tea iS not LooSe in the Pot it neVer

infuSeS ProPerLy.”

—george orWeLL , A Nice cup of TeA, 1946

There is no reason to forego a nice cup of tea anywhere in the world. Not only cheering and welcome, tea is included in many trekkers’ safety kits. Hot tea—taken with a sweet snack as soon as you begin to feel cold—could preclude a more serious core body temperature chill. Pack loose tea: it makes a tastier brew and leaves no soggy

teabags to pack out. Paper tea bags take years to decompose and should never be left in camp. Carry an interesting assortment of your favorite loose teas—premeasured for one teapot in bags if you’re backpacking—and savor a bracing cup anywhere, along with a ready-to-eat sweet homemade snack.

b i o g r a p h y

a california-based writer, Linda frederick yaf fe is the au-thor of Backpack Gourmet , High Trail cookery, and the recently released Solar cooking for Home and camp.

e x t r e m e c u i s i n efood for the epicurean adventurer

teatime in the outBack

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outBacK te athE EquiPmEnt is simPlE And lightwEight: A liddEd Cooking Pot, CuPs, somE loosE lEAF tEA, And onE squArE Foot oF nylon nEt.

1. Bring to a fuLL BoiL aS Many cuPS of treateD Water aS you Want

cuPS of tea.

2. turn off StoVe anD aDD to Pot:

1 to 2 teaSPoonS LooSe tea LeaVeS Per cuP

3. quicKLy coVer the Pot, SWirL the LeaVeS, anD Let SteeP for 3

MinuteS.

4. Stretch a Piece of fine MeSh nyLon net acroSS the SiDe of the

Pot anD Strain the tea into the cuPS.

5. after you haVe enJoyeD your tea, WiDeLy DiSPerSe the tea

LeaVeS, ShaKe the nyLon net to cLean it, anD PacK it aWay With

the Pot anD cuPS.

engL iSh energy Ba rSmAkEs 24; wEight For 1 sErving = 1½ ounCEs

1. oiL a 10 × 13-inch gLaSS caSSeroLe DiSh.

2. gentLy heat in a SKiLLet or SaucePan JuSt untiL BuBBLing: • 8 ounces english toffee bits • ¾ cup honey

3. MeanWhiLe, PLace in a Large BoWL: • 9 cups puffed rice cereal

4. Pour the toffee Mixture oVer the cereaL anD Stir. Let cooL for

5 MinuteS then aDD anD Mix WeLL:

• 4 ounces coarsely broken bittersweet chocolate

5. PreSS firMLy into the caSSeroLe DiSh. coVer anD refrigerate

for 2 hourS. Bring to rooM teMPerature, then cut into

24 SquareS. WraP inDiViDuaLLy Before Storing at rooM

teMPerature.

a PPLe - coconut roL L-uPS

mAkEs 16; wEight For 1 sErving = 0.5 ounCEs

1. Dry-toaSt in a SKiLLet untiL Light BroWn, then Set aSiDe: • ½ cup sweetened, flaked coconut

2. coVer 4 MeSh DehyDrator trayS With oVen ParchMent PaPer,

then LightLy oiL the PaPer.3. SPreaD on the trayS, one cuP Per tray, to forM 8-inch-DiaMeter

circLeS: • 4 cups homemade or commercial applesauce

4. SPrinKLe the toaSteD coconut eVenLy oVer the

aPPLeSauce circLeS.

5. DehyDrate at 145ºf. for 7 hourS, or untiL firM anD Leathery.

6. WhiLe StiLL WarM, roLL uP the DrieD aPPLeSauce SheetS anD cut

each roLL into 4 PieceS.

7. Let cooL coMPLeteLy Before Storing in 1-SerVing-Size BagS.

ensure a future for the world center

for exploration!

Founded in 1904 “to promote exploration by all means possible,” The Explorers Club© has become the premier resource for expedition planning and research. This fabled venue has also played a pri-mary role for those pushing the limits of knowledge and human endurance as a place to share the results of their expedi-tions with the greater public.

Today, we have embarked on a multi-phase restoration of our historic head-quarters and the extraordinary archives it houses—phase 1 will cost an estimated $1.5 million. To underwrite this effort, we are offering for sale “virtual bricks.” The purchase of bricks—which cost $50 each—will enable us to procure the nec-essary materials and expertise to carry out this important project.

To learn more, please contact President Lorie M.L. Karnath at 212-628-8383, or e-mail: [email protected].

the explorers cluB46 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021

212-628-8383 www.explorers.org

t h e l o w e l l t h o m a s B u i l d i n g p r e s e r v e a

B r i c k c a m p a i g n

58

48 minutes • Oceans 8 Films; 2009

• www.jOnbOwermaster.cOm/stOre.php

• $20 • reviewed by angela m.h. schuster

“In Antarctica, it is all about the ice,” renowned

kayaker and filmmaker Jon Bowermaster tells us in the opening scenes of his latest film, Terra Antarctica, an inspiring audiovisual ode to one of the most beautiful,

and fragile, landscapes on Earth. Bowermaster, who has spent the better part of three decades kayak-ing around the globe, had made numerous forays to Antarctica prior to the ex-pedition documented in this film. And, in doing so, he had witnessed firsthand the environmental changes tak-ing place in this remote and largely inaccessible part of the world.

Bowermaster and his kayaking team call on a col-lection of research stations charged with environmental monitoring. Although the Antarctic Treaty mandates that Antarctica is to be set aside as a scientific pre-serve, free of military activ-ity, Bowermaster highlights the financial and logistical challenges nations face in maintaining their tenu-ous toeholds on the White Continent. Some, he notes, have resorted to staffing their stations with military personnel, just to keep their bases open. Terra Antarctica succeeds in conveying the sheer scale of the continent and its relative desolation. Among the most dramatic sequences in the film are those of a collapsing ice arch—which crumbles piece by frozen piece—and an in-formative presentation of the annual waxing and waning of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

r e v i e w sedited by MiLBry c. PoLK

t e r r a a n t a r c t i c aa film by Jon Bowemaster


b o r N t o e x p l o r e how to bE A bACk yArd AdvEnturEr

by Richard Wiese368 pp • new yOrk: harper paperbacks,

2009 • isbn-10: 006144958X, isbn-13: 978-

0061449581 • $18.99

Former Explorers Club President Richard Wiese has written Born to Explore: How To Be a Backyard Adventurer, a how-to outdoor guide for kids. Wiese says the inspira-tion for this book came about during a trip to Antarctica with Students on Ice, a group of high schoolers led by Geoff Green, who were learning to be ambassadors for the polar regions. Wiese’s tone is infor-mative, sometimes personal, and instructional. Some of his suggestions require more commitment and technical expertise such as building the “six hour” canoe or making a thumb piano. His “Altoid” survival kit is also quite clever. Wiese points out that the inside cover can double as a reflector. Since much is based on Wiese’s own experience, we hope his advice on how to engage with electrified wire did not come at a great cost.

He cautions that when you encounter a live wire, don’t test it with your palm, as the reflex action will cause your hand to grip the wire. Explorers Club members will be amused at the often pithy contributions of familiar members like Jim Fowler. Wiese ends by saying that explorers should to “give back” and a few examples he gives of what others have done are inspirational.

t h e l o s t c i t y o f Z A tAlE oF dEAdly obsEssion in thE AmAzon

by David Grann352 pp • new yOrk: dOubleday, 2009

• isbn-10: 0385513534, isbn-13: 978-

0385513531 • $27.50

While serving in North Africa with the British Secret Service, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett learned to survey and make maps, a skill he took with him on subsequent expeditions to South America to explore unknown territory for the Royal Geographical Society. On one of his expeditions to the Amazon he claimed to have discovered an ancient city. In 1925, Fawcett—who had since morphed into a daredevil

adventurer with an admiring public hungry for his adventure stories (the character Indiana Jones is based on him)—took off in a swirl of press with his twenty-one-year-old son and a friend to search for the City of Z, convinced it was the source of the legendary El Dorado. When they failed to return, the ensuing media frenzy lured scores of others to search for the lost explorers and the fabled city. Many of them also never returned. New Yorker writer David Grann came across the story of Fawcett while doing research on Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World and was, like countless others, hooked. He had the added advantage of discovering an untapped trove of Fawcett’s di-aries, which convinced him he had a real chance of success. One crucial clue Grann found in Fawcett’s papers was that he had deliberately changed the location of the city to throw others off the trail. Grann admits that he is not the explor-ing type, yet even he ventured into the Amazon to search for clues. Grann’s book, The Lost City of Z, comes along at a time when archaeologists like Anna C. Roosevelt and others have challenged the long-held belief that the Amazon was an untouched wilderness. Roosevelt’s discoveries are pointing to a very different pic-ture of precontact Amazonia, which give credence to the reality of Fawcett’s lost city. Grann’s own expedition has surprising results. This is a grand adventure and a great detective story. Can’t wait for the movie.

re V ieWs

60

t h e p l a c e W h e r e y o u g o t o l i s t e N in sEArCh oF An ECology oF musiC

by John Luther Adams, foreword by Alex Ross

180 pp • middletOwn, ct: wesleyan,

2009 • isbn-10: 0819569038, isbn-13: 978-

0819569035 • $24.95

The music of the spheres was first hypothesized by Pythagoras as a harmonic or mathematical way of un-derstanding the relationship of the movement of heavenly bodies. Musician John Luther Adams’ wondrous book, The Place Where You Go to Listen: In Search of an Ecology of Music, chronicles, much like an expedition diary, the discovery, exploration, and creation of a unique fusion of music and the natural world. Adams’ goal was to transform the ever-changing sound waves created by natural phe-nomenon—the Aurora borealis, a phenomenon others have reported as having a sound component; the motion of the Earth’s plates; the cycles of the Moon; and the movement of the sun—into color and mu-sic. What motivated him was his desire to reinstate the bond he believes humans once had with their natural surroundings, and to try to instill harmony again.

He begins his journey with noise, “the sound of chaos,” out of which rose the “patterns that connect us to everything around us.” Like all explorers, he relied on maps to find his way and on inspiration drawn from indigenous peoples throughout the world, who still find musical harmony in their surroundings. Adams says, “Our individual and collective identities are fundamentally shaped by the places we in-habit. But in recent times we’ve lost many of our deepest con-nections with place. And as we’ve forgotten where we are, we’ve also forgotten who we are.” Adams’ Place Where You Go to Listen gives us back this profound sense of place.

t h e l a N D o f e a g l e s riding through EuroPE’s ForgottEn Country

by Robin Hanbury-Tenison224 pp • lOndOn: i b tauris, 2009 • isbn-

10: 1845118553, iSBn-13: 978-1845118556

• $35 • reviewed by nick smith

Recent books by Robin Hanbury-Tenison have tended to be either autobiographi-cal or works of reference. And while his two-part

autobiography—Worlds Within and Worlds Apart—and the new edition of the Oxford Book of Exploration have been welcome, what we’ve all been waiting for is a proper travel yarn from the veteran explorer, the man the Sunday Times named one of the top thou-sand people of the twentieth century.

It was certainly worth the wait, because Land of Eagles, Hanbury-Tenison’s account of his horseback expedi-tion through the little-known European country of Albania, is almost certainly his best book to date. On the one hand, it is a homage to the English Romantic poet Lord Byron, who famously rode through this rugged land during the days of the Grand Tour. On the other, it is a beautifully crafted exemplum of travel writing at its best—the sort of travel book Eric Newby used to write.

Interspersed with digres-sions and contemplations on the history of Albania, Land of Eagles reveals an anomalous country—the only truly Islamic member state in the 27- country European Union. It has had more than its fair share of invasions, bloodshed, ethnic cleansing, and political upheav-al over the centuries. But para-doxically, from the twenty-first-century perspective at least, as Hanbury-Tenison points out, it is also one of the most remote and traditional countries in a fast-changing Europe, which has apparently forgotten about it. This volume is destined to become required reading for those who want to learn more about this fascinating country.

re V ieWs

t

t he e x pl or e rs c l uB ch a p t e r ch a irs46 eaSt 70th Street, neW yorK, ny 10021 i 212-628-8383 i WWW.exPLorerS.org

a L a SK aJohn J. Kelley, Ph.D.Tel: 907-479-5989Fax: [email protected]

at L a ntaRoy Alexander WallaceTel: 404-237-5098Fax: [email protected]

centr a L f Lor iDaG. Michael HarrisTel: 727-584-2883Fax: 727-585-6078 [email protected]

ch icago / gre at L a K eSJames S. WestermanTel: 312-671-2800Fax: [email protected]

george rogerS cL a rKJoseph E. RickettsTel/Fax: [email protected]

gre ater P ieDMontJohn Adams HodgeTel: 803-779-3080 Fax: 803-765-1243 [email protected]

JuP i t er f Lor iDaRosemarie Twinam Tel: 772-219-1970Fax: [email protected]

ne W engL a nDGregory DeyermenjianTel: 978-927-8827, ext. 128Fax: [email protected]

north Pac if ic a L a SK aMead TreadwellTel: 907-258-7764Fax: [email protected]

northern ca L i forn i aAlan H. Nichols, J.D., D.S.Tel: 415-789-9348Fax: [email protected]

Pac if ic north W eStEd Sobey, Ph.D.Tel: [email protected]

Ph i L a DeLPh i aDoug SorokaTel: 215-257-4588 [email protected]

rocK y Mounta inKaryn SawyerTel: [email protected]

S a n D iegoCapt. Robert “Rio” HahnTel: 760-723-2318Fax: [email protected]

Southern ca L i forn i aDavid A. Dolan, FRGSTel. [email protected]

Southern f Lor iDaPamela L. [email protected]

South W eStBrian Hanson (Chapter Liaison)Tel: [email protected]

South W eSt f Lor iDaJim Thompson Tel: [email protected]

St. Lou iSMabel Purkerson, M.D. Tel: 314-994-1649 [email protected]

te x a SC. William SteeleTel: 214-770-4712Fax: [email protected]

Wa Sh ington , DcPolly A. Penhale, Ph.D.Tel: 703-292-7420Fax: [email protected]

a rgent in aHugo Castello, Ph.D.Fax: 54 11 4 982 5243/[email protected]

auStr a L i a -ne W ze a L a nDChristopher A. BrayTel: [email protected]

ca n a D i a nAmanda S. GlickmanTel: [email protected]

e a St a S i aSteven R. SchwankertTel: 86 1350 116 [email protected]

gre at Br i ta inBarry L. Moss Tel: 44 020 8992 [email protected]

i ceL a nDHaraldur Örn ÓlafssonTel: 354 545 8551 Fax: 354 562 1289 [email protected]

norWayHans-Erik HansenHome Tel: 47 22-458-205Work Tel: 47 [email protected]

PoL a nDMonika M. RogozinskaTel: 48-22-8484630Fax: [email protected]

ruS S i aAlexander Borodin Tel: [email protected]

South a S i aMandip S. SoinTel: 91-11- 26460244Fax: [email protected]

W eStern euroPeRobert E. Roethenmund Tel: [email protected]

nat ionaL chaPter cha irS internat ionaL chaPter cha irS

y o u W a N t t o g o W h e r e ? how to gE t somEonE to PAy For thE

tr iP oF your drEAms

by Jeff Blumenfeld244 pp • new yOrk: skyhOrse

publishing, 2009 • isbn-10: 1602396477,

isbn-13: 978-1602396470 • $24.95

Jeff Blumenfeld has drawn equally on his years of pub-lishing Expedition News, an informative monthly newsletter for the exploration community, and on his years working as a public relations specialist in what he calls “adventure marketing,” to provide unique insight into the ins and outs and ups and down of financ-ing expeditions. In his book, You Want To Go Where?, he points out right away that most of the expeditions we know from history were supported by political leaders, mercantile organizations, or the military. Today, we look to the titans of industry and foundations to help us live our big dream.

One key, Blumenfeld says, is to be able to cogently answer the “so what” question. You must be able to artfully tell a funder why this expedition

is important to do. Next, find a charitable tie-in. Everyone needs a hook to get his or her story noticed. Blumenfeld makes the distinction between expeditions for scientific pur-poses and adventure trips. Among the projects he profiles are Norman Vaughan’s expe-dition to Antarctic to climb a mountain named for him, blind climber Erik Weihenmayer’s Everest expedition, and Dan Buettner’s MayaQuest expedi-tion of the mid-1990s. Buettner was among the first to have people to follow his expedition in real time via the emerging Internet. Blumenfeld’s book is a great resource for explorers and others who want to turn a lifelong dream into reality.

h u a u t l a thirt y yEArs in onE oF thE world’s

dEEPEst CAvEs

by C. William Steele269 pp • daytOn, OhiO: cave bOOks,

2009 • isbn 978-0-939748-70-9• $24.95 •

reVieWeD By JiM cheSter

Huautla: Thirty Years in One of the World’s Deepest

Caves by C. William Steele is far more than an account of incredible exploration. It is a thought-provoking book that chronicles the 32-year investigation of Sistema Huautla—a seven-cave system in the Mexico state of Oaxaca. At -1,475 meters (-4,839 feet) Sistema Huautla is the twelfth deepest cave in the world with 20 entrances and 62 kilometers (39 miles) of passages.

Cave exploration is some-thing out of the ordinary that requires equally extraordinary effort to handle it. In other words, it can be serious stuff, especially in places like Sistema Huautla where death just “licks it chops” at a mis-cue. As might be expected, people like Steele wouldn’t be wandering these underground chasms unless they were “pretty darn good.” As Steele tells us, egos are high; demand for expertise is even higher. The mix can lead to personal drama as well as incredible feats of exploration. It is all in this book. I might add that this story is entirely played out in the shroud of eternal darkness.

Steele, whose name is synonymous with Mexico cave exploration, joined this effort in 1977 and has been with it ever since. He can also write. If you have ever been just a little curi-ous about these odd ducks who live for the stygian places on our planet, or have thought about what it would be like to be somewhere as remote as the surface of the Moon with a mountain wrapped around you, this book will set you firmly on the edge of your seat.

re V ieWs

Robert J. AtwaterCapt. Norman L. BakerBarbara BallardRobert D. Ballard, Ph.D.Samuel B. BallenMark Gregory BayukDaniel A. BennettJosh BernsteinJohn R. Bockstoce, D.Phil.Bjorn G. BolstadCapt. Bruce M. Bongar, Ph.D.Garrett R. BowdenHarry Davis BrooksLt. Col. Jewell Richard Browder*August “Augie” BrownJohn C.D. BrunoLee R. Bynum*Virginia Castagnola HunterJulianne M. Chase, Ph.D.Maj. Gen. Arthur W. Clark,

USAF (Ret.)Leslie E. ColbyJonathan M. ConradCatherine Nixon CookeConstance DifedeMr. & Mrs. James DonovanCol. William H. Dribben, USA

(Ret.)*Sylvia A. Earle, Ph.D.Lee M. ElmanMichael L. FinnRobert L. Fisher, Ph.D.

John W. FlintKay FosterJames M. FowlerW. Roger FryAlfred C. Glassell, Jr.George W. GowenRandall A. GreeneJean Charles Michel GuiteCapt. Robert “Rio” HahnAllan C. HamiltonScott W. HamiltonO. Winston “Bud” Hampton,

Ph.D.Brian P. HansonJames H. Hardy, M.D.Judith HeathRobert A. HemmGary “Doc” Hermalyn, Ph.D.Lotsie Hermann HoltonCharles B. HuestisRobert Edgar HymanJ.P. Morgan Charitable TrustRobert M. Jackson, M.D.Kenneth M. Kamler, M.D.Prince Joli KansilLorie M.L. KarnathAnthony G. Kehle, IIIAnne B. KeiserKathryn KiplingerThomas R. Kuhns, M.D.Hannah B. KurzweilCarl C. Landegger

Michael S. LevinFlorence Lewisohn TrustJ. Roland LieberMichael LuzichJames E. Lockwood, Jr.*Jose LoebJohn H. Loret, Ph.D., D.Sc.Margaret D. Lowman, Ph.D.Robert H. MalottLeslie MandelRobert E. McCarthy*George E. McCownCapt. Alfred S. McLaren,

Ph.D., USN (Ret.)Lorus T. Milne, Ph.D.James M. Mitchelhill*Arnold H. NeisWalter P. NoonanMartin T. Nweeia, D.D.S.Dr. John W. OlsenKathleen ParkerAlese & Morton PechterWilliam E. PhillipsProf. Mabel L. Purkerson, M.D.Roland R. PutonMabel Dorn Reader*Dimitri Rebikoff*John T. Reilly, Ph.D.Adrian Richards, Ph.D.Bruce E. Rippeteau, Ph.D.Merle Greene Robertson, Ph.D.Otto E. Roethenmund

James Beeland Rogers, Jr.Rudy L. Ruggles, Jr.Gene M. RurkaAvery B. RussellDavid J. Saul, Ph.D.Willets H. Sawyer, IIIA. Harvey Schreter*Mr. & Mrs. Donald SegurWalter Shropshire, Jr., Ph.D.,

M.Div.Theodore M. SiourisWilliam J. L. Sladen, M.D.,

D.Phil.Susan Deborah SmilowSally A. SpencerPamela L. StephanyRonnie & Allan StreichlerArthur O. SulzbergerVernon F. Taylor, IIIMitchell Terk, M.D.C. Frederick Thompson, IIJames “Buddy” ThompsonMarc Verstraete Van de Weyer Robert C. VaughnAnn Marks VolkweinLeonard A. Weakley, Jr.William G. Wellington, Ph.D.Robert H. WhitbyJulius Wile*Holly WilliamsFrancis A. Wodal** dECEAsEd

the explorers cluB legacy socie t y

A s l on g a s t h e r e i s Th e Ex pl or e r s Clu b, you r n a m e w i l l b e l i s ted a s a m e m b e r of Th e L ega c y S o c i et y.

the Legacy Soc ie t y coMMit tee

Theodore M.Siouris (Chairman), Robert J. Atwater, August “Augie” Brown, George W. Gowen, Scott W. Hamilton,

Brian P. Hanson, Peter Hess, Helen Kahn, Kathryn Kiplinger, William E. Phillips, Mabel L. Purkerson, Jack Rinehart, and Jim Thompson

“As the Founding Chairman of our Legacy Society, I know the important role it plays in assuring a strong future for our Club. If you make a bequest to The Legacy Society, as I have done, be sure to specify that those funds are to be added to the Legacy Endowment!Join us!” —William E. Phillips, MR’90

Bill Phillips in zermatt

the explorers cluB46 East 70th Street New York, NY 10021212-628-8383 [email protected]

for additionalinformation

contact

JaMLing tenzing norgay haD yet to Be Born When hiS

father, tenzing norgay, conquereD Mt. eVereSt With Sir

eDMunD P. hiLLary in 1953. yet, he WaS DeStineD to StanD

atoP the 8,850-Meter (29,035 foot) SuMMit hiMSeLf aS Part

of the 1996 exPeDition that MaDe the iMax fiLM eVereSt.

jc: You were filming on Everest in 1996 when those eight climbers perished.jtn: It was our day to summit. When we saw the inexperienced climbers going up, we decided to wait. People were high on the mountain too late. At 3:30 p.m. [turnaround was at 2], guys were still climbing up. Through the telescope we could see a line going toward the summit. The weather played a major role, but it wouldn’t have had they gotten up and down faster.

jc: Let’s talk about your own summit day, two weeks later.jtn: My desire to climb Everest grew after my father died in 1986. I wanted to climb to under-stand him. At a lot of places on the mountain, I imagined what those guys were thinking, where they might have slept. On our final day, halfway up from the South Col, I was really strong. I felt my father was in front, pulling me, or behind

pushing me, because I didn’t know where this energy came from.

jc: Your thoughts at the top? jtn: I took my goggles and mask off, and cried. Then I thanked Miyolangsangma [the goddess of Everest] and left photos of my parents and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and a toy that belonged to my daughter, Deki. I could see my dad there, right in front of me, with a big smile. He was telling me, “You know, you didn’t have to come this far.” And then I realized, I really didn’t have to climb the mountain to understand him. The irony was that I had to climb the mountain to find out that I didn’t have to climb the mountain. jc: Your summit pose was the mirror image of your dad’s. jtn: Since Hillary took the picture of my father in that famous pose—with one hand up holding the ice ax and flags—I thought it would be nice to do the same photo of me. I tried to strike the pose, but I had the wrong hand up!

for more of Jim clash’s columns/videos, see www.forbes.com/tothelimits or www.youtube.com/jimclash.

w h a t w e r e t h e y t h i n k i n g ?great moments in exploration as told to Jim Clash

on top of the worldwith Jamling Tenzing Norgay

64

From vast ocean depths to the frontiers of outer space, the explorers journal offers firsthand reporting from those pushing the limits of knowledge and human endurance.

Founded in 1904 to promote exploration “by all means possible,” The Explorers Club is an international organization dedicated to the advancement of field exploration and scientific inquiry. Among our members are leading pioneers in oceanography, mountaineering, archaeology, and the planetary and environmental sciences.

subscribe online to the explorers journal today!

Dare to go where no one has gone before!

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