During the Antarctic winter of 1911, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Dr. “Bill” Wilson, and “Birdie” Bowers embarked on what Cherry-Garrard described—without hyperbole—as “The Worst Journey in the World.” For thirty-five days they traveled under horrific conditions, hauling their sleds across the Ross Ice Shelf, enduring almost complete darkness, temperatures that plunged to -60°C, and ferocious blizzards. It was so cold that no lubricating layer of water formed between the sled runners and snow; the frictional resistance made traveling exhausting, and on some days they covered less than three miles. Their reindeer-hide sleeping bags froze during the “day,” and each night they thawed them with their body heat. The journey was simply awful. The objective of “The Worst Journey in the World” was the Emperor Penguin rookery at Cape Crozier. The three men probed the limits of human suffering because Emperor Penguins nest during the Antarctic winter, and Wilson hoped that a study of developing penguin eggs would illuminate the relationship between birds and reptiles, given the theory that “ontogeny (development) recapitulates phylogeny (evolutionary history).” And so Cherry Garrard and his companions man-hauled their sleds to the very edge of death, before staggering back to their base camp—with three penguin eggs. The eggs eventually made their way back to England, as did Cherry-Garrard. But Wilson and Bowers did not. They perished eight months later, on the return march from the South Pole with Robert Falcon Scott, “Titus” Oates, and Edgar Evans. The winter journey and the deaths of Scott and his men haunted Cherry-Garrard for the rest of his life. As a way to make sense of his experiences, he wrote one of the classic accounts of polar exploration, The Worst Journey in the World, which concludes with the following passage: “Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, ‘What is the use?’ For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which will not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin egg.” I’ve thought about this passage many times, most recently on a four-day, west-to-east crossing of the Inyo Mountains. I was after salamanders rather than penguin eggs, and although I claim absolutely no comparison between my sliver of a trip and Cherry-Garrard, Wilson, and Bowers' ordeal, my journey still led me to consider experiences that challenge our minds and bodies. I undertook the Inyo traverse for two main reasons. First, I hoped to access two isolated salamander localities that had not been visited since 1976. Second, in 2012 the canyon that I planned to descend had been pummeled by a hundred-year (or millennial) flash flood, and I wanted to understand how such an event might impact Inyo Mountains salamander populations. And oh yes—a bit of adventure would be nice, too. And so off SP Parker, Marty Hornick, and I went: up a 5,000-foot-plus climb from Owens Valley to the crest of the Inyos, some of it on an abandoned miner’s trail, then a steep, cross-country descent through McElvoy Canyon, which falls 8,000 feet into Saline Valley. (Two local climbers helped us carry water and rappel gear to our first camp.) In the lower part of McElvoy we rappelled past and through nine waterfalls, which varied from about 30 to 170 feet high. There were fields of broken talus, thickets of willow and wild rose, and challenging route-finding. And I will confess to several moments of fear: rappelling into the void on ropes secured to anchors with a single piece of 1/2-inch webbing, and the knowledge that once we began the rappels, we were absolutely committed to the descent, for there was no obvious escape path from the lower canyon. I’d never done any technical canyoneering before, and without the expertise of SP and Marty, I would have been lost. We traveled through rugged and isolated country. And although in the past parts of the Inyos had been the scene of intense mining activity, the mills and tunnels were abandoned, the trails mostly faded into the desert. It’s likely that no one had descended lower McElvoy Canyon since the 2012 flood; our camps were quiet, peaceful, and lovely. And the salamanders? We found only one—below a north-facing cliff, just beyond the reach of the 2012 flood. Raging down from above McElvoy’s highest springs, the waters had annihilated the canyon’s riparian habitat, moving boulders the size of large trucks and depositing huge fields of mud-and-rock slurry. There were places where the streambed was forty feet or more below the highest flood debris, and the waters had obliterated the two documented salamander localities in the lower canyon. The riparian vegetation was regenerating, but the habitat remained no place for salamanders—even if the few survivors and their offspring could have moved out of flood-safe refuges and into their former homes. Which brings me to the moral of my story. Three people, four days, one salamander, and a single row of data entered into spreadsheet: an ironically small yield for a fair amount of human effort. For me the traverse was arduous, although in absolutely no way was it a “Winter Journey” (my trip is to “The Worst Journey” as the national debt of Liechtenstein [US$ 0] is to the national debt of the United States [US$19 trillion and counting]). Yet it was the most rewarding and demanding experience of my project, the one that I most often will recall in my dotage. For I made two friends along the way, learned something important about the ecology of Inyo Mountains salamanders, and felt a breath stir inside me—perhaps Wordsworth’s “motion and a spirit,” a sense that the Inyo Mountains and what they represent offer many rewards, if all I am after is a salamander.
And so I am reminded that Cherry-Garrard’s last insight is true for all of us, no matter the course and substance of our lives—for there are penguin eggs everywhere in the world, if only we have the imagination and desire to go forth on our journeys, and find them.
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I returned to California in mid-March, after another pedal-to-the-floor cross-country drive—from Brockport to Bishop in less than three days, my route and timing fortunate enough to avoid the worst of late winter’s weather. My only stop along the way (other than for a short sleep in an Illinois motel, and a scenic nap in a Walmart parking lot in eastern Wyoming) was to watch the migrating Sandhill Cranes along the North Platte River, a lovely spectacle that I’d read about, but never seen. Two days after reaching Bishop I was back in the Inyo Mountains, working my way up a heat-soaked alluvial fan and through a bit of “habitat lag” (from cold and soggy western New York to sunny Mojave Desert scrub in less than a week). I wandered among barrel cactus and creosote bush, toward the place where I first found Inyo Mountains salamanders during last fall’s fieldwork—and where in 2009 I first encountered the species. A creature of habit, I suppose (me, but also the salamanders), although the emotions I carried with me in March of 2018 mostly were different from those that accompanied me in early October of 2017. The uncertainty and hesitation that that nagged me at the start of the project were mostly gone, replaced by an eagerness to be back at it, leavened by the confidence that I more or less understood my study system and understood what I needed to do. Although my pack was laden with research equipment and water, my psychic burden was much lighter. Still, I had (and have) my residual worries. Would there be salamanders, and would I find them? How easy would it be for me to master two new skills, along with all of the other tasks that I needed to accomplish: collecting tissue samples for a study of the evolutionary relationships among Inyo Mountains salamander populations, and swabbing salamanders for chytrid fungus, killer of frogs (and potentially salamanders)? And how would I adapt to working alone, in isolated and often challenging terrain? Well. There have been salamanders, and in some places, many of them: seven under one rock (a record), two in a marginal locality where I had been skunked twice before, seventeen at a site where I had never found more than two. And with the help of a local climber, I managed to make it into the canyon where last fall my companions and I were turned back by a rock fall “incident.” And although at first my technique for collecting tissue and chytrid samples were at best inept, I soon learned how to integrate those tasks with everything else that I needed to do, from photographing, weighing, and measuring the length of each salamander, to measuring soil pH and temperature, and estimating plant cover. There is a quiet satisfaction comes from this kind of adaptation, in science as well as most any human endeavor that demands even a basic skill set. Mostly, the salamanders are behaving in predictable ways, similar to what I came to expect during last fall’s fieldwork. Still, I have noticed some differences—more small individuals (young that hatched out late last fall?), fewer gravid females, and occasionally salamanders in drier places, under cover objects relatively far from water or on warmer, south-facing slopes. And one locality, which in past visits produced good numbers of salamanders, seems to have far fewer of them now, most likely due to a recent flash flood that removed much of the vegetation and organic soil that the salamanders prefer. These differences are valuable from a scientific standpoint, for they hint at seasonal patterns—but they also warn me of how blinding it can be to assume too much about the salamanders, based on past experience.
Even so, one of the great pleasures of ecological research and natural history work is that of recognition: of comforting encounters with familiar organisms, in their accustomed places. And even if there are differences of the sort that I describe above—for the world is a variable and constantly changing place, which is one of its seductive joys—there is an underlying constancy present, a sense of continuity in the lives of animals and plants. Life goes on, often in the face of intimidating forces. I even felt some sense of this continuity in the canyon where flash flooding had cleared it of soil, vegetation, and (presumably) most of its salamanders—for I discovered one young salamander there (and where there are young, there must be parents), and trusted that, given enough time and sufficient benign human neglect, the canyon and its salamanders would recover. The salamanders shall endure, just as they have done over the countless millennia, and just as we shall endure, in our own fashion. This notion is something that I have written about before, and I take more than a little solace in this belief. But I know that there is an abstract quality to my insistence on the restorative power of salamanders and their ilk. It’s something I have been thinking about as I write this, because just this morning I learned that a sister of a good friend has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Would the endurance of the natural world be of any comfort to her, and to her friends and family? And how would my beliefs be tested by fire—by my own suffering, or that of a loved one? I have no solid answer these questions, but I know that I will be thinking of them in the weeks ahead, as I probe the canyons of the Inyo Mountains, and the lives of their creatures. |
AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
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