Beat the Crowds. Antarctica Now. (Cont'd.)

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Outside Magazine November 2001

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Beat the Crowds. Antarctica Now. (Cont'd.)


	Loading and unloading fuel and gear at Patriot Hills

JOHN DAVIS, AN AMERICAN seal hunter, was the first person to set foot on the Antarctic Peninsula, in 1821. But it wasn't until 1901, when the British explorer Robert F. Scott and his men landed at Ross Island and began the first push toward the South Pole, that the exploration of Antarctica's interior begin. (Scott ultimately lost the polar race by a month to the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who arrived on December 14, 1911.)

The next men to set foot at 90 degrees south were the crew of a U.S. Navy Douglas C-47 Skytrain, dubbed Que Sera Sera , which landed on Halloween Day 1956, the vanguard of a Cold War effort to claim the South Pole before the Russians did. With much of the continent still unseen and unmapped, science and exploration enjoyed a peaceful coexistence over the next decade. In the summer of 19571958, the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary, completed the first crossing of the continent. In 1966, the U.S. Navy flew a team of climbers from the American Alpine Club to Vinson, where they made the first ascent.

Annual commercial trips to Antarctica started in January of that year, when Lars-Eric Lindblad, a Swedish-born tour leader and trailblazing showman, chartered a small, ice-strengthened ship from the Argentine navy, put 56 clients and a handful of lecturers on board, and sailed south across the Drake Passage from Ushuaia, a small port on Tierra del Fuego. Lindblad's passengers were delighted by the itinerary, which looped through the subantarctic islands and down the glaciated west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Even better was the chance to zip ashore on a Zodiac and see some of the planet's most spectacular concentrations of wildlife—the peninsula's huge seal and penguin populations.

Lindblad didn't get his first competitor, Society Expeditions, until 12 years later. But by 1990, with six outfitters and approximately 5,000 annual visitors, Antarctica had become an established, if still somewhat obscure, adventure-travel destination. Then came the flush economy of the nineties, a glut of decommissioned Soviet research vessels, and a surge of interest in the early days of polar exploration, most notably Ernest Shackleton's botched but heroic 1914-1916 voyage on the Endurance —an epic that, like the 1996 Everest disaster, seems to have functioned less as a cautionary tale than an inducement to travel. During the 19992000 season, a record 14,762 visitors—99 percent of them passengers on Lindblad-style cruises—set foot on the continent, according to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, a Colorado-based trade group with 32 member companies. Though last year saw a slight decline in visitors (the total was closer to 13,000), more growth is coming. Recently, IAATO issued a report projecting 20,000 visitors by the 2005 2006 season. In 2001, ANI took 140 people to Antarctica.

To a small but vocal contingent of environmentalists, that prediction is a call to arms. "Sure, people should be able to go," says Beth Clark, president of The Antarctica Project, a Washington, D.C.based advocacy group that is the North American secretariat of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, a network of 240 member organizations worldwide. "But we need to cap their numbers at something reasonable, and we need to do it soon."

Clark is a fortysomething biologist and a former researcher at McMurdo Station, the biggest U.S. base in Antarctica. She's perhaps best known for championing a proposal to make the continent an internationally administered world park, a plan endorsed by two of ASOC's highest-profile member organizations, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. If established, this park would have few visitors; Clark's "reasonable" number is closer to 5,000 per year. She wants the world to "step back" until long-term studies on tourist impact are completed.

Tourism pros counter that they're already being careful. "No one is more concerned about the environment than we are—it's our product," says Denise Landau, IAATO's executive secretary. She points out that IAATO guidelines call for shore parties of fewer than 100 people and plenty of buffer zones for the animals. She believes such self-policing is the only workable solution on a continent where there is no single legal authority.

Instead there's a jumble of overseers. The Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959 by 12 countries and since ratified by 45 nations, put an indefinite hold on territorial claims, provided for international scientific cooperation, and prohibited military activity. It did not say much about eco-policing, but subsequent agreements, including the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty—put into effect in 1998—have laid out rudimentary environmental standards. Clark's approach has been to lobby an annual gathering of signatories known as the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting for stricter rules. In 1994, in response to concerns from environmentalists and scientists, the signatories banned dogs from Antarctica, partly to block diseases that could harm native wildlife.

Most tour operators roll their eyes when they hear Clark's name, but not all disagree with her call to limit numbers. "We're all a bit worried about what happens if big ships come down here," admits Dave German, founder of Fathom Expeditions, an outfitter based in Toronto. But come they have. One large ship, the Orient Lines 500-passenger Marco Polo , is a regular on the Antarctica circuit, while another, the Holland America MS Rotterdam , which carries 1,300 passengers, cruised partway down the peninsula in January 2000, though no landings were attempted.

"The system works now," German says. "But it won't if a bunch of faceless corporations decide to offer Antarctica for $1,000 a passenger."

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