The Crestones

Only two and a half hours drive from my photography studio in Denver, are the Sangro de Christo range of mountains. When I showed people the photos most people assumed these peaks couldn't possibly be in United States, much less Colorado. Here are a few pictures from my solo hike in. I was there to do an outdoor lifestyle and adventure photoshoot for clients, but found working difficult while my eyes darted up and down potential climbs.

The Last Days of Ellesmere

5/30/08
Tomorrow: Hot food, Drink, Warmth, buildings, showers... You get the Idea, and yet, life out here is by no means bad. Hard at worst. I do look forward to sleeping in the dark though. What will the City hold for me after this adventure? What Changes?
Today I took a few minutes to go for a ski by myself across the sound. I took my time and managed to cross in an hour or so, passage to land was barred by open water that had appeared overnight from the river. So I followed the coast for a bit before cutting back across the bay for camp. I eventually crossed my own tracks and there alongside them, two fresh sets of wolf tracks. They had followed me and must have snuck past while I was eating lunch. I followed the tracks as they went directly to camp, the prints of one of the wolves were quite large. I certainly wanted a to get a look at the beast but he never did show himself.

I’m both relieved to be out of here and quite sad, there will be more trips to come, of that I’m sure.

05/31/08
A bottle of red wine signifies the end. I drink to Howls and midnight sun for the last time. Perhaps there have been many lasts on this Journey and as well many firsts.

Wolves are circling me now as I write, should I fear? There are 4...5...Now 6! Perhaps I should stand up. Should I be afraid or should I stay still and possibly have the experience of a lifetime? The others are watching from camp which is quite far away. Now I see why sharks are called the wolves of the sea... Now I see 7 wolves! They are so much like sharks, their curiosity matched with their fear, though at once they could tear me apart. I want so bad to photograph them but my camera is in camp, to rise would scare them off. Perhaps I should keep this for myself?

They came quite close just then, 10 feet away perhaps, enough to look into their eyes and see that they were not here for violence but for simple curiosity.

Alone, on the Ice, In the land of wolves.

Patience, patience, another approaches. Even the Alternating rhythms of my breath scare it. So much fear and yet so much calm, it is only 5 feet from me. I do not turn to face it this time but allow it to approach from behind, always in the corner of my eye.. It certainly prefers my blind spot.

Wow, truly an experience of a lifetime. Who gets so close to such wild creatures, so magnificent they are, so powerful! A perfect way to say goodbye to the arctic. I’m anxious to say goodbye and hello to a lifestyle though, and New York will be welcome with all of it’s eccentricities.

After the Wolf Experience:
It sniffed the air from behind me. I force my muscles not to turn my neck, the slightest motion scares it away and each time our play of trust begins anew. I risk it all to simply be near, and the only reference I have to the approaching wolf is is it’s breath on my neck. This is enough, for my senses flood with the desire to run. I remind myself that the reputation of the wolf is made by men who fear and I take the body-language as a sign of it’s intentions instead of the stories. So I sit and when it is over I return to camp. Tobias watched it happen and waits with shared elation. As it turns out, there were people watching the whole time, the entire experience is on film, what Luck! My last night on Ellesmere...



June 3rd
Two days ago we stood on the wild Ice of Eureka Sound, and here we stand now, in New York City wearing fancy shirts, eating fancy dinners, and trying our best to act normal. It’s these contrasts that make life interesting, and at least for me, the sudden immersion into an entirely different culture just highlights the best memories of our adventure. As we left Eureka, our egos had been whittled down to the bone as we were transformed into a team of people with a common goal. The effect was amplified by the physical stresses that confronted us, and the little amount of time we had to actually reflect upon ourselves while faced with the wonders of the North, and the many tasks that faced us each day. We all find ourselves striving to make New York as much like the arctic as we can, Sam opens the windows to his hotel room trying to get fresh air, I turn up the AC to make it as cold as possible in my room, and all of us are faced with our various sleep issues, I can’t sleep because of the lack of exercise, and Toby cannot sleep enough. We are all adjusting though, and will soon be back into whatever life we have waiting for us. For me, I have many months of travel coming up, and a few conservation projects in the works, but the Arctic has left to strong an impression to be ignored. I plan on pursuing some of the stories that are common to the Arctic but unheard of in the bustling southern world, for now though, my priority list is short, to go home, see my family, my friends, and celebrate the opportunity that I have been given to inspire people to take action and make the world a better place.

Ellesmere Island Journal days 1-3

5/10/08
Yesterday I finally Joined the team, they’ve been pushing through the rough Ice now for 40 days and only just reached smooth traveling where the plane landed. On the the flight in I manned the controls for a couple of hours and flew the Twin Otter over sections of the Arctic Ocean. I brought plenty of gifts with me to try to get on everyones good side, but it seems I didn’t particularly have to worry about it as they were just happy to see a new face. It’s extremely warm right now, and with the sun shining as it does 24 hours a day, everything feels extremely comfortable. We celebrated a bit last night and drug the sled to the top of a nearby peak and 6 of us rode straight down the hill in a mad dash, I have to say, it was one of the most fun days I’ve had to date.

5/11/08
This may be my only chance to be alone. I’m sitting on top of a small mountain overlooking our camp, and the broken arctic ocean. From here I can see the shadows of clouds as they move across confused jumbles of Ice far out to sea. The shadows shimmer as they move. This place has not been conquered by man, we simply can make quick dashes in and out of it. As I sit here and take in a full 360 degree view the only elusion to man that I can see are my own tracks, and our tents. Not even a man made sound penetrates the stillness, such powerful stillness. Yet, it holds such violence. Only a mountain away the Cache of Otto Sverdrup sits, a treasure lost that has been found by Toby after many years.

5/12/08
It was our first day moving since I arrived. We packed up early and set about moving camp. The sleds are heavy because of the amount of food that we now cary, and as hard as I trained, it was not near enough. As we finally pulled into camp, my motivation collapsed and merely setting up the tent was an act not performed so much as automated. I stand now ready to collapse. We covered about 23 Kilometers and I sat down only once all day. The General Outline of our day is as follows. Wake at 6:00, eat breakfast by 7:00 pack gear by 7:30 load the sleds by 8:00. From here Will usually treks ahead to find a route and we travel at a jogging pace for 2 hours at a time taking 15 minute breaks in between. We continue like this for 8 hours or so until we set up camp again. This is a very loose schedule, on easy days, the breaks extend to almost 45 minutes, and some days we quit a few minutes early or late.

Mika

“Unusual things are not meant to last.” Said Mika, a deceptively humble and sedate Inuit woman. She had said some form of the same statement many times over the last few weeks. This time she was referring to a team of dogs that she said could pull her Dogsled at a sustained speed of 17 kilometers per hour. Sadly most of those dogs had perished from the disease parvo, the year before. She sat across the room from me sowing a pair of beaver skin mitts speaking in a quiet monotone voice, occasionally punctuating words by raising her eyebrows. Inuit people are not all as quiet as Mika, but those who were raised mostly on the land understand the value of quiet. “We are taught to be quiet so as not to disturb the animals.” Mika said. I’m sure I had a quizzical look on my face. Who cares I thought. The more I learned from Mika about their traditions, the more I realized just how valuable their laws are. She remembers a time years ago when the Canadian Government tried to teach the Inuit to be herders, so they could make a living herding Caribou. The Inuit tried the techniques, but in the end the Caribou were just to hard to manage, so they went back to their old ways. What the Canadian Government didn’t understand, was that the Inuit had been managing the Caribou already for thousands of years. By our standards, the Inuit were a nomadic people, moving from place to place depending on the seasons. Nomads are roamers though, and they knew exactly where they were going, and it was the same as the year before. They didn’t move only to follow herds of Caribou, or to stay within hunting distance of the Flow Edge. They moved to allow their homes to air out, and to let the scent of man leave for a time, thus allowing nature to follow it’s course uninterrupted by man.

Many of the Inuit ways are confusing to us. They fight for rights to lands rich in mineral deposits, and yet do not mine them. They are a people backed by oral tradition, with knowledge passed down from the Elders. Those who lived solely off of the land are older now, mostly in their 80s, and it’s they who understand the reasons behind the laws. As with many oral traditions, they are passed on only when they are of use to those who keep them, and they are intimately connected with the language they were created in, changing the language changes the meaning of the story. Mika is fighting now to preserve not only her people, but their ancient ways. It isn’t easy, she is bending the rules by recording what has been an oral tradition for so long, and it’s considered rude to tell the Elders what to talk about. On the cusp that binds the generations, Mika is fighting to hold together her culture.

Friluftsliv

Friluftsliv (frí-loofts-live)

Toby taught me a new word in Norwegian today. We were having a conversation about languages and how you can express certain things more precisely in one language verses another. Toby speaking more than 4 languages was more than understanding of what I meant by that. I gave the example of one of my favorite spanish words, ‘tranquilo’ which translates directly to ‘tranquil’ but it’s meaning is so much deeper. It’s a way of being, a mood, and is a way of life in sleepy little beach towns in Central America.

Friluftsliv. It means literally: Free-Air-Life but again, the real meaning is so much deeper. Like any of these words, they loose meaning when they are forced into another language. Toby helped me understand the meaning by changing the words around to “open air life,” We can get a general understanding of the meaning right off the bat, just as we know the “meaning” of the word tranquil. But in Norway, it goes deeper.

It means living in the open air, but living ‘for’ the open air. You may be stuck in an office all week, but you look forward to spending your weekend outdoors. You could drive your car, but you walk. It means that your heart is in the fresh air, and you will do whatever you can to be there. I guess in a way, it combines a few of our american words. Like the over used and bastardized environmental word ‘Green’ and the personality trait ‘outdoorsy.’ You could probably even throw in a little bit of ‘inspired.’

We may not be able to pronounce ‘fruluftsliv’ with any sort of accuracy, but we can certainly make an effort to live by it. I’ve seen the effect of the word, even before I knew it existed. When at 53 years old, my dad suddenly decided to become a surfer and get in shape, or in the way my 83 year old grandmother still goes hiking after a recent hip surgery.

There is a power that language holds that is revealed to those people like Toby who speak a number of them. Like my friend Wade taught me, Language is not just a code that is designed to explain the world, it is a way of seeing your world.

30 K Across the Bay

Stepping off of the airplane in Iqaluit reminded me of running head long into a brick wall. The cold wind was penetrating, and impenetrable. In the short walk from the plane to the building, the wind had pushed the cold through every layer I had on, and I felt like I was standing naked on some fictional icy planet. Iqaluit is not actually above the arctic circle, but sits just south of it on the map. The map lies. If you follow the tree line, the northern limit of where even large plant life can live, you will find that there is a sudden dip just around Iqaluit. Arctic storms that can be heard coming, howl across the ice, bringing temperatures that make your bones brittle. It’s a white dessert, with no open water, no trees, and scarce life to be found.

After meeting up with the team, I went back to the house where I’ll be staying for the next month, and was given my clothing that will be my only protection from the elements for the upcoming expedition to the even colder Ellesmere Island. The words of a good friend came to mind as I pulled on my bibs, and bent down to my knees to zip up my jacket. “Function over fashion,” Craig had said. I have no problem with that, as long as it keeps me warm!

Soon after, I was introduced to the dogs. They need no artificial warmth, or layers to keep them warm. Even the puppies can spend nights out, curled up on the ice. These dogs however are closer in relation to arctic wolves than they are to the handbag stuffing chihuahuas and the overbred lapdogs we find comfort in. It shows too. The elongated stride, the tooth scarred muzzles, and the cold, calculating, but intelligent stare of the dogs remind me of the feeling of looking into the eyes of a lion on the Serengetti.

The dogs you see in movies are malamutes, and siberian huskies, kitty-cats compared to the canadian eskimo dogs that are pulling us. Three of the dogs on our 9 dog team have drug their previous owners and 800 pounds of gear to the north pole twice. They are easy to make friends with though, and just like people, each dog has it’s own personality. The new dogs on the team are skittish, and afraid of people, just like a captured wolf would be. The veterans have the system so figured out that they could practically put their own harness on and will snap at other dogs for stepping out of line.
After a hard day of pulling you around, the dogs are tied up individually and fed, then after all the other work is done for the night, they look forward to a good petting that is the highlight of their day. Sarah, my teammate impressed the value of “saying goodnight” to your dogs early. A dog that is your friend is going to listen a lot better, and is going to enjoy pulling you around a lot more than one that resents you.

On my second day in Iqaluit, we load the sleds and harness the dogs for a 30 kilometer run out to a cabin that Sarah and Eric own across the bay. Sarah and Eric are the children of the famous arctic explorer Matty Mcnair-Landry. Matty is like one of the sled dogs, she pulls people up to the arctic. People with dreams of the North Pole invariably will come to Matty to lead them there. Sarah and I team up on a sled, and are yanked by the yelping dogs through a kilometer of broken up sea-ice before reaching the smooth ice beyond. I can’t say it was the easiest place to learn to ski. Dodging chunks of ice, wind hardened drifts of snow, and the sliding sled the whole time. Some of the new dogs didn’t always know how to pick their way through the ice while tied into the sled, and would try to go around the ice on the wrong side. As the sled went forward, the momentum and the 8 other dogs would suddenly yank the misguided dog backwards and the dog would get drug around the ice chunks and catapulted back toward the sled. Sarah has been doing this since she was two. She can remember being tied down to the sled and bundled up as her mom mushed the dogs across the ice. A life in the arctic running dogs makes for a strong person. I got to see Sarah lift an 80 pound dog (one of the small ones) as it got caught between two ice flows, and throw the dog over the ice, and over the sled, clearing some of the other dogs, probably saving it from being smashed to death between the flows by the frenzied other dogs.

Shark Attack

I´m on Cocos Island photographing sharks and shark poachers for my project that I´m working on with National Geographic, and on my last night on the Island, after a full day of diving with massive schools of sharks, we decide to do a night dive and hopefully catch one of the more impressive congregations of sharks, a feeding frenzy. There is a pretty reliable group of perhaps 200 white tip reef sharks, each between 5 to 7 feet long that come into the particular bay that we were diving in every night.

After about 45 minutes of taking photographs of these sharks searching every crevice in the reef for fish, I began to get a little to comfortable... I allowed myself to descend into the school which stuck pretty close to the bottom, and was mostly left alone except for one of the bigger sharks that rushed me, and was successfully discouraged when it ran into my big metal camera housing.

Perhaps 20 minutes later, just as we were about to resurface, I was alone on the bottom perhaps 50 feet underwater, behind me a huge boulder hid the sharks from my view and I hoped me from them. The sharks swarmed around the boulder, and I was instantly in the midst of hundreds of sharks! One of the larger ones, obviously a leader in the pack came up from behind and latched onto my foot from the side, and began to thrash about. I put a good kick into it´s nose a couple of times and it finally released me and took off, seeing it run must have discouraged the other sharks, because they all turned and swam a safe distance away, I dashed up about 15 feet to get above the school, and then looked down to assess the damage done to my foot. I count myself extremely lucky, because the fin was torn not an inch from my flesh, and the thick rubber together with a neoprene boot had stopped the sharks teeth from penetrating too deep, and left me unscathed. This seemed the perfect time to end the dive!

Ispiritu Santo

The breeze from the wings are all that alerts me to the Ispiritu Santo hovering just behind my shoulder. Its head turned to the side throws an inquisitive look at me which I’m sure I returned. In the green world full of ferns feathering off from whatever they can hold onto, the little white bird seems to have been sent down from another realm, an ethereal light pouring out from its feathers. Up into the canopy it returns to it’s roost and our team moves on with not a step lost, even in a moment which has had as many moments in it, as all of eternity.

The Great Blue Void

Kicking slowly through a great blue void, to deep to see the surface, and hundreds of feet above the ocean floor, I allow the current to carry me so that I can conserve the priceless breath of air I'm holding in. I can hear a pod of spinner dolphin approaching, though I can’t see them yet. First a few flashes of light off of the sides of tuna, then the torpedo shaped fish begin to dash by on all sides. Following close behind, five hundred porpoise effortlessly glide by in formation. Some circle just beyond arms reach and others herd the young away from me. As quickly as the ocean revealed them, they are gone, their whistles still audible.
With a single kick my body rises along side the bubbles that the dolphin had left behind. With the appearance of the surface, the hull of our 38 foot sailboat looms overhead like a gigantic oceanic bird resting on the surface. With no land in site, the sails are hoisted, and slap of the waves on the side of the boat carry me away, and below into the void.

Urgent

For over 60 years Costa Rica has had ties with Taiwan, and now, the ties have been cut and Costa Rica announces their new contract with China. Taiwan was granted the fishing rights to the Costa Rican waters and had hungrily scooped up everything in it's path, now, with an even hungrier benefactor, the oceans of Costa Rica are about to come under siege. Already, over 90% of the large fish are gone. Not missing, just gone.

Costa Rica let it happen, bribed by Taiwan with bridges and roads, and of course large payoffs to the right government officials. Costa Rica has long enjoyed the reputation that it's held as the Eco friendly vacation spot. With tourism dollars pouring into Eco tourism, hotels have been built on what was once mangroves, cities have been built around "pristine" rain forest so as to bring gawking tourists closer. Thus isolating species, and encroaching on their habitat.

With one of the best dive spots in the world in Costa Rica, they again appear to be doing everything just right, all those who visit are wooed by the vast schools of hammerhead shark, the gigantic tuna, and the jack schools so large that they block out the sun. This Island is a protected area, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Costa Ricans have dedicated one small boat to patrol over 450 square miles of ocean. Fishing boats enjoy lax laws that just barely allow the government to say that they are making an effort. Just outside of the the 12 mile radius, sea life falls off drastically, a testament to the overfishing that is rampant in the region.

It seems odd that a country whos number one income is tourism would risk it all by openly squandering their recourses, and they will continue to do so until that tourism market is affected. Of course, your average tourist is ignorant of the main issues of the world, and travel to places like Costa Rica where there is little besides the landscape to make them feel like they have gone too far from home. Awareness is our only weapon against transactions like these. When it is common knowledge that we are on the brink of disaster, and that certain places like Costa Rica have actively fooled us for decades, then and only then will they take action.