Beat the Crowds. Antarctica Now.

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Outside Magazine November 2001

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Beat the Crowds. Antarctica Now.
As the Last Cool Place becomes an adventure-travel magnet, the scientists and bureaucrats who run the show are feeling crowded. Is this big, beautiful continent big enough for everybody?

By Rob Buchanan


	Members of Doug Stoup's 1999 team, en route to the first ski and snowboard descent of Mount Vinson, Antarctica's highest peak

With its snub nose and boxy fuselage, the Lockheed L100 Hercules is not a lovely flying machine. But to a loadmaster, it's beautiful. Thanks to four 4,300-horsepower turboprop engines, a Herc can take off at almost twice its own weight. It can transport a light tank, or several jeeps, or 90 combat-equipped troops. But on this austral summer morning in Punta Arenas, Chile, the cargo is less fearsome: 35 adventure travelers, along with a six-man South African flight crew. Inside the nearly windowless plane, a few rows of old airliner seats have been bolted down. The rest of the space is given over to food and gear—and dozens of 60-liter drums of aviation fuel. Where we're going, there's no more precious commodity.

It's early January, the beginning of a 10-day visit for this group. Most of the passengers are amateur climbers and their guides en route to 16,864-foot Mount Vinson, Antarctica's highest peak. Many of the clients are prosperous graybeards well into their fifties, though a handful of cashed-out-early Internet entrepreneurs and investment bankers bring down the average age. Not everyone is rich. One guy from Kentucky mortgaged his True Value hardware store to be here, and another, a soon-to-be-famous blind mountaineer named Erik Weihenmayer, has persuaded the National Federation of the Blind to help underwrite his and his guide's airfare all the way to Vinson—$26,000 each. (He'll repay them in a few months with the flood of publicity he generates by summiting Mount Everest.) Three of the group are just plain tourists: two sightseers headed off to high-five the South Pole, and one Antarctica buff, a college professor from Illinois who's on the austerity plan. She's paying $11,500 simply to hang out where the plane lands.

After a six-hour flight, we begin a long, circular descent—an unnerving experience with no window to look out and no paved runway below. There's a bump as the wheels hit the ice, and we seem to roll forever. When the cargo ramp drops open I get my first look at the Last Continent. Rich afternoon light slants into the back of the plane; bulkily clad silhouettes are already rolling fuel drums down onto the dimpled blue ice of the runway. Beyond these figures, a glittering sea of snow runs off toward distant hills. But how distant? Five miles? Thirty? In the pristine Antarctic air, objects appear with such amazing clarity that it's hard to say.

We're at 80 degrees south, 81 degrees west, about 550 miles from where the crooked finger of the Antarctic Peninsula joins the continent, and 690 miles from the pole. The Ellsworth Mountains, Antarctica's highest range, stretch to the west. To the north lie Hercules Inlet and the Weddell Sea, buried under the 3,000-foot-thick Ronne Ice Shelf. It's a thrill just to be standing here.

On a slight rise half a mile away is our destination—the Patriot Hills base camp of Adventure Network International, the company that flew us in and, for the last 15 years, Antarctica's only private air service. Established in 1984 by a maverick Anglo-Canadian partnership and now a U.S. outfit based in Boca Raton, Florida, ANI is the lone civilian, as it were, among the continent's 80-odd national bases—mostly scientific research stations—run by 27 different countries. The camp at Patriot Hills consists of a half-dozen big Weatherhavens (translucent, insulated tents shaped like Quonset huts), a hexagonal canvas radio shack, and a dozen smaller tents that house ANI's staff: cooks, field guides, a mechanic, and a doctor. Nearby, three ski-equipped airplanes—a pair of De Havilland Twin Otters and a bright-orange Cessna 185—are tethered side by side, noses to the wind. The planes are impressive, but as we're about to discover, in Antarctica there's never any guarantee that you can get where you want, when you want.

The cold seems as dazzling as the light, though I later discover it's a relatively mild 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Moving quickly, we pile our gear onto a sledge train pulled by a snowcat. As we do, a group of departing climbers loads the Herc for its return flight. Everybody's in high spirits: All have summited Vinson, and one couple has parapented it (they're French, naturally).

"It was amazing," says one man, handing me his camera so I can get a shot of the group. "And cold. Wow!"

It's hard not to be inspired by the enthusiasm of the homeward-bound. Soon we're all pitching in to roll the last of their cargo on board. A number of battered fuel barrels are headed out—empties, I assume, until I attempt to lift one.

"Frozen piss," explains Jamie Main, a hale, gloveless Scot in his midthirties who's the field operations manager at Patriot Hills. "Aye, you'll not see any yellow snow 'round here."

After the pee drums come the poo drums—plastic half-barrels stacked with clumpy Hefty bags. This is a point of pride for ANI: Everything but a little gray water—leftovers from sponge baths and dishwashing—comes off the ice, a far stricter environmental standard than that of even the most progressive national programs. (By contrast, at Amundsen- Scott South Pole Station—the U.S. polar base staffed by up to 220 scientists and support workers—raw sewage is pumped through a heated pipe directly into the ice cap, where it forms supposedly self-contained "bulbs" 375 feet down.)

No doubt ANI's tread-lightly ethic reflects a genuine desire to do the right thing, but there's also a loud cleaner-than-thou message going out for all the world to hear. It's my first glimpse of the other Antarctica. Not the vast, wide-open Last Great Wilderness, but instead the crowded political arena in which three factions—scientists, environmentalists, and "recreationals"—are circling warily. The conflicts that separate them come down to questions of access—who gets it, and who decides who gets it. Science's presence on Antarctica is significant—the place is a vast lab for studies on everything from global warming to the history of the universe, with the U.S. alone spending $217 million in fiscal 2001 on research. But science is no longer the only game in town. ANI represents the interests of adventurers everywhere who dream of one day reaching Antarctica's frozen heart.

In the dining tent, an hour after we land, Main announces that the weather at Vinson base camp is clear and holding. The Otter pilots are ready to fly. The first two planeloads will leave immediately, carrying most of the privately guided climbing groups. A third group, including five independents who've signed up to climb with Keil Hillman, ANI's Vinson guide, will depart as soon as the first Otter returns.

"When will that be?" asks Alison Levine, a 35-year-old San Francisco investment adviser who's climbing with ANI. "Will that be later today?" She smiles, catching herself. "I mean, you know, I just don't want those guys getting too much of a head start."

"Don't know, lassie," says Main, laying on the brogue. "Could be today. Could be a week from today."

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