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Antarctica: Unlocking the Forbidden Continent
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18311 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1990 |
2,422 Words |
| Author
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Gordon Wiltsie
Gordon Wiltsie is a California-based writer and photographer.
He recently returned from Antarctica |
Although I was too cold and exhausted to feel much at the time, pulling over the last cornice to the top of Antarctica's 16,059-foot mount Vinson ranks among my life's most ecstatic moments. Having spent five long days toiling on steep, icy slopes, carrying packs half our weight, four friends and I had crested the highest point on earth's most forbidding continent and gazed on a sight unique in all the world.
To every side of us sprawled the vast expanse of our planet's last great wilderness, partially wreathed in clouds and bathed in a rich, warm hue by a low-angle midnight sun. To the north and south ran the sharp, angular Ellsworth Range, swathed in glaciers and mostly unclimbed, unnamed, and unexplored eastward lay the treacherous Ronne Ice Shelf; and to the cap, so flat that from our high perch the horizon seemed to follow the earth's curvature.
A stiff wind made ice crystals hiss as they stung our faces, the only sound we heard; as far as our eyes could see, nothing crawled, flew, or grew. Not even lichens can survive the six-month night here, when winds gust at more than one hundred miles per hour and temperatures plummet to three digits below zero.
Except for our Twin Otter pilot and his engineer, camped in a tiny, tented tourist base 150 miles south, the next nearest human outpost was an American science base at the South Pole, more than 600 miles farther. Never before had I felt so much like a man standing at the end of the earth.
Indeed, what made our climb astonishing was not that we had climbed our mountain, but simply that
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