Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  The Dry Valleys

  We went on like this for hours, as though there was no being done with the astonishment landscapes might offer us, or to the potential for any seemingly inconsequential thing out there to startle and inform, or for the most ordinary event to kindle one’s hunger to experience again what was still undisturbed and beautiful. One brilliantly clear afternoon when we saw the sun crossing behind the Royal Society Range we quit whatever it was we were doing at the Berg Field Center and sat down to watch. At the head of the Koettlitz Glacier, where the ice of the polar ice cap crowns slightly as it flows over a shoulder of bedrock, the low light of the sun was passing through the glacier’s interior. For a few moments it seemed that this part of the glacier was lit from within. The sun burned there like a lightbulb shining through a parchment shade.

  * * *

  —

  IF THERE WAS a siren landscape for me in my forties and fifties, it was Antarctica. It was difficult and expensive to get to without major help; weather still played a challenging role in whatever you wished to do; most of its particular geographical corners were still unexplored (though each year field parties reached a few more of them). It was relatively easy, unless you were part of the workforce employed at McMurdo, to get off by yourself or get out in the field with a few others doing things you never imagined. Importantly, Antarctica is the only continent that has not been nationalized and which might still be characterized as virtually unpopulated. Anything might turn up here, like the most sane, equitable international treaty humans ever negotiated and signed, the Antarctic Treaty. This treaty places the gathering and sharing of knowledge ahead of subjugating the land (a ridiculous thought, here, to begin with); forbids military maneuvers; and encourages ethical comity.

  All that’s missing, for me, is a wider understanding of how little human history this place has. When I looked at the mountain ranges to the northwest of our camp at Graves Nunataks, I saw not only mountain ranges no one had ever been in but a land in which no animals familiar to me had ever made a home. When we left the southern end of Klein Glacier, headed for Graves Nunataks, and had to make an emergency stop at Inuksuq, I was reminded of the Thule, pressing on eastward from Skraeling Island in summer. When I closed up an unknown, unnamed gelatinous ctenophore underwater in a two-quart specimen jar, to be photographed in the lab that night and then released back into the sea, I felt like William Bartram, exploring the St. Johns River in Florida with his father in 1765.

  * * *

  —

  ON MY FIRST JOURNEY to Antarctica I accompanied two other journalists on a press tour. Our host, a gentleman from the Office of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation, escorted us on three or four brief trips, showing us in just a few days much of what is iconic about the continent. The time was adequate to acquire a general sense of Antarctic history and of the scientific research efforts the United States was funding there. We traveled by helicopter to Cape Royds, where Ernest Shackleton’s polar expedition overwintered in 1908, and then to Cape Evans, where Robert Falcon Scott’s party overwintered in 1911 and 1912. Both capes, located on the west coast of Ross Island, front McMurdo Sound and are relatively close to McMurdo Station. The diligence of several New Zealand historical societies, a paucity of visitors, and the extremely cold, dry weather have combined to preserve the buildings at both places in a nearly pristine state. (Scott’s pocket watch was still hanging on a hook by his bunk the first time I visited.) The immediacy of the past at sites like this is eerie. If you felt free to do so at Cape Evans, you could have stretched out on Captain Titus Oates’s upper bunk, bunched up his pillow, and, removing his bookmark, begun reading at the page where he left off in a book he never saw again. The hardy sun-bleached buildings with their heroic gloom still evince the dutiful lives of resolute men, a hundred years after the abrupt departure of those who survived the tragedy of Scott’s final expedition.

  We were also flown out to McMurdo Sound’s ice edge, where inquisitive emperor penguins approached us cautiously, waddle-walking across the ice; and pods of orcas passed close by in the open water and paused a dozen yards away to spy-hop, curious about our presence. We were flown 840 miles south to visit Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and also had time at a cacophonous Adélie penguin rookery on Ross Island. On several occasions we were helicoptered out from McMurdo to inspect scientific camps in Victoria Land. Most of the geologists, glaciologists, limnologists, chemists, and other scientists working at these sites lived in heated semipermanent tent shelters with plywood floors, called Jamesways. They were equipped with cots, tables, and chairs, and occasionally garrisoned with a small support staff, which would include a cook if the camp was large enough.

  Our weeklong exposure to Antarctic history, to the diversity and importance of the scientific work there, and to the scale and breadth of the land itself, left the three of us astonished and admiring. We returned to the United States to write—insightfully, we each wanted to think—about what we’d seen for The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and in my case, The Washington Post. Amid all that I had found exciting and fascinating during my introduction to Antarctica, however, I also observed several dark threads, the kind of undercurrents that move beneath any enterprise of this scale once it becomes institutionalized. By the 1980s waste management had become a major problem at McMurdo Station, and the NSF had been pressured by a contingent of Greenpeace representatives to attend to it. (Greenpeace had by then set up their own base near McMurdo Station, to monitor NSF’s compliance with the treaty.) The military infrastructure at McMurdo, primarily responsible for airborne logistics, a tradition held over from Operation Deep Freeze in the 1950s, had become a disruptive and frustrating presence for many scientists by the 1980s. The military had worked tirelessly from the start of scientific research in Antarctica to prevent female scientists from working there, arguing that the conditions were too challenging for women. By the end of the 1980s, military protocols, such as no flying on Sundays, were creating too great an impediment to scientific work, and eventually much of the military presence at McMurdo was phased out. More efficient private contractors came in to replace them. During the years the military maintained its presence there, however, only two ways of imagining the world were encouraged at McMurdo: scientific inquiry, with its focus on rational analysis and data; and military order, with its focus on chain of command and strictly enforced regulations.

  As military operations in Antarctica were reduced, the NSF started up an Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, an effort to support the work of writers, painters, and photographers, primarily, who wanted to interpret the continent. The NSF’s goal with the program was to have artists and writers convey to the lay public a more complete image of Antarctica than science alone was able to provide. After my initial visit as a journalist, under the auspices of the NSF, I applied and was accepted several more times as a participant in the Artists and Writers Program. My first opportunity, as it happened, followed immediately on my first stint there as a reporter. The NSF invited me to stay on an additional week at McMurdo and provided me with logistical support that got me out to a couple of additional field camps.

  * * *

  —

  OF THE HALF DOZEN or so outstations I’d visited during my first week in Antarctica, the one that had worked most on my imagination was a New Zealand base called Vanda. I was able to make arrangements to visit it once more during my second week there.

  The tight cluster of five or six pale green one-story flat-roofed huts at Vanda stood out starkly on a dark, snowless plain, a tiny green checkmark in a vast basin of space, a dot in a long, barren, narrow valley slung between the ramparts of two mountain ranges, the Olympus Range to the north, the Asgard Range to the south. The buildings were chained to the ground at all four corners to hold them against ferocious katabatic winds that fell off the polar plateau and sometimes swept down the entire eighteen-mile length of the
valley at sixty knots or more.

  Though it’s almost completely covered by ice and snow, Antarctica is in fact a desert. Snowfall is scant. And in several places along its coast, where valley glaciers have retreated, the land surface has been scraped bare by the wind. (These particular glacial retreats occurred long before the modern-day glacial retreats caused by global climate change.) These dozen or so expanses of exposed ground are called dry valleys. They’re found at two very infrequently visited spots in East Antarctica, the Bunger and Vestfold Hills, and also, famously, in Victoria Land, where they form a series of parallel valleys running perpendicular to the western shore of McMurdo Sound. Vanda station is situated in the middle of one of them, the Wright Valley, next to a permanently frozen body of water, Lake Vanda. (The eponymous Vanda was a lead dog for a sledging party, the first to arrive here, in 1958.) To the north of the Wright are several more dry valleys, three of which—Barwick, Balham, and McKelvey—are closed to human entry in order to preserve them in a completely undisturbed state for as long as possible.

  It hasn’t rained in the Wright Valley for two million years, and what little snow falls here is immediately shattered and sublimated by the wind. A geologist’s eye would note right away that rocks lying loose on the valley floor have never been sorted by the force of moving water—small rocks sit beside big rocks, and grains of rock are not clustered together. Their distribution is completely random. Generally speaking, biological life in Antarctica is restricted to the coast; life in the interior is represented only by lichen, algae in the snow, and microscopic creatures living in protected environments. Deep within the microfractures of some rocks in the dry valleys, for example, where they’re shielded from desiccating winds and where concentrated solar energy can provide moisture from a melted snowflake, microorganisms called cryptoendoliths are able to survive where logic once dictated life was not possible.

  I arrived at Vanda station by helicopter, shook hands all around with people I’d met the week before, and was shown my bunk. The interior of the main building is tidy, spartan, and snug. Solar panels and wind generators produce electricity quietly, complementing the soft-spoken atmosphere researchers maintain here. I’d already gotten a good look at the station on the press tour, and had interviewed the scientists working there. I was actually most eager to go for a long walk.

  What also drew me to Vanda was the administrative simplicity of this outpost for the curious, and the starkness of the place—the buildings looked like a handful of fishing dories gammed up on the North Atlantic without a mother ship. The classical lines of the Wright itself, too, called out to me, so fundamentally different from the rococo lines of a tropical jungle. The austerity of the valley was made even bolder by the transparency of the dustless air, through which reflected light from the farthest mountains reached us with no loss of detail. And it was here too, in the Wright Valley, that Antarctica’s longest river, the Onyx, flowed.

  I set off northeast along the course of the Onyx with two companions, men bent on addressing some scientific responsibilities they had farther up the valley than I intended to go. While they attended to that, I planned to climb up to the saddle of Bull Pass in the Olympus Range for a look into the sequestered McKelvey Valley. If time permitted, I’d hike west a short ways along the spine of the mountains. I was in radio contact with the other two men, but the landscape was so naked and the air so clear, we were rarely out of binocular sight of each other.

  The milk-blue sky was clear of obvious clouds, the winds were light, and the temperature pleasantly warm, around 20° F. Near the top of the pass I came upon a smooth, shallow slope. Its sandy surface was pocked by rocky fist-size debris shed from the mountain walls above. Most of these rocks had come from a thin vein of dolerite, a fine-grained black igneous rock similar to basalt. Those that had not rolled farther down the slope were settled here on a layer of compacted sand. Over time, katabatic winds, bearing grains of sand and slivers of ice, had abraded some of the rocks and eroded the ground around them, leaving each one mounted on a small pedestal of sand, like a faceted gem sitting on a jeweler’s dop. They resemble small deliberately shaped modernist sculptures, the convergence of their flat, dark planes suggesting the form of a pyramid. They’re called ventifacts. Things made by the wind.

  At the top of the pass I radioed my companions below to tell them I was going to walk a mile or two to the west, along the crest of the range. The fact that Bull Pass had a name was no indication that anyone had ever been here, and in effect, Bull Pass was a dead end—the McKelvey Valley just to the north was unexplored and permanently closed. I had not seen anything like a human footprint since I left the banks of the Onyx, and in the moment, I had the thought that I might be the first person ever to hike west along the crest of the Olympus Range, toward Mount Jason. As I set off, I allowed myself to hold on to this thought, partly because the history of human exploration in the interior of Antarctica is so exceedingly thin. I was intoxicated with a sense of the great space surrounding me, the deep Earth history on display, a scene easy to come by in the Transantarctics. Some time into this reverie I came upon a camera case lying on the ground.

  I picked it up. I looked it over thoroughly. The upper half of a black Nikon 35mm SLR case. Chastised, I put the case in my backpack with my survival gear and went on. The urge to make an exclusive claim runs deep in a culture like mine, where individuals fear more and more a loss of identity, the onset of anonymity. I was privately mortified by the fact that I had entertained the illusion that I might be the first to walk this ridgeline. To what degree had this adolescent daydream of mine taken me away from what was actually here?

  I doubled back to the pass some time later. From that height I could see the morning sun glinting on the river below, a line of silver neatly bisecting the lower Wright Valley. Across the way I could see the instructive mountain walls of the Asgard Range, a deck of sedimentary layers, mainly sandstones, called the Beacon Supergroup. In one of these layers, formed about 200 million years ago, scientists have found the fossil remains of a reptile, Lystrosaurus, and a fern, Dicroidium. The identical organisms have been found in rocks of similar age in South Africa, Australia, India, and South America, evidence that supports the modern idea that these continents once formed a single continent before drifting apart in the early Mesozoic.

  I descended from Bull Pass to the valley below without having gotten a view into the McKelvey Valley. It appeared I’d have to hike a ways to the north before I could see into it, and I didn’t want to take the chance of crossing an invisible line and ending up in the protected area.

  * * *

  —

  TECHNICALLY, THE ONYX is a meltwater stream. When the glacier that once filled the Wright Valley retreated west toward the polar plateau (its remnant is called the Wright Upper Glacier), it left an ice mass at the lower end of the valley (the Wright Lower Glacier) which is the major source of the Onyx River’s water. In January, at the height of the austral summer, the Onyx flows unobstructed in gently sinusoidal sweeps southwestward to Lake Vanda. In its lower reach, the section I’d hiked beside that morning, the river is about thirty feet wide and less than a foot deep. (Years later, at Graves Nunataks, I thought of the wind as the only animal living in the interior of Antarctica; on this day the Onyx had made a similar claim on my imagination, a thing living where no other thing lived, but no more in the realm of biology than the wind.)

  I emptied my canteen of McMurdo Station water and filled it from the river.

  On their return, the two scientists met me with chunks of ice chipped from the nose of a glacier that descends into the valley from the Asgard Range, and we headed back to the base together. Glacial ice fizzes and pops as it melts, releasing Earth’s atmosphere of many thousands of years ago in bursts. The small tote of glacial ice the scientists were bringing back would be greatly appreciated by the other scientists. At the time, glacial ice, whenever it was available, was used in a
ritual at Vanda station, a ceremony meant to bring a visiting guest into the exclusive company of those in the so-called Royal Drambuie Society. This ritual was little more than a friendly drink together, but it had an edge to it. The New Zealanders disliked the overfriendly presumption and swagger of the young American military pilots who flew scientists and visitors to Vanda. The pilots couldn’t join the Royal Drambuie Society because they couldn’t drink while on duty, so this was a way for this otherwise friendly group of people to send them a message.

  Every visitor, on the other hand, including the pilots, was offered freshly baked scones with their tea upon arrival, and an invitation to join the Royal Vanda Swim Club. Candidates were escorted out onto the ice covering Lake Vanda, where they were asked to remove all their clothes except the heavy wool socks most everyone wore, which provided traction on the ice. Those who were still game descended a spiral staircase carved into the walls of an ice shaft that ended twelve feet below in the extremely salty waters of Lake Vanda. Full immersion—in over your head—was required for membership.

  Not everyone opted to join. The ambient air was always colder than the water, and if the wind was blowing, the chill factor could easily be well below 0° F. Back in the hut, successful candidates were given a jacket patch and an official wallet card attesting to their daring.