From Alaska to the White Continent

It was so quiet that I felt I had to hold my breath as I could hear my own heartbeat in this vast stillness. There were no sounds of any life, and for the moment, not even any wind. The water made only a noiseless oily movement like poured gin from the freezer. I had found this spot on a steep rock jutting up out of the white wilderness. As far as the eye could see there was a multitude of whites and blues of ice and dark blue almost black water that looked just as cold as it was. Suddenly, my surrealistic environment was shattered with what seemed like a shot from a heavy cannon. Within a few hundred feet an iceberg had calved right before my eyes. This is Antarctica, the fifth largest continent of over five million square miles of lonely mostly snow-covered landscape. 

It is the farthest south I have traveled in my adventures to the far corners of our world. 

Previously, I had been in the far north to the former ‘gold-rush” town of Nome in Alaska. Some 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle, it is a city without trees in a 600-mile radius and surrounded by tundra and the Bering Sea. I flew around in the middle of the winter in a two-seater helicopter during a snowstorm to photograph the Iditarod, the famous, or infamous yearly dogsled race normally held near the polar circle in the beginning of March. All I remember was the terrible winds buffeting the small helicopter and wondering how we could possibly stay in the air. My pilot looked the part of the rough Alaskan with a full beard, and he did not seem in the least concerned as we buffeted about. Finally, after he looked sideways at my white face as I was trying to busy myself making more photos than I would ever need. He cracked a wide smile: “I guess it’s about time we try to make it home.”

Thankful to be back on the ground I did not even mind my transfer back to town on a school bus without adequate heating. When I disembarked and walked towards my hotel at the end of the street, a local stopped his pick-up truck and told me to “get in before you freeze to death.” We ended up in a bar where a sign on the wall proclaimed: “Our town is too small for a town drunk, so we take turns.” Alaska in the winter certainly is a far cry from the beautiful summers, but it can be an exhilarating experience. 

Both Alaska and Antarctica boast majestic icebergs and incredible views of massive ice floes. Alaska offers sightings of the impressive polar bears and down South there are colonies, or “rookeries” of penguins. There are scheduled flights into Alaska, whereas Antarctica can only be reached by boat. That said, McMurdo Station is the U.S. Research base on the southern tip of Ross Island and has an airport with three runways.

However, the facility is only used by the U.S. government and for emergencies. Visitors interested in exploring inner Antarctica cross the Drake Passage from Ushuaia at the southern tip of South America during our winter months, which is their summer.

The rough seas in this section of the world are notorious, and during my crossing I was once again shown the power of nature in the form of 40-foot waves. I took photos from my small cabin window until the washbasin was torn from the wall when our small boat hit an exceptionally big wave.

Antarctica is the only continent without permanent human residents and 5,250,000 square miles of a lonely snow- and ice-covered landscape. The Greeks believed there was land there to balance the lands in the North and avoid the world from toppling over. They called it “antarktikos” – opposite the Arctic. The land forms an enormous plateau with an average elevation of 6,000 feet and mountain ranges along the coastline. Further inland, the South Polar Plateau lies under thousands of years of snow accumulation forming a layer of over 8,000 feet. Most everywhere the temperature stays below freezing the whole year, and as low as -130 Fahrenheit has been recorded in winter. 

Joseph M. Dukert wrote: “Imagine a place as big as the U.S. and Europe combined. Sunnier than California, yet colder than the freezer compartment of your refrigerator. Drier than Arabia and higher than mountainous Switzerland. And emptier than the Sahara Desert. The strange and beautiful continent at the bottom of the Earth.” 

In 1820, Nathaniel Palmer, an American who was hunting for fur seals, was the first to sight what is now called the Antarctic Peninsula. Some 20 years later, several explorers mapped the coast sufficiently to prove that there was indeed, another continent. But it was not until 1911 that Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, reached the South Pole. The North Pole was reached two years earlier in 1909 by American engineer, Robert Peary. In fact, there have been heated discussions that another American, Frederick Cook may have reached the pole a year earlier.

The introduction of the airplane opened the inhospitable lands to further exploration and research. Today there are a handful of research stations from a number of nations located there. Most of them for legitimate research, but some as an excuse for military presence. The Antarctic Treaty was signed by twelve nations in 1961 making this part of the world unique. Countries agreed to maintain and protect all living resources, not to make any further claims on the area, not to dump waste or use any nuclear material. Military presence was allowed but only as support for scientific research. My Antarctica journey was an adventure starting in Ushuaia on the southern tip of South America as I boarded the M.S. Explorer. It was the first such ship originally designed for the Antarctic waters by legendary tour operator Lars-Eric Lindblad in 1969. At a length of 238 feet and 2,398 grt, an 8,000 nautical mile range, shallow draft and ice-strengthened hull allowed her to reach points none of the other passenger vessels in the area could reach at the time. 

One of the many highlights of my voyage was meeting the great grandson of Sir Ernest Shackleton. Ernest Shackleton’s incredible Antarctica expedition from 1914 to 1916 was brought to the forefront by Alfred’s Lansing’s book “Endurance.” Young Shackleton was catching a ride with several others to McMurdo Station and we had ample time to talk.

His great-grandfather led a total of four expeditions as a polar explorer. He never reached the South Pole but got as close as 97 miles. The third journey aboard the Endurance made history as the ship got stuck in the ice, eventually was crushed and sank. Shackleton and five crew members went for help in one of the 22-foot-long life boats on an 800-mile journey to South Georgia, battling 50-foot waves and then another 22 mile walk across mountains to the whaling station at Stromness. It was the first contact with other humans in two years and the final step to eventually save his crew left behind on Elephant Island. All 128 members survived!

In 1921 Shackleton returned one more time to Antarctica aboard a converted Norwegian Sealer, the Quest, but on January 5, 1922 he passed away after a heart attack. It was a befitting ending for me to end my journey to Antarctica visiting his grave on a hill in South Georgia Island and sit next to the Scottish Granite headstone looking down to the old whaling station and the seas beyond.