2014
A year and a half ago, I spent two weeks along Antarctica’s northwest coast.
Flying to Buenos Aires and further south to Ushuaia, the ‘southernmost city in the world’ (Latitude 55 degrees S) which sits on the north bank of the Beagle Channel, the interior passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Named for Darwin’s ship that sailed this passage in 1831, the Beagle Channel separates Argentina’s very southern tip, the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, from Chile’s islands to the south.
Upon exiting the eastern end of Beagle Channel beyond Picton Island, Chile — a passage can then be set to cross the famed and feared 500 mile wide Drake Passage that separates South America from the ‘ice continent’.
Along the north side of Beagle Channel are lovely snow-covered mountains descending down to the water’s edge. Although this passage provides an inland route across Cape Horn, it is too narrow for sizeable ships to navigate its notoriously harsh and unpredictable weather.
Antarctica has this mythic weight. It resides in the collective unconscious of so many people, and it makes this huge impact, just like outer space. It’s like going to the moon.
—Jon Krakauer, Mountaineer and Author of Into Thin Air
A year and a half ago while visiting Alaska for the first time, I was taken by the monolithic glaciers. So extreme and so beautiful, I decided then that I had to visit Antarctica, home of the greatest mass of ice in the world!
Antarctica, the fifth largest continent, is a very long way down there. It’s a fourteen-hour flight from Miami to the very tip of Argentina via Buenos Aires, and another two days by cruise ship providing the seas are relatively calm – so you need a pretty compelling reason to make the trek. Mine was seeing blue ice through the lens of my camera. On February 22, 2014, I boarded a plane in Albuquerque, NM, and began my three-week odyssey to the base of the earth. (more…)
