The book Will and I wrote about the expedition – CROSSING ANTARCTICA – has just been republished. Readying the book for reprinting I have reread it several times during the past few months and was happily reminded of just how audacious an undertaking it was, beginning with the incredible complexities of coordinating a six-man team from six different countries on a continent ruled by international treaty.

LUNCH, Trans-Antarctica Expedition 1989-90, Photo by Will Steger

But what I was re-impressed by most was that this was a REAL ADVENTURE story. There is nothing faux when you’re dealing with a fierce winter storm that lasts sixty days, or the threat of running out of dog food far, far from help, or the mental struggle of having to get up every morning for seven months, endure -40 degree days of pushing through deep snow … without giving in to the inevitable human desire to simply give up.

In one of its anniversary issues Outside chose a few of the “best opening lines ever” from an adventure book. The first paragraph of CROSSING ANTARCTICA was included:

“July 25, 1989 – The stench of wet dogs, kerosene, cigarette smoke, molding cheese and sweat-stained clothing saturated the air of the Soviet ‘flying coffin’ as we closed in on Antarctica. Fifty-odd passengers readied themselves for what we fully expected to be a crash landing. My partner in this expedition-to-be, a diminutive Frenchman named Jean-Louis Etienne, was standing beside my seat. He leaned over and insisted the smell that permeated the tense cabin and increased the tension was one he recognized; it was, he said, the smell of adventure.”

The expedition would end on the far side of the continent, near the Russian base of Mirnyy. No team has ever, or most likely will ever, cross a similar distance on the seventh continent. On the final day, March 3, the team was exhausted but exhilarated. Midway through the expedition a variety of options had been considered, including reducing the team to four, or perhaps quitting altogether. Its successful conclusion – broadcast live by ABC News, a huge deal and expense at the time – was one of those brilliant memories we will all carry for a lifetime.

On that last day Will wrote in his journal, “… we traveled the final sixteen miles under perfect, clear skies and temperatures hovering just below zero.

“We could see the deep blue of the Indian Ocean the entire day. Sunlight danced and glared off the icebergs that had lined up to greet us, and we crested the hill overlooking the Soviet base just before seven o’clock. As we headed down one last icy slope – men shouting encouragement to the dogs, the dogs howling out of pleasure at the scene that spread before them – an aura of peace swept over me as the responsibilities of the past three years and these last 3,741 miles lifted from my shoulders.

“As I skied the last half mile I could not erase from my mind a picture of another time, another cold place. It was April 1986, the middle of the frozen Arctic Ocean, when Jean-Louis and I first met. He stepped to the top of a ridge of jumbled sea ice, seemingly out of nowhere, and we embraced, like brothers, though we’d never even been introduced. Everything that we’d done these past years evolved from that fated moment, from that embrace. We had turned our dreams – about adventure and cooperation, about preservation and the environment – into realities. We had the confidence to take risks, and the scene splayed in front of us now was our reward, our affirmation.

“The Soviets had marked our entryway with red flags and made a Finish line. A gathering of one hundred, speaking a dozen different languages, swarmed around us as we came down the flag bedecked chute. As I called my dogs to a stop one last time and stepped out of my skis, Jean-Louis walked toward me. I lifted Sam onto my shoulder and Jean-Louis – completing the circle begun those years ago in the middle of the Arctic Ocean – wrapped us both in a bear hug.”

My friend Eric Larsen is there now, and a half-dozen other skiing teams (no more dogs, alas), all closing in on the South Pole at the very height of the austral summer. My friend Kraig Becker and his Adventure Blog does a great job of keeping up with the expeditions; here’s his dispatch from yesterday:

“While the rest of us celebrated the holidays with friends and family in the comfort of our homes, the Antarctic teams spent the days on the trail, heading due south, and closing in on their goal – The South Pole.

“The most recent update from Antarctica come from the Kaspersky Commonwealth Team, where we learn that the girls are a mere 20 nautical miles from the Pole. The ladies have been out on the ice for 36 days, and it appears that they will hit 90ºS tomorrow. The team was hoping that they would be able to see the polar research station located at the Pole on the horizon today, but so far they’ve had no luck in spotting it, which is adding a bit of frustration on the final days of the expedition. The girls also say that they will never take hot, running water and flush toilets for granted ever again.

“The last update from Ryan Waters and Cecilie Skog haven’t sent a dispatch since Christmas Eve, when they were within 100 nautical miles of the Pole, and it is quite possible that they have arrived at their destination today or tomorrow at the latest. They celebrated the holiday with a half-day on the trail, and some time in the tent, but since then, nothing has been heard.

“Similarly, Eric Larsen, and his team haven’t sent a dispatch since Christmas Day, which was their 39th day out of Patriot Hills. Eric and the boys spent the day locating their final supply cache, before turning South once again. With their sleds full once again, it was slow going throughout the day, which was mostly up hill. They’re now within two degrees of the Pole, and they hope to reach their destination within eight or nine days, which would put them in on the 2nd or 3rd of January, if everything goes according to plan.

“Meagan McGrath also sent an audio dispatch on Christmas Day with updates on her progress as well. She says she had a fantastic day out on the ice, and is covering great distances in the past few days, and spent much of the holiday thinking of her friends and family, who she is missing badly, but is still enjoying her journey so far. There was no update on her location, but because she was forced to restart early on, Meagan is still a good distance away from the Pole.

“Finally, the Shackleton’s Unfinished Business Team have wasted no time in their journey to the Pole, and according to their latest dispatch today, they are now at 89.2ºS and covered 9.3 nautical miles today. At this rate, they’ll finish off that final degree in the next few days, and they’ll stand at the Pole for the New Year.

“It appears that the next few days will be a busy one at the bottom of the world. Watch for updates from all the teams as they begin to arrive at the South Pole. The Antarctic season for 2009 will begin to wind down in the next few weeks, but not before plenty of action on Mt. Vinson as well, where the climbers will be looking to claim one of the seven summits.”

We are republishing our book about the adventure, CROSSING ANTARCTICA, in honor of the twentieth anniversary and I’ve been thinking about those days a lot while on the ice this year. Lots has changed, particularly in regard to technology. Then, the team had a satellite beacon that tracked its whereabouts once a day; today those who ski to the pole are able to send live video and photos to their websites. Then, dogs pulled the heavily-loaded sleds, an homage to the early explorers of the continent; today, thanks to an amendment to the Antarctica Treaty in 1991, there will never again be dogs in Antarctica (the formal reason was to limit the potential for distemper to be introduced to the seal population, though I have always believed the banning of dogs was really targeted to eliminate private dog sledding expeditions from the continent). Then, the ice along the Larsen B ice shelf where the expedition began was hard and thick; today, that ice has been gone for more than seven years, broken off into thousands of bits. Then, maybe a few thousand visited the Peninsula by tourist ship; now it’s more than 40,000 each season.

These are Will’s journal notes from the last week of December, 1989. They had just left the South Pole and were two-and-a-half months from completing the seven-month-long expedition, the longest in Antarctic history:

DECEMBER 25, DAY 152
I spent today alone on the back sled, haunted by the fact that my dogs are sagging and unable to put my finger on why. It is no longer a minor problem—I am running fifteen minutes behind the second sled, so my team doesn’t get a break when the others stop to build snow cairns. I am late for lunch and into camp, which eliminates my spending even a few minutes with the others.
Since I am late into camp in the evening I automatically assume the tasks of the “Outside Man,” which includes cutting snow blocks for water. Tonight the blocks come from one of Dahe’s five-foot-deep snowpits, which he digs every thirty miles. It is the responsibility of each tent’s Outside Man to retrieve blocks from Dahe’s “well,” filling nylon bags with perfectly cut blocks. That simple chore is often the best time for socializing. You kneel at the edge of the pit, relax for a few minutes, all the while packing away snow and chatting with whoever has joined you at the “well.” Dahe is often still there, carefully scraping and bottling samples of snow and ice. Though our exchanges are brief, I always walk away from my visits to the “well” feeling satisfied. The scene reminds me of an African riverbank, with the natives gathering at the river’s edge to draw water for cooking and bathing. Except for the cold, our missions are very similar.

Once inside the tent Geoff wishes me a happy holiday, and we agree that the area of inaccessibility may be the best place to spend it, if for no other reason than it is always a White Christmas here.

Lunch, Antarctica, 1989. Photo: Will Steger

DECEMBER 26, DAY 153
It is amazing how we have acclimated to this weather. Overnight the temperature rose to -15° and we overheated inside and had to sleep with our bags fully unzipped. At home in similar temperatures it would be on the chilly side, even in the north woods of Minnesota. We’re all surprised that the winds have maintained their steady pace and that we are still crossing whitecaps of sastrugi. The surface is not that difficult for us to travel over; though Geoff’s sled tipped once today, it is an annoyance rather than a hindrance. It does make it a little harder to ski and you have to watch the sled carefully so that it doesn’t tip, but since the snow is on the soft side there is little worry of the sled’s breaking if it were to fall. The biggest advantage to our days remains the hard-packed surfaces (today we made twenty-five miles). I don’t think it’s going to be until 82° or 81° latitude, another three hundred miles, that we start seeing the wind cut back a little bit, which is fine with me, because less wind means deeper snow. The closer we can get to Vostok on hard surfaces the better off we are.
After comparing notes with everyone else, it seems that it is our thinking caps that are suffering most these days. The same thoughts keep recycling through your head, mile after mile, day after day, and you simply get tired of thinking. You can’t appease yourself by telling yourself it’s almost over, because it isn’t. We have become like snow nomads, with no sense of place; the only continuity to our days is packing up, traveling and unpacking. Our isolation is compounded by the spiritless, soulless emptiness of the landscape that engulfs us. If a person weren’t at peace with himself on a trip like this it would drive him crazy. If you were a primarily negative person it would be extremely difficult to survive in Antarctica. I used to think that space travel would be exciting; now I’ve had a glimpse of how exacting a psychological toll it must take.
We are expecting Brydon shortly after midnight, because that’s when the cairns’ shadows will be at right angles and easiest for him to follow. We stopped tonight as close to 86° latitude as we could determine, since that was the agreed-upon location for resupply. However, since radio conditions prohibited Brydon from ascertaining where we’d stopped, he left the Pole flying close to the ground, counting on finding our trail of snowmen.
We heard the plane before we saw it, and he flew right to us. He could stay just an hour, given the plane’s tightly calculated fuel allowance, so we hurriedly unloaded the Twin Otter and made arrangements with him to resupply us once more, at 82° latitude, on January 9.

By midday tomorrow we should be taking footsteps on an island off the tip of the Peninsula.

I’ve been to Antarctica a couple dozen times; this trip is momentous because my introduction to the seventh continent was exactly twenty years ago right now, as part of my friend Will Steger’s Transantarctic Expedition. TAE, the last expedition ever by dog on the continent, was a big one: An international team of six men and thirty-six sled dogs spent 221 days on the ice, traveling 3,741 miles across the continent, from the tip of the Peninsula to the South Pole, across the Area of Inaccessibility to the far eastern edge. Among the expeditions many firsts and lasts, the spot on the frozen sea ice where that it began, near small black peaks known as Seal Nunataks off the tip of the Peninsula, is today open ocean. The ice where a Twin Otter from King George Island dropped the team has broken up and drifted off towards South America. What was then frozen sea guarding and protecting Antarctica’s glaciers – part of the Larsen B ice shelf – largely disappeared in 2002.

When it comes to traveling along the Peninsula it’s all about the ice. Each season the ice here is different. As the air and sea temperatures have warmed along the Peninsula – on average by five to nine degrees Fahrenheit, the greatest increase on the planet — the ice freezes later, melts earlier. But as I say, each season is different and I’m very curious to see what it looks like this year. What I’ve been hearing from friends who’ve already been to the Peninsula this early austral summer, they report seeing more snow and less snow, colder air than usual and many blue-sky days.

We are about to cross the Antarctic Convergence, an invisible line on the map between South America and Antarctica that indicates you’ve crossed into true southern territory and air temperatures drop fast. Despite the cold I’m going to try and spend as many hours outside today as possible, basking under the gray skies and in the salt spray, both of which remind me – always – of closing in on Antarctica.

While much of the afternoon is spent in silence, listening to the wind, feeling the sun burn on pale skin, we talk about the state of, well, everything … from politics to small town gossip, climate change to the best way to plant rhubarb. I ask Will, whose dog sledded, skied, canoed and swum around the Arctic as much as anyone alive, what he’d heard about recent North Pole and Arctic adventures. (He’s casually starting to talk about an ambitious dogsled expedition tracing the Northwest Passage in a couple years time.) He mentions John Huston, a mutual friend, who managed Will’s 2007 expedition across Ellesmere Island. “What John did was really incredible, quite different from when we went to the North Pole in 1986 with dogs.”

Just a few days before I’d had an email from John, with some insight into his recently completed North Pole expedition:

On April 25, 2009 we Tyler Fish – and -myself became the first Americans to reach the North Pole unsupported and unassisted. Our 55-day journey, which began at the northernmost point in North America, Ward Hunt Island, Canada, has been called ‘the hardest trek on the planet.’ We skied and snow shoed over 480 miles on the frozen dynamic surface of the Arctic Ocean.

The Arctic Ocean is perhaps the place on earth most affected by climate change. So having just spent almost two months living there, people always ask us “Did you see the effects of climate change?” or “Did you see the ice melting?” The answer is never simple, but surely the ice we traveled over is quite different from the ice 25 years ago.

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, over the past 30 years the ice on the Arctic Ocean has decreased drastically in area and in thickness. Thinner ice is weaker, more susceptible to melting and cracking than older sea ice.

During the last month of the expedition we donned dry suits and swam across 10 or 12 open leads (cracks of water between ice flows). Swimming is not that cold of an experience since the water temperature can be up to 60°F warmer than the air temperature. In recent years most expeditions to the North Pole from Canada have not had to swim more than just a few times.

Over the last two weeks of the expedition we were battered by winds out of the northwest. These winds pushed the pack ice to the southeast 6 to 8 miles every 24 hours, in a direction away from the North Pole. In order to reach the pole in time for our scheduled pick up by a Russian helicopter we slept only 3 of the 66 hours before setting foot on the North Pole. Most of that time we were skiing on the extremely slippery snow/ice crust that has not been visible this early in the season until the past few years.

Some scientists say that the Arctic Ocean may be ice-free during the summer within 30 years. In as few as 10 years it may not be possible to ski to the North Pole.

Especially around his native Minnesota these past four years, Will’s been leading the charge in regard to trying to get local governments to start including warming temperatures in any long-range planning. Like John Huston, Will has seen the changes happening across the Arctic up-close, and is both saddened and angered about what’s happening. But on a warm July day on the edge of the Boundary Waters its best to keep those sentiments – sad and angry – at bay and instead keep your eyes peeled for painted turtles slipping off logs into the Dead River.

This morning – home comfortably but soggy in the Catskills, about to spend the long weekend in the Boundary Waters with my friend Will Steger – I’ve gone to the book about our Aleutian Adventure, “Birthplace of the Winds,” to remind myself exactly what we we’d gotten ourselves into.

“When I awoke I had virtually no anxiety about the upcoming – most likely final – crossing. Rested by a good, eight-hour sleep, feeling as good as I had all trip, I was anxious to get going.

“As soon as we push the boat onto the water, I am overwhelmed by an ominous feeling. The normally kelp-filled cove is wind-churned, foamy. We push out first and try to wait for Sean and Barry, which proves impossible. We are forced to paddle full-strength, right off the bat, just to avoid being sucked out to sea. Beyond, the roar grows louder.”

Suffice to say the day, eight hours later we were still paddling, into an offshore wind blowing from the four-mile long beach on Chuginadak. I remember shouting back to Scott McGuire, suggesting maybe we should hunker down in the kelp – like the seals do, during big storms – but he was afraid it would only grow worse and we’d spend the night on the water.

When we did finally pull the boats up on shore we were cold and cramped, but thrilled. It was our last big paddle of the adventure. I remember my partner Barry Tessman’s words to this day: “It doesn’t get any better than this!”

On global warming, predictions are dire today. We did not predict how much ice would have already been lost at the Poles. In the book I quoted Dr. Stephen Schneider (who I just re-met in San Francisco at the Institute for the Golden Gate a couple weeks ago) suggesting, “We are looking into a very murky crystal ball.” Today it is less murky; we have many more clues about how quickly things are heating up.

Ozone depletion is one environmental problem that has actually been slightly mitigated since the book was published, thanks to constant monitoring of the ozone hole above the Southern Ocean and an international ban on ozone-destroying fluorocarbons; smog, or air pollution, has improved in some urban areas but grown far worse in others, especially as industrial Asia has boomed. Acid rain continues, but with major industries called on to build cleaner stacks and allowances made for emission bartering, there have been improvements.

The subject of what we were dong to the planet’s rain forest was a hot topic 20 years ago; today the threat is the same and we continue to lose vast amounts of forest each year. The contribution of forests as carbon-dioxide vacuums is as important today as it was then. In regard to garbage, the emphasis twenty years ago was largely on the fact that landfills were overflowing; hazardous waste – whether from home products or manufacturing leftovers – continues to be a health hazard around the world.

When it came to water pollution, we were right on: I wrote then about one of the themes of my work today – protecting our one ocean – specifically the weight of plastic already floating near its surface and the harm being done to its marine life. As for freshwater, in the U.S. and elsewhere there have actually been a variety of environmental success stories, particularly in regard to manufacturers dumping waste and chemicals directly into rivers and lakes. Energy consumption was a major worry then and we called for the obvious need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. The world obviously didn’t listen; demand and usage has only gone up, up, up since 1990. Though there is a renewed emphasis on alternatives these days, there is still little real money being spent on development; even the Obama administration is having a hard time admitting there is no such thing as “clean coal.” Overpopulation was the final chapter in the book and spoke to the discrepancy between the impacts on the planet of a baby born in the U.S. versus Bangladesh – the American would during his/her lifetime use one hundred times more resources and energy as his/her Bangladeshian counterpart. That has not changed.

An emphasis of the book was on what the individual could do to reduce what we have in the past two decades come to know as his/her footprint. On only a couple environmental fronts have we made significant steps forward (ozone depletion, freshwater pollution). One good thing to grow in the past twenty years is a boom in green consciousness. I wish I could say books like ours have contributed to that greening; perhaps they have, it’s a hard thing to measure. Personally it’s a good exercise for me to revisit “Saving the Earth” every year to see just how we’re doing and to ponder an updated version on some future anniversary. Though one most likely available only for the Kindle, to save on trees.

That expedition, documented in the book Steger and I wrote about the expedition (“Crossing Antarctica”), had its lowlights: A forty-day cold storm on the Peninsula, which stopped travel or limited it to several miles a day. The death-by-freezing of one of Steger’s favorite dogs, Tim. Lost caches. A very impolite welcome by officials at the U.S. Scott-Amundsen base at the South Pole. Long, arduous days crossing the high plateau west of the Pole, known as the Area of Inaccessibility. But ultimately that $12 million expedition will be remembered as both the final dogsled adventure here and the longest of any kind ever.

Dog sledding through the Transantarctic Range, 1989

Since then each season I pay attention to the variety of serious expeditions and stunts that come to Antarctica to test their mettle. By now the continent has been skied, kited and walked from almost every angle possible. Some are successful (Borge Ousland’s solo, unsupported ski), some less so (hot air balloonists and golfers), others simply too bizarre to understand why they are continued (a marathon on King George Island?).

This season a handful of teams and a few solo men and one woman are attempting to reach the South Pole from various starting points, with various goals. Todd Carmichael is speed skiing to the South Pole, unsupported, solo. The great grandson of Ernest, Peter Shackleton, is part of a team recreating the hundredth anniversary of grandpa’s great attempt. An old friend, Richard Weber, who was on Steger’s North Pole team in 1986, is part of the South Pole Quest Team. Veteran explorer Mike Horn is skiing from base camp at Patriot Hills to the South Pole, as part of his four-year-long round the world by-all-means Pangaea Expedition. And a couple dudes, as far as I know, are still planning to drive across part of the continent in some kind of motorized vehicle.

It’s cold in the interior today, but a balmy twenty degrees along the Peninsula, under gray skies and a light snow. Midday I picked up Apsley Cherry-Gerrard’s “Worst Journey in the World,” one of the best-written books about early Antarctic exploration, for a quick reminder of how those first adventurers found travel on the seventh continent. Gerrard’s is an account of a trio of Robert F. Scott’s men who went, at their boss’s behest in 1910, on a wintertime march on the west side of McMurdo Sound, some 70 miles around Ross Island to Cape Crozier, to collect penguin eggs in the middle of the Antarctic winter.

“The temperature tonight was -75.8 degrees, and I will not pretend that it did not convince me that Dante was right when he placed the circles of ice below the circles of fire … The horror of the nineteen days it took us to travel from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier would have to be re-experienced to be appreciated; and any one would be a fool who went again: it is not possible to describe it. The weeks, which followed were comparative bliss, not because later our conditions were better – they were far worse – but because, we were callous. I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain. They talk of the heroism of the dying – they little know – it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep. The trouble is to go on ….”

Makes me wonder what those traveling inland today are reading, and writing?