TWO WEEKS LATER—and a week after our Calvo detour had us waylaid—we've made it 35 miles seaward and still have a day before the Navimag ferry picks us up on its run north to Puerto Montt. The situation seems desperate: The avocados are gone, and we're down to our last one-pound wheel of Edam. There's still oatmeal, but it's of little use to us without butter or brown sugar.

"First we were the Endurance," Reg offers before invoking John Wesley Powell. "Now we're the Emma Dean: The bacon is rancid, the flour is molded, but we've got coffee!" Nearly a pound of it still.

"Show me hunger, show me starvation," I say, snapping his picture. Reg growls like a bear as he hauls ashore our last dozen sacks of freeze-dried chicken and lasagna.

Our suffering, or lack of it, has been a running joke for the last month. One of Reg's favorite truisms is "Adventure is just another word for poor planning," and he's right: Our hardships have been of our own making, like the time I didn't anchor my tent and woke up flying through the air. Tilman understood this, too, and traveled with great civility. "Give us the luxuries and we will dispense with the necessities" was his rallying cry, as he demonstrated above Calvo Fjord. "After tea," he noted, "we improved the first part of the ice route by cutting steps."

Tilman never knew the glory of a hot Nalgene at the foot of his Polarguard sleeping bag, nor the pleasures of sipping steaming coffee from a BrewMug. But he seemed to understand Reg's life philosophy: "If you've got water in front of you, a trail to hike, and a bottle of wine among friends, that's enough."