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.
4 Comments
Curt Shirer
4/22/2018 06:38:17 pm
Well now, Pard.. That's a great expression of adventure and philosophy! Thanks for sharing the text, pictures and thoughts!!
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Chris
4/22/2018 07:09:44 pm
Thanks, Curt. Maybe you learned me some of that, way back when!
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Scott
4/23/2018 08:04:35 pm
Enjoyed this post. This makes me think of that major issue in conservation, where you can manage for and conserve rarities but sometimes cannot control for stochastic or catastrophic events that wallop populations.
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Chris Norment
4/23/2018 08:59:28 pm
Scott, you are right. I am coming to think that catastrophic flash floods are THE major driver of IMS population dynamics. Of course, we cannot manage directly for flash floods, but their frequency and intensity may be affected by anthropogenically-driven climate change.
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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
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