Caroline Fraser Archives - ��ϳԹ�� Online

“You Are in Bear Country”

sperkins-pom — Thu, 01 Mar 2001 00:00:00 +0000

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LATE LAST MAY, Glenda Ann Bradley, a 50-year-old fourth-grade teacher from Cosby, Tennessee, and her former husband, Ralph Hill, drove to a trailhead in the Tennessee portion of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The couple, who were reconciling, hiked in for a few miles, and then Hill went down to the Little River to fish while Bradley read beside the trail. He returned two hours later only to find her daypack, which contained food, lying untouched on the path and her lifeless body about 70 yards away, with two black bears—a 110-pound adult female and a 40-pound female yearling—hovering over it. Hill and other hikers tried to get them away from the body, but it took two park rangers—and 19 rounds from their pistols—to do it. An autopsy later revealed that Bradley died from blood loss, and necropsies on the bears suggested that both had fed on her. It was the first-ever fatal bear mauling in the Smokies— indeed, in any of the southeastern national parks.

Just over a month later, around 9 a.m. on July 2, Mary-Beth Miller, a 24-year-old Canadian biathlete who was training to make the national women’s team, went jogging alone at the Myriam Bédard Biathlon Centre, located on a Canadian army base just north of Quebec City. She was wearing headphones, so she may not have heard her attacker, which rushed at her from the side, throwing her to the ground and biting and clawing at her head and neck. It appears Miller escaped for a moment but fell, brought down again. A military search party found her body on the trail around midnight. Four days later her killer was trapped and killed: a 165-pound female black bear with traces of mother’s milk in its fur. Investigators later speculated that the bear may have been distraught over a missing cub.

TWO WOMEN killed by black bears, within six weeks of each other, without any apparent provocation. Though the incidents are tragic and disturbing, there’s no need to panic. There are perhaps three-quarters of a million black bears in North America, but fatal attacks are exceedingly rare—on average, only about three people die every year from injuries caused by grizzlies or black bears, says Stephen Herrero, author of Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance and North America’s leading authority on the subject. Minnesota’s North American Bear Center knows of only 43 people who were killed by black bears in North America during the 20th century. Still, as hikers, climbers, and canoeists fan out across the backcountry this spring—just as hungry black bears emerge from hibernation—they will do well to arm themselves with recent research on ursine behavior. And hey, a few cans of pepper spray couldn’t hurt.

While the number of actual attacks has remained roughly consistent year to year, complaints about nuisance bears have skyrocketed. In New Jersey, home to over eight million people and about 2,000 bears, the number of complaints rose from 285 in 1995 to 1,659 in 1999. There, as in many other states, suburbanites moving into new developments in previously rural areas have discovered that their new neighbors have a poorly developed appreciation for private property and will invite themselves to barbecues, jump through windows, eat pets, and kill fawns in the yard. “We’re not talking warm and fuzzy here,” one disgruntled resident told The New York Times.

With grizzlies limited in the Lower 48 to remote stretches of the northern Rockies and the inland mountains of the Northwest, most complaints in the Lower 48 involve black bears, and most are fairly inconsequential to humans, if drastically consequential to bears. Last June, police in Albany, New York, shot a 436-pound black bear after it “approached” a jogger; a month earlier, a teenage Boy Scout in a sleeping bag was shoved off a bench by a bear at a campground in New Jersey. In a string of three separate incidents in July, four Scouts and two adult campers were scratched and bitten at New Mexico’s Philmont Scout Ranch by black bears starving due to drought. (Two of the animals were shot, the third escaped.) Last June, in Glacier’s first black bear attack since 1978, Jason Sansom, an Air Force lieutenant hiking in the park with his wife, was caught and bitten by a black bear. After playing dead for 15 minutes, Sansom decided that “it was either do something or die.” He beat the animal away with his keys, escaping with bruised ribs and minor wounds.

Clearly, there’s a fine line between nuisance and tragedy when it comes to bears, so wildlife agencies across the country are stepping up efforts to stop people from feeding bears, inadvertently or on purpose. A couple of years ago, the town of Snowmass, Colorado, mandated bear-proof trash containers to discourage curious local bruins, says Colorado Division of Wildlife spokesman Todd Malmsbury. “If people want to have wildlife,” he says, “they have to learn to live with it.”

Of course, there’s more wildlife to live with in some areas than others. In the sixties, the Smoky Mountains had about 300 black bears. Now the region boasts 1,500—the result, in part, of several years of good acorn crops, according to Mike Pelton, professor emeritus of wildlife science at the University of Tennessee. The black bear population in the southern Appalachians exploded in the early nineties, says Pelton, former head of the world’s longest-running bear study. “It’s higher than we’ve ever seen it.” Pelton and his team had previously trapped and tagged the bear that killed Glenda Ann Bradley, which had shown no prior nuisance behavior, and Pelton served on the National Park Service inquiry that looked into Bradley’s death. The inquest found that Bradley’s biggest mistake may have been to run from the bears; once she did that, according to Jason Houck, the park’s laconic chief ranger, the animals “plotted an intercept course, took her down, and fatally mauled her.” For that reason, Pelton was dismayed to hear one question repeatedly posed by the public in the uproar following Bradley’s death: If a bear attacks, aren’t you supposed to play dead? Experts say that’s exactly the wrong thing to do with black bears; instead, they recommend fighting back with sticks or rocks while backing away. Similarly, running from any bear is not a good idea.

Perhaps the most essential piece of knowledge is that serious black bear attacks are almost always predacious. While grizzlies will attack to defend cubs, their territory, or a carcass they’re feeding on, black bears are probably more interested in food, the intended meal being you. Since many day hikers think of black bears as relatively harmless, John Hechtel, a bear biologist in Canada’s Yukon Territory, is producing a new video in partnership with the International Association for Bear Research and Management, Staying Safe in Bear Country, to be distributed in the coming months to national parks. The video aims to teach the public sophisticated tactical advice to replace the old—and misleading—adage, “If it’s brown, lie down; if it’s black, fight back.” (In addition to the tips above, for example, campers should avoid areas where bears are habituated to human food and not trust that a black bear won’t be brown in color.)

Hechtel allows that attacks are complex, often ambiguous events: “You can’t do science on bear attacks. You can’t roll back the film of a mauling and say, ‘This time, don’t shout, don’t wave your arms.'” But given how incredibly tolerant black bears really are, Hechtel says, it was hard to find footage of aggressive behavior. His ultimate advice is to put the horror stories in perspective and realize that bears “are a lot more like dogs than like some kind of mythological critters who are out there waiting to kick human butt.”

Full Suspension of Disbelief

Meet Joshua Bender, professional test pilot

YOU’D NEED A graduate degree in Extreme Recreation to stay on top of freeride mountain biking, a sport that has splintered in the past five years into the velo-genres of stunts, steeps, urban assault, and now big air. Of this last category, no one hucks meat more merrily, or from more absurd heights, than 26-year-old Joshua Bender. Thanks in part to the cult success of New World Disorder and Down, a pair of recent bike videos, the Virgin, Utah, resident inked a two-year, $24,000 contract with Fox Racing. And while he’s mangled ten frames, tacoed nearly a hundred wheels, broken six bones, and knocked himself unconscious three times since he started his gravity experiments two years ago, Bender claims he’s just getting started: “My goal is to drop a 100-footer,” he says. (His record to date: 60 feet, off a cliff near Kamloops, B.C.) In the 30-foot jump above, filmed last October outside Glendale, Nevada for the upcoming New World Disorder II, Bender successfully landed his custom-built Karpiel bike, which, at 50 pounds, is tricked out with a full foot of front and rear suspension. Why risk life and limb just to huck? “It’s like Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier every time I go out.”

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Fast and Lit

With UPS drivers sipping from CamelBaks and just about everyone using carabiners as keychains, the gadgetry of the outdoor world continues to surface in unexpected places. Witness the Photon Micro-Light II—an ultra-lightweight LED flashlight, about the size of four stacked quarters, prized by trekkers. Now the device has found a following in, of all places, the rave scene. That’s because when clipped to a whirling raver’s extra-large trousers, the Photon leaves neon-colored tracers of light in the darkness (see above). The manufacturer, Oregon-based Laughing Rabbit Inc. is getting into the groove, and in March will unveil a tiny light expressly for dance-floor exhibitionists, for about $30. The beam will change color when moved and a crystal prism lens will scatter the light in all directions. “I am making it so that it is awesome,” states company president David Allen. Whoa…Intense. —James Glave

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Mergers and Expeditions

Forget the Internet, the real money is in financing high adventure. Or so goes the thinking at one new startup.

SERIOUS adventure ain’t cheap, and since governments and wealthy industrialists tend not to fund expeditions the way they used to, today’s climbers and trekkers usually rely on equipment companies to fix them up with ice axes, down jumpsuits, and a nice mule or two. But for many free-spirited types, writing a grant proposal is more daunting than topping out on K2.

Enter Yourexpedition, a Minneapolis-based marketing, PR, and logistics firm launched last fall as a broker between athletes who want to do something epic but don’t have the money, and deep-pocketed firms that want a piece of the glory but have few heroes handy in the Rolodex. “We’re going to come in there with a big splash,” says Yourexpedition president Charlie Hartwell, a 37-year-old former marketing manager for Pillsbury.

As Hartwell explains, his firm (which caters exclusively to female athletes) matches up the jocks with the suits, taking a fee from the latter. In the case of the company’s first big deal, a $1.5 million Antarctic traverse by Scandia, Minnesotabased Ann Bancroft (a Yourexpedition partner) and Norway’s Liv Arnesen, the athletes got cash and PR, and sponsors Pfizer, Volvo, and Motorola, reached the 18- to 50-year-old female demographic in the ensuing media frenzy (the company cites more than 1,200 “placements,” PR-speak for media mentions).Bancroft and Arnesen’s send-off party alone—a lavish evening in Cape Town, South Africa—ran over $50,000.

Hartwell is currently shopping for future sponsors, but with a recent infusion of $2.7 million in private financing, he still has enough cash left to make at least one more big splash. Or belly flop. “A lot of stuff is overhyped,” complains Utah-based Himalayan climber Kitty Calhoun. “What is important is to not lose the heart and soul of climbing.” Fair enough. The line for application forms is on the left.

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UPDATE
Kyrgyzstan Kidnapper May Be Alive in Prison

“I WANTED TO GO HOME.” That appears to be the ultimate, if cryptic, reason why Rafshan Sharipov, a 20-year-old Islamic rebel from Tajikistan, allegedly admits he took part in the kidnapping of four young American climbers last August in Kyrgyzstan—a six-day drama detailed in ��ϳԹ��’s November issue (“Fear of Falling”). In the story, Sharipov was last seen tumbling off a cliff into the darkness. The man who sent him there, 22-year-old Colorado climber Tommy Caldwell, made the fateful decision to yank his captor so that he and his companions—Jason Smith, 22, Beth Rodden, 20, and John Dickey, 25—could make a break for freedom. All four climbers saw Sharipov (who identified himself to the group as “Su”) go over the edge and believed that he could not have survived the fall.

However, much to the surprise of his former prisoners, he apparently did. Sharipov, who seems to be a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan—a militant group seeking to carve out an independent Islamic state in Central Asia—was subsequently captured by the Kyrgyz military. In a videotaped jailhouse interview, obtained and translated by ��ϳԹ��, Sharipov appears dejected but surprisingly healthy, considering the fall he apparently took. In the taped interview, Sharipov claims he encountered the Americans while traveling home through Kyrgyzstan after four months of weapons training. Although he does not speak on camera about the kidnapping or the days during which the climbers were marched around the Kara Su Valley—nor does the footage allude to Sharipov falling off a cliff—a Kyrgyz official on the video says that, according to Sharipov, the Americans fled after he fell asleep. Dickey, who has seen the tape, believes Sharipov was their captor, and all four climbers stand by their account of their escape.

The U.S. State Department has declined to comment on the kidnapping, but Caldwell says the FBI has taken an interest in Sharipov. “They want to interview him, with a view to looking into prosecuting him,” says Caldwell. All four climbers have expressed relief that Sharipov is alive—relief that has removed the guilt that they mave have taken a life to save their own. —Greg Child

Global Warming? Get Real.

In the high Arctic, climate change isn’t an abstract concept

HOT ENOUGH for ya? It is in the far north, where ocean currents are shifting, the polar ice shelf is thinning, and the Inuit are for the first time seeing wildlife—i.e. robins, dragonflies, and salmon—previously only found in far warmer climes. Early signs of the apocalypse? Based on last November’s failed United Nations meeting on climate change at The Hague (and the collapse of subsequent emergency talks in Ottawa in December), we should all be investing in boats. The U.S. delegation, headed by Frank Loy, refused to back off on a proposal that would allow emissions credits for pre-existing carbon “sinks,” such as forests. Such sinks would significantly offset the nation’s 7 percent greenhouse gas reduction goal set under the Kyoto Protocol. Scientists are still split on what’s behind the thaw (the planet’s natural cycles, or smokestacks) but some are biting their nails: “Regardless of the cause, the change is so extraordinary it needs attention,” says Lawson Brigham, an Arctic scientist. Consideringthe indicators below, one has to wonder: Will the next North Pole fashion craze be Hawaaiian shirts?

1 A Robin in Winter One of the more obscure words in the Inuit language of Igloolik is misullijuq—loosely, “rain in midwinter,” an extremely rare event. Until recently, that is. According to research conducted between June 1999 and May 2000 by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (a Canadian think tank), residents of Sachs Harbour on Canada’s Banks Island are noticing spring ice breakup coming earlier, and, for the first time, thunderstorms. Townspeople also encountered dragonflies and robins, and have had to venture farther out to sea to hunt for seals. The most alarming change: House foundations are beginning to shift as the permafrost melts beneath them.

2 Baja, Canada? In 1942, after a grueling voyage that included two winters locked in the ice, the schooner St. Roch (above) successfully navigated the perilous 1,000-mile Northwest Passage across the top of Canada. Last July, 60 years after the first trip began, the St. Roch II—a 66-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran—made the same trip in only 103 days. The key difference: “No pack ice ever even touched the hull,” explains St. Roch IIcaptain Ken Burton. The crew went swimming (without wetsuits) in 40.1-degree-Fahrenheit water between 70 and 72 degrees north latitude, about 1,200 miles from the Pole. “It was surreal,” he says. “It looked like Baja.”

3 The Floe-Protein Diet Polar bears are not light eaters; North America’s largest land carnivores will nosh 43 blubbery seals each year. But shortening Arctic winters are cutting into the feast. The earlier arrival of spring breakup (June, compared to July in decades past) now means fewer floes, which the bears use as fishing platforms from which to secure plump, juicy pups. A recent Canadian Wildlife Service study found that the earlier ice breakup is resulting in skinnier bears (the average body weight has dropped 10 percent) that have 10 percent fewer offspring than they did two decades ago.

4 Into Thin Ice By reflecting up to 80 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space, sea ice acts as a kind of planetary thermostat. Trouble is, the thickness of the frosty mantle covering the Arctic Ocean has diminished by about 40 percent in the last four decades. “Not only has there been a reduction in polar sea-ice thickness but in surface area too,” says climatologist Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

Fracture Zone

Bouldering was once a sport of strategy and strength. Now a new movement is pushing it to hazardous heights.

HAD THERE been an orthopedic surgeon on hand for the Colorado premiere of the climbing film Scary Faces, she would have been handing out stacks of business cards. The crowd that December night at the Boulder Theater included a man in a wheelchair with two broken ankles, a pair on crutches, and a handful of others with pronounced limps. All were apostles of “highballing,” rock climbers who used to boulder, or climb horizontally within ten feet of the ground, but who now scale bone-breaking heights of up to 30 feet, with foam pads and spotters strategically arrayed below to cushion and direct their falls.

“If pads had never been invented,” says Paul Lembeck, a 40-year-old horticulturist who tore his ankle ligaments after falling 15 feet off a boulder last November, “people probably wouldn’t be out highballing very much.” The sport seems to be thriving under a twisted, crash-test-dummy logic: Give drivers air bags, they just go faster; give boulderers pads, they just go higher. More than a dozen companies now make over 40 foam models, and climbers from Squamish to the Shawangunks fear bouldering will forever change from a sport of strength to one of nerves—and good insurance.

Naturally, highballers love the thrill. “When you top out on a highball,” says Michael Moelter, 22, “you’re so psyched you didn’t wreck. It’s rad.” But the sport is dangerous. Take Steve Banks’s word for it. As head of the Venice, California based gear firm Pad Industries, one of the manufacturers that helped stoke the trend, he discourages highballing. “The higher you climb, the better chance you have of missing your pad,” he says. “That’s just good math.”

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It’s What’s Inside That Counts
After a century of service, say so long to the inner tube

“THIS IS GOING to be the big-time standard in every mountain-bike wheel out there,” gushes Steve Driscoll, marketing manager at the French component manufacturer Mavic. He’s not talking up a tweak on the rim or a novel twist in the spokes, but something more fundamental: a new generation of wheels that do away entirely with that 113-year-old fixture of cycling, the inner tube.

Driscoll has good reason to be pumped. Like similar designs available from competing wheel manufacturers Rolf and Bontrager, Mavic’stubeless Crossmax UST ($799) and more affordable Crossroc UST ($350) are less vulnerable to pinch flats, or “snakebites,” the holes that occur when a rider slams his wheel into a rock or log, squishes the tire, compresses the tube into the edge of the rim, and tears the rubber. Converts will also be able to ride on as little as half the air pressure, doubling the amount of rubber on the trail and, by extension, the traction. This spring, tires from Continental, Geax, and Specialized, with unique treads arranged for low-pressure setups, will be widely available for the first time. “Tubeless will have as much impact on the industry as front suspension did,” promises Specialized product development manager Al Clark.

Maybe. Bontrager founder Keith Bontrager believes that for now, at a steep $799 a pair, his firm’s Race Lite Tubeless wheels will appeal primarily to pro racers. “The product reviewers are saying, ‘I smashed the hell out of the rim, but I never got a flat,'” he says. “That doesn’t work for the general public.” Aside from bringing the prices down to earth, engineers have a few other kinks to work out. With their thick sidewalls, the new tires are heavier than their tube-bearing predecessors. Grit can sneak into the seal between tire and rim, allowing air to seep out. And at low pressure, front tires can fold and crumple during hard braking. But then, better the tire than you. —Ben Hewitt

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RAW DATA
Lake Sailing, Sans Lake

Maximum number of three-wheeled “dirtboats” expected in America’s Landsailing Cup, the largest terra-firma regatta in America, at California’s Ivanpah Dry Lake this March:
90

Surface area of course, in square miles of hard-packed clay:
3

Years Ivanpah regatta held
26

Speed of fastest seafaring yacht, in mph:
53

Speed of fastest landsailing yacht, in mph:
116.7

Size of sail flown on that yacht, in square feet:
71

Female sailors expected this year:
4

Radio-controlled model dirtboats expected:
10

Weight of speed-record-holding Iron Duck, in pounds:
1,800

Dirtboat crashes resulting in broken bones at Ivanpah:
0

Nonfatal motorcycle crashes involving man hired to barbeque a pig for the 1999 event:
1

Number of cement mixers used to prep après-sail banana daiquiris:
1

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$17B
>REVENUE
The estimated Gross Domestic Product of Cuba for 1998—and the amount Americans spent on outdoor sports equipment and clothing in 1999, according to an industry report by the Outdoor Recreation Coalition of America.

Shear Comfort

The Ibex Randonee Pullover brings wool back to the woods.

WHILE FEW would argue that the humble sheep offers any sort of benchmark for animal IQ, it’s hard to trump the brilliance of ovine design when it comes to temperature control: Wool keeps you warm when it’s cool out, cool when it’s warm out, and doesn’t even begin to feel wet until it has absorbed 40 percent of its weight in water. So it’s nice to see innovative clothing manufacturers going back to the farm. Using modern milling techniques that eliminate scratchiness and enhance durability, companies like SmartWool, Devold, Icebreaker, Woolrich, and Ibex are rekindling a love affair between outdoor enthusiasts and wool that ignited sometime around, well, 7000 b.c. and blazed brightly until the debut of down in the early fifties.

The Ibex Randonee Pullover ($235; 800-773-9647; www.ibexwear.com) features a soft weave of merino wool on the inside with a synthetic flexible fabric made by Schoeller called “Skifans” on the outer surface. The result: a light, breathable, wind-resistant shell that solves a problem Ibex president John Fernsell understands all too well. “When I run or ski, I overheat and sweat like a 400-pound fat guy,” he sighs. “But wool’s climate control is distinctive. Basically, you can wear it at 45 degrees or 20 degrees without changing a thing.” Of course, sheep knew that all along.

Eclipse of the Son

John Shipton embarks on a poignant trip to Patagonia.

IN A LIFETIME spent exploring the world’s most remote ranges, the legendary British mountaineer Eric Shipton wrote six classic exploration books, discovered the first route up Everest, and co-invented the now de rigueur fast-and-light approach to alpinism.

About the only person not impressed was Shipton’s youngest son.

“To everybody else, he was this great hero,” says John Shipton, a 50-year-old horticulturist from Y Felin, Wales. “To me, he was just this silly old bugger. He wasn’t around much and that was all right with me.”

Shipton the younger spent much of his youth rebelling against his father’s “reactionary values.” Thrown out of two schools, John eventually graduated and bummed around the world with the stated ambition of “becoming a beggar.” Only now, something is calling him to the mountains. In March, he expects to be circling and, weather permitting, climbing Chile’s 5,741-foot Mount Burney —a peak not touched since his father summited in 1973.

Burney’s height may be modest, but Shipton’s trip will involve two weeks of arduous tramping through thick temperate rainforest, peat bogs, and icefields. “This trip is totally what my father was all about,” says Shipton.

So how did John finally come to follow, quite literally, in his dad’s footsteps? For one thing, he read Everest and Beyond, Peter Steele’s biography of the elder Shipton. “I realized there was another side to the family story than the one my mother always told me,” says John. The trip also springs out of his own increasingly ambitious botanical outings—plant-hunting trips that have taken him to the highlands of Morocco, Turkey, and Chile.

As of late December, the affable but scattered Shipton was still mulling over a number of crucial details of his trip. “It’s rather like the way Eric would have done it,” says Steele. “I think he’s starting to realize his father wasn’t so bad after all.”

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From Luna to Lumber

THERE’S A THIN LINE between sacred environmental totem and patio furniture. In the case of Luna, the northern California redwood from which Julia “Butterfly” Hill revitalized the anti-logging movement, that line is about half an inch thick and just under three feet deep—the work of a vandal’s chainsaw. In a senseless act of violence undertaken sometime last Thanksgiving weekend, the still-unknown assailant sunk a 36-inch blade more than halfway through the base of the 1,000-year-old tree. Spying an unbeatable PR opportunity, Pacific Lumber and the California Department of Forestry—the 27-year-old Hill’s former nemeses—joined foresters, arborists, and engineers from around the nation in an effort to bolt Luna back together. Though the braced tree is less vulnerable to toppling now, only time will tell if the inner cambium, Luna’s nutrient-transport system, can recover. “Luna’s value is much more than just the wood,” says Stuart Moskowitz, a member of the board at Sanctuary Forest, the group overseeing Luna’s welfare. “Even if she falls, she’s a symbol of peace and the need to protect our resources, and that’s priceless.” On the other hand, were Luna not Luna, she’d be just another old-growth redwood—one that, as it turns out, would yield about 150,000 board feet of specialty lumber, potentially worth more than a million bucks. Should the unthinkable happen and Luna end up on the shelves of the nation’s home-improvement stores, here’s where she might go from there. —Misty Blakesley

If a Tree Falls in the Forest What might lie in store for the nation’s most famous redwood
80	Tongue-and-groove siding-clad homes: Single-story, 3000-square-foot house
168	Gazebos: 895-board-foot gazebo
833	Hot tubs: Five-foot diameter hot tub
1,974	Picnic tables: 76-board-foot table
2,083	Park benches: 72-board-foot bench

The post “You Are in Bear Country” appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

The Galapagos Unveiled

sperkins-pom — Mon, 01 Jan 2001 00:00:00 +0000

The Season:

Sitting on the equator, the Galápagos Islands have two seasons, the wet (January to June, when it's humid and temperatures are in the mid- to high eighties), and the dry (July to December, when temps are a few degrees cooler). Year-round, you're bound to see phenomenal wildlife, except during an El Nino year, when normally arid regions at sea level grow lush and green and the animal life—from iguanas to penguins—is decimated by warming sea temperatures.

Getting Around:
Virtually the only way to see the Galápagos is by tour boat; the larger boats offer the most experienced guides and cut down on island-to-island travel time. Seven nights on Lindblad Expeditions's 80-passenger MS Polaris(including meals, taxes, entry fees, and two nights in a hotel in Guayaquil; 800-425-2724) start at $2,980, double occupancy; Lindblad also offers a combined air package (Miami to Guayaquil round-trip on American, Guayaquil to Baltra round-trip on TAME for $850). Metropolitan Touring, based in Quito, offers seven nights on its 90-passenger Santa Cruz starting at $2,099 per person (800-527-2500). Diving trips can be booked on Angermeyer's Enchanted Excursions's motor- and sail-powered Sulidae and Cachalote; call 593-2-569-960 in Quito, or visit www.angermeyer.com
What to Pack:
The sun is fierce, so pack sunglasses, sunblock, hats, quick-drying shorts, and long-sleeved shirts along with your bathing suit and rugged sandals. A light jacket is handy for nights aboard ship and for hikes at higher elevations. Trails can be rocky, so take hiking shoes. A wetsuit makes snorkeling more bearable (water temps vary from 78 to 68 degrees depending on the season); many boats carry snorkeling equipment. Also, bring binoculars to spot the little vermillion flycatchers.

What to Read:
Darwin's chapter on the Galápagos in Voyage of The Beagle is a must. Jonathan Weiner's The Beak of the Finch gives you a bird's-eye view of Peter and Rosemary Grant's 20-year study of Darwin's finches on Daphne Major, a tiny island you'll see as you depart from Baltra. Pierre Constant's The Galápagos Islands: A Natural History Guide is packed with maps and tips for divers; Galápagos: A Natural History, by Michael H. Jackson, is particularly good on animal and plant life. The Ecuador Handbook, by Julian Smith, from Moon Travel Handbooks, has an excellent nuts-and-bolts section on everything from weather conditions to a list of outfitted trips in the Galápagos.

The post The Galapagos Unveiled appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

The Ballad of Lonesome George

sperkins-pom — Mon, 01 Jan 2001 00:00:00 +0000

THE FLIGHT FROM MIAMI TO Guayaquil, Ecuador, is packed with tourists headed to the Galápagos and elegantly dressed Ecuadorans returning from shopping trips. Judging by these passengers, Ecuador looks to be a thriving capitalist society. The woman sitting next to me, who's going back home to the southern city of Cuenca with her teenage daughter, asks me to help them force a heavy plastic bucket under the seat. I ask what's in it: tokens for video games.

But Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador and the jumping-off point for the Galápagos, presents a different picture. Even at midnight, the airport is bustling with customs officials and armed officers wearing ornate uniforms. The entrance to the Guayaquil Hilton Colón, an echoing monument to architectural excess, is guarded by private security wielding short-barreled automatic weapons. The glass wall of my hotel room looks down on blocks of razed shacks. When I get up at 5:30 the next morning to catch a flight to the Galápagos, I look out and see one inhabitant taking a leak against the leaning wall of his home, a structure that could have fit into one of the Hilton's vast bathrooms. A sentiment reinforcing the prevailing mood is spray-painted on the wall of a construction site near the Hilton: fuera yankees asesinos—viva colombia insurgente (Get out, Yankee murderers—Long live the Colombian Insurgency).
Guayaquil is a port city on the Pacific, and if I could look across 600 miles of open ocean from the Hilton's window, I would see the Galápagos: 15 islands and a few dozen rocks. In 1832, when the islands were officially annexed, Ecuador was the only country that wanted them. Spain turned up its nose in the 16th century, and around the same time an English sea captain concurred, saying that the islands “are desert and beare no fruite.” Everyone subsequently changed their minds. Over the last 150 years, both England and the United States have tried to buy or lease the islands, recognizing their strategic military importance in the Pacific. But Ecuador hung on to them and is glad it did. The Galápagos are now its top tourist attraction and bring in over $100 million annually.

But the boom in the islands has come during a bust for the country as a whole. Ecuador, said to have one of the ten most corrupt governments in the world, is in dire economic and political straits. In 1999, after an El Nino year that devastated coastal areas and the Galápagos, as well as an eruption scare from the Guagua Pichincha volcano, which spread ash all over Quito, Ecuador defaulted on its foreign loans, and a bloodless coup in early 2000 installed the country's sixth leader (Gustavo Noboa) in four years. Violent crime aimed at foreigners and wealthy Ecuadorans has skyrocketed, including the kidnapping in October 2000 of ten foreign oil workers, five of them Americans, in the northeastern jungle. (By early November, two French captives had escaped, and the other eight were still being held.) Due to its crime rate, Guayaquil has been under a state of emergency off and on since 1999, contributing to an incendiary and unstable atmosphere that's obvious the minute one steps off the plane.

None of this appears to have stopped the tourists from coming to the Galápagos. A national park since 1959 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the islands began attracting a few thousand visitors in the 1960s and now draw more than 60,000 tourists annually, most on package tours. The presence of so many tourists, along with the success of the fishing industry in the region, has created a boomtown atmosphere there, attracting some 17,000 permanent residents—fishermen, farmers, park personnel—as word has spread that the islands boast Ecuador's highest standard of living. By necessity, to protect the fragile islands and famously tame wildlife, the archipelago is one of the most tightly controlled ecotourist destinations on earth: an antiadventure for the adventuresome. Licensed park guides watch your every step to make sure you don't trample an iguana nesting area or crush a bird's nest. And though we tourists make almost no direct impact, leaving, as the cliché goes, only footprints, our indirect impact is enormous. With our dollars and voracious needs for comfortable beds and gourmet meals, we're attracting hundreds of people to serve us. And we come bearing with us, in the bellies of the 727s that now fly out to the islands every day, untold introduced species—spores, insects, molds, scales, vines, viruses—that attack and destroy the very world we've come to treasure. Economically, tourists are the salvation of the Galápagos; ecologically, we're kudzu.

Never hospitable to Homo sapiens and crisscrossed with enough bizarre stories of human mayhem, starvation, cannibalism, and murder to prove it, the Galápagos still have one thing to teach us, with all the subtlety of a baseball bat to the back of the head: Evolution's a bitch. And we keep not learning it.

AFTER TWO HOURS CROSSING the ocean, the nearly full jet flops down on a tiny spot in the Pacific, the island of Baltra, which sports a leftover airstrip built by the United States during World War II, and not much else. The only building in sight is the airport, and the first impression is of an intense stillness. Parched tangles of desert vegetation and cacti stretch off to the distance, swept by a ceaseless warm ocean wind. A few flitting black finches—Darwin's finches—and a single land iguana, a heavy yellow lizard as fat as a house cat but with its own reptilian half-smile, are the only signs of life. Park guards search the bags of all arrivals, looking not for contraband but for nonnative insects, seeds, and animals.

There are only a few dozen hotel rooms in the islands; most visitors sleep at sea, joining scheduled cruises that leave from Baltra or traveling by bus and ferry to the largest town in the islands, Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz, to charter a boat and guide. Some 97 percent of the land in the islands belongs to Galápagos National Park. Camping, where it's allowed at all, is by permit only and is complicated by the scarcity of water. Whether on a cruise or a charter, all visitors must be guided on land by naturalists licensed by the National Park Service, who are trained to protect the tourist from the islands and, more important, the islands from the tourist. Herein lies the paradox of Galápagos-touring: Whether you're a bungee-jumping, gonzo-adventuring yahoo or a little old lady in tennis shoes, you must keep to the same trails and follow the same rules.
I embark for a week on the MSPolaris, an 80-passenger, 238-foot ship, operated by Lindblad Expeditions, that's one of the largest in the islands. My fellow passengers include birders, sketch-artists, and mad-dog video enthusiasts with cameras the size of sea lions. It being October, a low-tourist month, the ship's only about half full, so we head to the islands in groups of eight to ten in the Polaris's Zodiacs. Our expedition leader is Lynn Fowler, a familiar figure in the Galápagos, who coordinates our hiking and snorkeling trips (and makes sure nobody gets left behind when we return to the Polaris). The niece of animal wrangler Jim Fowler (Marlin Perkins's sidekick on the old Wild Kingdom TV series), Lynn first toured the islands in 1976 and fell in love with them so intensely that she sat in the Baltra airport and sobbed when it was time to leave. She returned a few years later as one of the first women admitted into the national park's naturalist program. After marrying an Ecuadoran ship captain, having two children, and starting a school at her farm on the Ecuadoran coast, Fowler (who is now divorced) began guiding for Lindblad and private groups in the early 1980s. She has baited sharks for Peter Benchley in one television special and snorkeled with Alan Alda in another. At nearly six feet tall, with long blond hair, she is an impressive figure in a wetsuit.

Fowler completed the work for her doctorate in 1980 by living alone for a year on the rim of one of the volcanoes on largely uninhabited Isabela Island, studying the impact of introduced donkeys on the resident subspecies of giant tortoise. She became renowned throughout the islands for going about naked on her own personal volcano (the clothes on her back literally rotted), and she was awoken one night by earthquakes; the volcano next door was exploding.

THE POLARIS STOPS AT MANY of the larger islands: Espanola, Floreana, Genovesa, San Salvador, Santa Cruz, Fernandina, and Isabela. The strong ocean currents, the distances between the islands (anywhere from three to 110 miles), their raw black volcanic profiles and ragged cliff faces, create a forbidding impression of isolation. Less than four million years old, the Galápagos Islands are some of the youngest and most active volcanoes in the world (the most recent major eruption occurred on Isabela in 1998). We cruise past the rocky oceanic outcrop called Roca Redonda, the tip of an enormous underwater mountain, and spend a morning in Puerto Ayora, on Santa Cruz, at the Charles Darwin Research Station. The 41-year-old station is funded by Ecuador, UNESCO, and various scientific organizations (the San Diego Zoo foots the bill for the station's giant-tortoise projects), and is staffed by biologists who oversee its conservation and protection programs.

The animals they study are as fierce and strange as the geological features of the islands: delicate little finches called vampires survive by pecking other birds and drinking their blood; fluffy masked booby chicks routinely kill their siblings to better their own chances; male albatross, with wingspans wider than a man is tall, gang-rape females returning from sea. Because these creatures evolved without predators in the picture, they have no fear of us, and we stand inches away from basking marine iguanas and sea lion pups. As our Zodiac pulls up to the narrow concrete landing on uninhabited Fernandina, one of the most pristine oceanic islands left in the world, we're instructed to give some room to a sea lion mom who's just given birth on the jetty, the afterbirth dripping into the water. On a trail through the interior of Espanola, the southeasternmost island, we have to take care not to step on a Galápagos snake or to disturb the rooster-size offspring of the waved albatross standing on the trail. Here, tiptoeing through this miniaturized Jurassic Park, we're the dinosaurs, looming over the inhabitants.
Not that they can't take care of themselves. At Punta Suarez, on Espanola's windward side, we're surrounded by thousands of breeding pairs of blue-footed boobies, masked boobies, and most of the planet's population of waved albatross, not to mention crowds of the island's endemic subspecies of mockingbirds, as well as shearwaters, frigate birds, and Galápagos hawks, all whistling, hooting, cawing, and shrieking. The blue-footed boobies are engaged in their bizarre foot-fetish rituals, ever so slowly lifting each blue foot to show their prospective mates. Albatross pairs are furiously clicking enormous yellow beaks that look like they could take your arm off. It's no place for people who have panic attacks brought on by a certain Hitchcock film.
As tour guides go, Fowler and the naturalists she oversees on the Polaris are remarkably frank about everything Galápaganean. Paula Tagle, an Ecuadoran geologist, unblushingly tells us about the sexual proclivities of the small black males of the Genovesa iguana, who live in an environment harsh even by Galápagos standards—raked by the sun and with meager food sources—and who are less likely to get lucky than iguanas on other islands. The females, for whom size apparently does matter, find the males puny and unappealing. The smaller males have developed their own compensatory routine: They work up a load of sperm by masturbating on a rock for a few minutes, ejaculate into a pouch, and then, when an unwitting female walks by, hop on, releasing the sperm.

Our guides are also hypervigilant, knowing full well that our very presence stirs the evolutionary stew. They make certain that we stay on the trails, that we constantly rinse our feet and snorkeling gear (so as not to track sea-lion poop onto the boat or carry seeds from one island to another), and that we strictly observe the No-Giving-Water-to-the-Mockingbirds rule (although flocks follow us everywhere, aggressively begging for a sip from our bottles on islands where the only shade trees are 30-foot cacti). Everywhere we go, the guides preach the gospel of Darwin and promote the destruction of introduced and invasive species. Lest the Galápagos go the way of Hawaii, with its dozens of extinctions caused by introduced pigs, snakes, insects, and plants, the fittest cannot be allowed to survive. One afternoon, as we gather for lunch in the dining room aboard the Polaris, we're greeted by an entire roast pig, a cheery apple stuffed into its surprised-looking mouth, shot that morning on Floreana. Message received.

GOATS AND PIGS, FIRST BROUGHT to the Galápagos in the 16th century by pirates and other sailors, still infest several islands, and Isabela is also home to feral dogs, cattle, and cats. With no natural predators to keep them in check, the goats raze whole hillsides of vegetation, threatening plant species, causing erosion, and wiping out the food sources of the giant tortoise. Pigs destroy the nests of marine turtles; dogs and cats kill land iguanas; black rats are wiping out native rice rats. During the 1960s and 1970s, goats were eradicated on several of the smaller islands, and Floreana was cleared of dogs. But on the larger islands, with their impenetrable areas of dense brush and razor-sharp lava fields—Isabela alone is 75 miles long—the process of elimination could take decades.

Hunters hired by the park laboriously track down and shoot every feral pig on an island before going after the goats (the logic being that if they killed the goats first, heavy vegetation would grow back, providing cover for pigs). To track the goats, so fleet of foot and hard to find, park hunters outfit a single animal—the “Judas goat”—with a radio collar; it leads them to the wary but naturally social herds.
In an attempt to reverse some of the damage wrought by introduced species, Lindblad Expeditions created the Galápagos Conservation Fund in 1997 to raise money from its passengers for special conservation projects. The fund had more than a half-million dollars by the end of last year, and one of the major projects it sponsors is the pig-eradication program on San Salvador. Tom O'Brien, Lindblad's director of environmental affairs, neatly captures the paradoxical fact that tourists bring both peril and promise to the region: “If tourism hadn't put such a high value on the Galápagos, I don't think there'd be a hope that it would be protected by Ecuador or the international community.” As for the pigs, he says that scientists believe “there is only one shrewd juvenile male left” on San Salvador.

The islands have harbored other, more highly-prized survivors, like the tortoise Lonesome George, the tragicomic symbol of the devastation caused by nonnatives. George is the last of his Pinta Island subspecies, a male of many friends but no lovers. Last seen in 1906, the subspecies was long thought to be extinct, but Georgewas discovered there in 1971 and brought to live at the Darwin Station, while scientists searched the world's zoos for a possible girlfriend. Although there's a $10,000 reward for a Pinta female, none has been found, and George, who's been keeping company in a corral with two females from Isabela (genetically the closest match), has never shown the slightest interest in sexual encounters with them or anyone else, including a female researcher who tried to gratify him manually in order to get a sperm sample. George is about 70 years old, in the prime of his life, and could live another hundred years. Slowly prowling his capacious and beautifully appointed pen, complete with wading pool, he's a fearsome-looking 194-pound beast, seemingly unresigned to his fate. Perhaps because of his high saddle-back, his neck seems grotesquely elongated, his old-man's eyes sunk deep in his head above his beaky mouth. With our goats and our carelessness, we've done this to him, and he doesn't look happy about it.

George's Espanola relatives have been more fortunate. In the midsixties, the Park Service removed the few endangered giant tortoises left on Española (a unique saddle-back subspecies endemic to that island) and bred them at the Darwin Station; since then, more than a thousand young tortoises have been returned to the island. But this success is one of the few bright spots in the sordid human history of the Galápagos.

AT DAWN ONE MORNING, the Polaris stops at Floreana's Post Office Bay, where we go ashore to see an old barrel where a tiny population of colonists once left mail for passing sailors to pick up. It was, one of those residents wrote, “the loneliest mail-boxin the world.” Despite the garish scraps of painted driftwood festooned around the barrel, it's an eerie spot, where the wind whistles mournfully through the scalesia trees. You can still leave postcards that may or may not ever reach their destinations. Visible from off the beach are the ruins of a low lava wall, evidence of an ill-fated, never-completed resort of the 1930s.

The first Europeans to visit these uninhabited islands thought they were bewitched. In 1535, Fray Tomas de Berlanga, the third bishop of Panama, nearly died of thirst in the Galápagos when his ship, en route to Peru, was caught by the powerful South Equatorial Current and carried into the archipelago. His impression: “It looked as though God had caused it to rain stones.” In the 17th century, pirates, whalers, and whole navies used the islands as a hideout and provisioning station, stacking live tortoises—sailors' fast food—upside-down in the holds of their ships, where the animals remained miserably alive for months without food or water.
The first human to live in the Galápagos was Patrick Watkins, an Irish sailor marooned on Floreana in 1807. According to whalers who saw him, he went about “covered in vermin; his red hair and beard matted…so wild and savage in his manner and appearance that he struck everyone with horror.” In 1809, he seized a whaleboat and disappeared with five hostages, eventually turning up in Guayaquil. No one ever learned what became of his hostages; legend has it he “ate them or threw them overboard.”

Even Charles Darwin was alarmed by the islands when he arrived in 1835 on board the HMS Beagle. Of his first sight of the Galápagos he wrote, “Nothing could be less inviting.” He found the weather “overpoweringly hot,” the tortoise meat “very indifferent,” and fancied that “even the bushes smelt unpleasantly.” But after he got over his initial distaste, he spent his time riding tortoises and collecting what would become his famous finches, amazed at their tameness: “They approached so close that any number might have been killed with a stick.” He threw one unlucky marine iguana repeatedly into the water to see if it would return to shore. (It did.) In the interest of science, he also took it upon himself to yank the tail of a land iguana, which was sticking out of its hole. “At this it was greatly astonished,” he wrote, “and soon shuffled up to see what was the matter; and then stared me in the face, as much as to say, 'What made you pull my tail?'” Darwin spent a brief 19 days on the islands, visiting only four (San Salvador, San Cristóbal, Floreana, and Isabela). But his observations of the volcanoes and the geology, the plants and the animals—particularly the tiny variations in size and shape of finches' beaks from island to island—led to his mind-altering and world-shaking theories of evolution and to his great book, On the Origin of Species (1859).

In the 20th century, as it became easier to get to the islands, more strange characters arrived. In 1929, after reading American naturalist William Beebe's travelogue Galápagos: World's End, an egomaniacal German dentist named Friedrich Ritter, who fancied himself a successor to Nietzsche, dumped his wife and sailed to Floreana with his girlfriend. Resolved to limit himself to a vegetarian diet, he had his teeth pulled before the trip; once there, the pair lived off mashed fruit and the eggs from their chickens. Sensational press reports about the couple's Edenic exploits drew other eccentric Germans to the island during the thirties, including the colorful Baroness von Wagner de Bosquet—the self-styled “Empress of Floreana”—and two of her lovers. Sporting a pearl-handled revolver, bathing in the island's one source of fresh water, and stealing food from the few other inhabitants, the baroness commanded one of her companions to begin building the lava wall, now crumbling, that can be seen from Post Office Bay. The wall was intended to surround a retreat she planned to name the Hacienda Paradiso, “a lovely spot where the weary traveller can rejoice to find refreshing peace and tranquillity on his way through life.”

The tranquillity was short-lived. In the summer of 1934, the baroness and one of her boyfriends disappeared, probably murdered by the other boyfriend, whose mummified body was found months later on an island to the north, after he attempted to flee on a rickety fishing boat. Ritter, the dentist, died that same year of botulism, and his girlfriend left for home.

More recently the islands have been the scene of sporadic mob violence as Ecuador's government has struggled to monitor the powerful tuna-fishing industry and waters rich in sea cucumbers, sluglike bottom dwellers considered a delicacy—and an aphrodisiac—in Asia. In 1994, after the government tried to crack down on rampant abuses and close the sea-cucumber fishery in the Galápagos, a virtual guerrilla war broke out. Fishermen resentful of the national park burned the Darwin Station's chief scientist in effigy and slaughtered 86 giant tortoises on Isabela, leaving, according to one scientist, “tortoise heads; [and] bits of their legs hanging from the trees.” In January 1995, fishermen wielding machetes and knives invaded the station, taking the staff and the tortoises hostage for four days and threatening to kill Lonesome George. Two years later, a park employee was shot and nearly killed while participating in a raid on an illegal sea-cucumber harvesting camp. In 1998 Ecuador passed a Special Law of the Galápagos, which purports to limit immigration and to regulate tourism, fishing, and introduced species. Whether the country has the will to enforce it remains to be seen.

Almost every day, we snorkel off a different island, dazzled by the brilliant, seemingly abundant sea life: angelfish, butterfly fish, damselfish, parrot fish, trumpetfish, schools of golden rays flying through the water. But while snorkeling in areas where sea cucumbers once blanketed the sea floor, we see only a single cuke, as lonely as Lonesome George. I would never have known they were missing if Lynn Fowler hadn't mentioned it. But once she does, it becomes impossible not to feel like Noah seeing one of his passengers go overboard. When she asks for donations for the Galápagos Conservation Fund, I get in line.

AFTER SEVEN DAYS cruising the waters of the Galápagos, we're delivered back to Guayaquil and brought to the city's central square, known as Parque de los Iguanas, to see some more of the critters before we go home. The place is crawling with free-range iguanas the size of terriers, clambering in the trees and swarming around trays into which people throw lettuce and fruit. They're the bright, neon-green iguanas of mainland South America, garish, streetwise cousins of the clean-living marine iguanas of the Galápagos, with dangling dewlaps and a decadent string of fringe down their backs. They look as if they could mug somebody.

A long time ago, a couple of their ancestors became among the first tourists in the islands. During a period of heavy rains, possibly during an El Nino year, they may have been swept out to sea on a raft of earth, a chunk of land that broke off from a riverbank, carrying whole trees and hapless animals as it sailed off into the Pacific, caught in the current until it hit land: the Galápagos.

The iguanas had no choice but to stay and get on with their lives, evolving into something unprecedented and miraculously cunning: the only reptiles on the planet that can swim in the sea, eat algae, and snort salt through their snouts. On each island, they adapted, developing to survive the environment, becoming the fat red-and-black iguanas of Espanola or the wily little masturbators of Genovesa.

Sometime after the iguanas' big adventure, Darwin dropped by. He rode a few tortoises and pulled a few tails, not yet aware that he would one day change the course of human history. Now you, too, can come see what Darwin gawked at not so long ago: “that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.” But know, as you stroll along a trail among creatures found nowhere else, that you are implicated—for good or ill—in the evolution going on around you. Watch your step.

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