People want to recreate South Pole Expeditions.

[catsittingstill]

There's an interesting article about it in the New York Times blog here.

We're coming up on the 100th anniversaries of some famous expeditions to the South Pole and apparently some companies are selling tours of various sorts--be flown to the south pole on that day, be flown to within a few miles of the South Pole and ski in, some people are going to ski the exact route, some people are going to *race* each other along those routes.  Not my thing, but whatever.

I certainly understand the desire to climb a mountain, the desire to canoe a river, the desire to go to the wilderness to seek the silence that fills up the heart.

There are, however, two things that people should keep in mind about these particular expeditions.

One, the South Pole is not a playground.  It is not even a normal wilderness.  It is "a place that wants you dead."

Yes, we have better equipment than the early explorers, yes, that includes GPS, satellite phones and rescue planes--but that may not matter.  You can get weather at the south pole that makes it completely impossible that any plane can come for you and that bad weather can last for days.

You could die, like Robert Scott died, freezing by inches in your tent only a few miles from the supplies that could save your life.

If you're not okay with that, don't go.

Two, there is a scientific outpost at the South Pole, the Amundsen Scott Research Station.  The scientists are there to work.  Their work is more important than your play, no matter how much you paid.  Do not interfere with it.  Do not expect them to entertain you; do not expect them to make you comfortable; do not expect them to keep you safe.  And, by all that you consider important in your life, do not get into trouble somewhere they might have to squander their slim resources, intended for doing science, to haul your skylarking ass to safety. 

Die somewhere where it's not their problem.

If you're not okay with that, don't go.

Aside from that, it's a free country, if you feel like spending 40K to go to the South Pole, (shrug) knock yourselves out.

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Antarctica can't be that dangerous! I mean the indigenous Antarctic people have been living there for tens of thousands of years, and they get along OK. What's the big--oh--you're saying it's the only continent that doesn't support any indigenous people and never has? Uh, nevermind.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Of course there are indigenous people there! It's just that they're a bit shorter than most of us, and have more body hair (well, something like body hair), and don't talk any comprehensible language, and...

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

But at least they must be civilized with that formal attire.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Hrm, I'd always figured that there was no indigenous human population just because no one had discovered it. But now that I think about it, maybe the problem is a lack of transitional lifestyles -- the Inuit could develop the toolset needed for living in the high arctic one step at a time. You'd need to invent a whole bunch of very specialized technologies all at once, migrating from Tiera del Fuego.

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

It is such an interesting place, in its own special way, that I would actually like to go there. However, as you point out, the cost of an expedition exceeds my bank account!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I understand the cruises along the coast are cheaper and you would probably see a lot more neat stuff than you would in the middle of the ice-bound continent anyway.

[durconnell.livejournal.com]

There is a fair amount of regular Antartic tourism. This site states about 35,000 people visited in in the 2009-2010 season. Most of them are cruises to the coast with maybe a brief trip ashore. Amundsen-Scott station does not get many tourists.

http://www.iaato.org/tourism_stats.html

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Quite true. My remarks were about going on the mainland, and especially going to the pole rather than going to Antarctica itself.

I do not particularly like the idea of a cruise ship--I like small groups of people I know well but large groups of strangers one is cooped up in a small space with can be pretty horrible--so I doubt I will ever go myself. But there is a lot of neat stuff to be seen along the coast.

At the pole, I think, not so much. Not much in the way of living things (depending on how you feel about the occasional algae-seeded snowbank) in particular, I suspect.

And since at least one of the people in the story planning to ski to the pole had not, a year before leaving, ever been on cross-country skis in his life, and did not care for cold weather I do not think this is a particularly well-thought-out idea.