Sketches made alongside Darwin on the Beagle voyage:

A possible solution to the Dark Forest Theory is that any species advanced enough to make contact with interstellar life is vastly more likely to have evolved a Cooperate baseline strategy rather than a Defect one. Klingons, maybe; Reapers? Ehn.

Not that anyone should take the Drake equation seriously in any case. Our "I Love Lucy" reruns are not going to summon the fungi from Yugoth.

If anything is listening though: hi! We're ballistic cursorial hunters! Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.

Soviet geology: an exotic and romantic business:

Large sections of the country were still waiting to be explored and mapped. Foreign travel was still impossible for most Soviets, so idealistic youths were drawn to geology for the thrill of adventure and exploration. Some of them really thought they could find personal freedom, if not by going west, then in the distant corners of the wild east....

They mapped, carried loads of samples, fished and hunted, wrote poetry, drank vodka, and sang songs around the campfire. In fact, many Russian musicians and poets (Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky included) started out as geologists or worked as technicians in those parties. Few outside of Russia know that it was geologists who started an important movement in modern poetry in St. Petersburg in the 1960s, called the “Geological School.” Furthermore, geologist authors dominated a genre of unofficial, often politically risqué songs (“bard songs”). The songs were about cloud shadows in the tundra, windy mountain passes, shamans and dervishes in time-forgotten villages, apatite [sic..... unless they mean the mineral], camaraderie, lack of cigarettes, and nostalgia for home and love during long field seasons.....


Even until the late 1980s, saying you were a geologist to girls in St. Petersburg was a great pick-up line — often greeted with admiring smiles and questions about exotic places and wild excesses in the field. Yet when I told my father that I was going to become a geologist he said: “Do you want to be one of those inebriated loudmouths with backpacks and guitars who bellow songs on night trains?”

Apparently, the composer Giya Kancheli (recommended) came out of such a background.
 

Cache of 140 WWII Spitfires discovered in Burmese jungle: very cool!

... the Spitfires are buried in the original crates with their wings folded back along their bodies, covered in grease and wax paper. Their joints are even tarred and they're expected to be in pristine condition.

Via Adventure Blog.

Och, science!

Scottish scientists recreate Shackleton's whisky

A successful first ascent of the Shark's Fin on Mt. Meru in the Gharwal Himalaya: looks like quite a route! Jimmy Chin, probably the world's best climbing photographer, was on the expedition, so it'll be worth looking for more images of this one.

Reaching the edge of the Nyiragongo lava lake

Two poems after my own heart:

Behold the ever-patient Yak,
With four explorers on his back.
He treks for miles across the snows,
Wearing a bracelet in his nose;
And when they stop to have a snack,
It's slices of the useful Yak!

And:

You cannot please the caribou,
No matter what you say or do;
He just morosely glares at you.

Both by Katrina Moore, née Hincks, an intrepid and cultured lady of the best old-fashioned kind. I must try and track down more of her writing. Found these in David Roberts' The Last of His Kind, highly recommended if mountaineering history is your cup of tea.

Two U.K. climbers make a couple of really remote first ascents in Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor:

Alan says: "I was standing on top of a mountain in Afghanistan that probably no Westerner had even seen - maybe no human being has even seen.

Alan Halewood has photos on his blog.

Hat Tip: The Adventure Blog

Links roundup:

Really creepy noises in the San Juan mountains (via Chas)

How do you translate "He wanks as high as any in Wome!" into Arabic? (And does he have a wife?)

Recreating the aurochs: yes! (Chas again)

Two reviews of Avatar that are actually interesting and intelligent: an Orthodox perspective ("What I think is worth noting in this pagan/pantheistic view of god, man and nature is its similarity to Orthodox Christianity"), and Darren Naish discusses the beasties.

Things we should all consider in our outdoor adventures: Plight of missing hikers will make great movie. "Personally, I'm hoping at least someone does not make it out alive." But no outdoor adventure movie will ever be dumber than this.

Speaking of which, I finally saw Nordwand. Everything about it was very well done, but they could hardly have made it less uplifting. I don't suppose anyone will start making feature films about how wonderful mountaineering is when everything goes right, but it's nice to get some sense of why people ever think the sport is a good idea. Even Touching the Void was better in that regard.

Speaking of which, a new search is on for Mallory and Irvine's camera, in connection with Irvine's corpse. Good luck with that.

Shackleton's whisky recovered!

And last (and possibly best): amazing climbing by a monkey man in India. Consider me very jealous!

Has the mystery of the disappearance of Everett Ruess been solved? National Geographic Adventure has a teaser.

Hat tip to the very worthwhile Guy Tal Photography.

Painting the Polar Landscape: a collection of Arctic and Antarctic paintings from the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

To see the 21st Century holding its own, check out Tony Foster's work (more, scroll down).

Exploring a 3,100' cave shaft in China.

A vast, high and entirely unexplored mountain range: the only catch is that it's buried under 2.5 miles of ice.

An Antarctic mountain range that rivals the Alps in elevation will be probed this month by an expedition of scientists using airborne radar and other Information Age tools to virtually "peel away" more than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) of ice covering the peaks.

One of the mysteries of the mountain range is that current evidence suggests that it "shouldn't be there" at all.

The researchers hope to find answers there to some basic questions about the nature of the southernmost continent, including the massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet. For instance, it is unclear how Antarctica came to be ice-covered in the first place and whether that process began millions of years ago in the enigmatic Gamburtsev Mountain range...

The scientists will eventually create a coordinated mosaic of images of the shallowest layers in the ice sheet to regions hundreds of kilometers beneath the hidden mountains, in effect creating a 3-D map of the vast and unexplored region...

Mountains of Madness, anyone? It's mindblowing just how thick the Antarctic ice sheets are: the South Pole lies at over 9,000 feet, but bedrock is thought to be near sea level.

Oh, very well, here's something: the HMS Beagle Project.

In 2009, the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth we will launch a sailing replica of HMS Beagle. An icon of scientific progress, she will circumnavigate the globe in Darwin's wake, crewed by aspiring scientists and researchers. They will carry out original research both at sea and on land, updating Darwin's observations, breaking new scientific ground and relating the adventure of science to enthuse a new generation of young students.

The Project's blog is worth a glance as well, and shall presumably wax ever more interesting.

The aforementioned blog informs us that David Attenborough's next project shall be about Charles Darwin.

Finally and best, (indeed, worthy of near immortalization as the O&P Current Pick) is the Charles Darwin's Beagle Diary blog, daily entries from both Darwin's and Fitzroy's journals, plus illustrations!

All right, I can't hide any longer. I have Internet at home again, and while Odious has held down the fort very well, it's time I contributed something. I have an ungodly number of photographs from the last seven months, some of which will doubtless be inflicted in due time. But for now I shall fall back on that standby of all bloggers: what I've been reading.

You should all rush out right now and procure a copy of Where the Sea Breaks Its Back by Cory Ford, subtitled The Epic Story of Early Naturalist Georg Steller and the Russian Exploration of Alaska. Mrs. Peculiar and I spent much of the summer devouring (re-devouring, in my case) Patrick O'Brian novels, and the transition to Mr. Ford's book was utterly seamless, like picking up a work of non-fiction which O'Brian would surely have penned had Ford not beat him to it. Nautical exploration, harsh elements, shipwreck, the resourceful desperation of sailors, and above all natural philosophy: it's all there. And Mr. Ford's pen does excellent justice to all (he had a long-running column in Field & Stream; ah, for the days when outdoor sporting magazines cultivated writing of a caliber that can no longer be found in National Geographic). From the introductory chapter describing the Aleutians, the author's own experience:

The sun was setting; we watched it poise on the horizon and then slip out of sight as deftly as a conjurer's coin. A queer chuckling sound caught our ears, and we halted. A small dark-bodied bird, with white eyes and a crested topknot like a California quail, marched out from a crevice in the cliff and regarded us owlishly for a moment. Then he fluffed his feathers-- I could have sworn he shrugged-- and walked to the edge of a projecting rock, and pitched in a power dive toward the water. Through my glasses I saw him spread his wings and level off at the bottom of his descent, only a few inches from the surface of the ocean, and shoot out at right angles like a projectile from a gun.

He was followed by a steady succession of other birds, each in turn stepping out onto a rock and hurtling down in the same breathtaking leap. Some were crested auklets; some the absurd-looking least auklet, its big eyes surrounded by a few white bristles, giving the effect of plucked eyebrows; some the rare rhinoceros auklet with a tuft of feathers sprouting from its bill like a horn. The air was full of acrobatic birds, forming single lines and moving in long undulating ribbons below us, crisscrossing each other's paths, weaving in and out in graceful patterns, alternately light and dark as they turned in the air. Abruptly the show ended. At some inaudible signal, the ribbons wound upward to the top of the cliff, and with a roar like a waterfall the entire flock disintegrated overhead and landed all about us. One by one the gave us the same owlish look, shrugged again, and trudged back in to their burrows for the night.

Naturally, the narrative revolves around Steller. A young, ambitious man, a brilliant naturalist, he is very sympathetic while being frequently as insufferable as a Stendhal protagonist. The man had the enviable yet heartbreaking distinction of being the first trained naturalist to set eyes upon the northwest of the American continent, on Vitus Bering's epic voyage in 1741. Americans will most likely recognize his name in the Steller's Jay; he also lends his name to an eider, a sea lion and the spectacular Steller's Sea Eagle. Even more intriguing, he observed two highly unusual species which were never seen by a scientist again. Steller's Sea Cow was an enormous manatee dwelling in Alaskan waters, up to 35 feet long, 25 around and four tons in weight. Steller measured a specimen and found that its heart weighed 36 1/4 pounds and that its stomach was [Steller's words] "of amazing size, 6 feet long, 5 feet wide, and so stuffed with food and seaweed that four strong men with a rope attached could scarcely move it from its place and drag it out." Operating in a very different tradition of scientific observation than today's, and also under trying circumstances, to say the least, Steller also gave the following description of the animal:

[The fat was] glandular, firm, and shiny white, but when exposed to the sun takes on a yellowish tinge like May butter. Both the smell and the taste of it are most delicious, and it is beyond comparison with the fat of any marine animal... Melted, it tastes so sweet and delicious that we lost all desire for butter. In taste it comes pretty close to the oil of sweet almonds... The meat, when cooked, although it must boil rather long, is exceedingly savoury and cannot be distinguished easily from beef. The fat of the calves is so much like fresh lard that it is hard to tell them apart, but their meat differs in no wise from veal.

Small wonder that, after they had sustained Steller and his companions through an Aleutian winter, the sea cows were devoured every one by Russian fur traders. Steller's writings are the only record of the animal.

More mysterious still is Steller's Sea Monkey. In the naturalist's own words

"It was about two Russian ells [five feet] in length... the head was like a dog's, with pointed, erect ears. From the lower and upper lips on both sides whiskers hung down, which made it look almost like a Chinaman. The eyes were large; the body was longish, round and thick, tapering gradually toward the tail. The skin seemed thickly covered with hair, of a grey color on the back, but reddish white on the belly; in the water, however, the whole animal appeared red, like a cow. The tail was divided in to two fins, of which the upper, as in the case of sharks, was twice as large as the lower. Nothing struck me as more surprising than the fact that neither forefeet (as in the marine amphibians) nor, in their stead, fins were to be seen."

He was particularly impressed by "its wonderful actions, jumps, and gracefulness. For over two hours it swam around our ship, looking, as with admiration, first at the one and then at the other of us. At times it came so near to the ship that it could have been touched with a pole, but as soon as anybody stirred it moved a little farther. It could raise itself one-third of its length out of the water exactly like a man, and sometimes it remained in this position for several minutes. After it had observed us for about half an hour, it shot like an arrow under our vessel and came up again on the other side... in this way it dived perhaps thirty times. There drifted by a seaweed, club-shaped and hollow at one end like a bottle, toward which, as soon as it was sighted, the animal darted, seized it in its mouth, and swam with it toward the ship, making such motions and monkey tricks that nothing more laughable can be imagined. After many funny jumps and motions it finally darted off and did not appear again. It was seen later, however, several times in different places of the sea."

No one has any idea. The thing was never seen again, and were it any other observer one would question the account's reliability. But Steller was a seriously good observational scientist. All his other accounts of marine life hold up in retrospect, and he seems to have gotten quite a long and close look at the animal. What's a cryptozoologist to think? If the Russians ate them all, it was never deemed worthy of mention.

Of course, voyages of exploration are not generally lacking in Sturm und Drang, and Bering's voyage ranks high in the annals of human misery. Indeed, it's progress is emblematic of the phrase Worse things happen at sea. After sighting the sea monkey, the St. Peter was harried by desperate weather until it was finally wrecked on a desolate island, with a crew deep in the throes of scurvy. Despite all that had just happened at sea, what then happened on land is intensely harrowing:

...three sailors died as they were brought up on deck, and a fourth succumbed on the way to the beach... Conditions were not much better ashore. Driftwood for the underground huts had to be dragged a considerable distance, and the handful of men still able to work had not yet completed the shelters. The sick lay on the open beach under rags and bits of canvas, sometimes half buried by the drifting snow. When a man died, his comrades were too weak to remove the body, and it remained alongside the living. A night they could hear the foxes gnawing at the corpse.

"Everywhere on the shore there was nothing but pitiful and terrifying sights," Steller sympathized. "Some sick cried because they were so cold, others because hungry and thirsty, since the mouths of many were so miserably affected by the scurvy that they could not eat because of the great pain, as the gums were swollen like a sponge, brown-black, grown over the teeth and covering them." His previous contempt for his Russian shipmates was forgotten. Now, in their adversity, he worked tirelessly to minister to the needs of the crew, bringing them warm soups and antiscorbutic herbs and roots which he dug from the frozen ground.

From this situation, as hopeless as any in which humans find themselves, comes not only survival, but the irreplaceable scientific tour de force that is Steller's description of the sea cow. Why can't we make movies as amazing as this? Steller's biography puts any number of Hollywood epics to shame.

Also, his De Bestiis Marinis is available online.

My other recent read, which I will discuss at much shorter length, is Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides. Revolving around the biography of Kit Carson, it is also an account of the American settlement of the southwest and the Navajo experience of that settlement. Kit Carson is easy to vilify for his role in rounding up the Navajos, but the man was hardly a racist. His three marriages, for instance, were to an Arapaho, a Cheyenne and a New Mexico Spanish woman. Sides does an excellent job of not shying away from the brutal aspects of the American conquest while also avoiding excess of sentiment and hand wringing. What I like best about the book is Sides' ability to reveal the full strangeness of history, especially parts of American history which we too often take for granted. For instance, I had no idea that after Stephen Watts Kearny and his dragoons traveled from Santa Fe to invade California, they were met and nearly slaughtered by mounted Californians wielding nine-foot lances.

More regular blogging to come, I hope!

In Chitral there is another legendary creature, the "glacier frog." It is about the size of a calf, has the shape of a frog, and lives in glacier crevasses. What it lives on, nobody seems to know. Many people who claim to have seen one, usually indistinctly silhouetted against the background of a crevasse, maintain that its head and back were encrusted with gold and diamonds...

[There follows an account of how to obtain treasure from a diamond-hoarding cobra.]

The Islamic Chitralis were more down to earth. They had little use for rites and incantations; to capture a glacier frog, more drastic measures were necessary. A smith, who was a shrewd enough businessman to have earned enough money to buy himself a truck, suggested we should go into partnership: He would make the right kind of fishhook, and if I managed to catch a glacier frog with it, we should go fifty-fifty on the proceeds. To avoid losing face and appearing a complete sucker, I stuck out for a bigger share for myself; after all, it was I who was exposing myself to the perils of frog fishing. But for some reason or other our scheme never came off. Nevertheless, I was very grateful to the glacier frog. In those days the Chitralis were still backwoodsmen, so to speak, and had nothing of the Sherpas' experience of anything so crazy as mountaineering. To the Chitralis I was an inexplicable phenomenon and was consequently viewed with mistrust. But once the news got around that I was aftera glacier frog, they gave me enthusiastic support.

From Himalaya by Herbert Tichy, 1968

R.I.P Brad Washburn, mountaineer, cartographer, genuine explorer. Dr. Hypercube beat me to it, and said most of what I would want to say. For my thoughts on the passing of the last generation of true explorers (pace Deep Sea News, who do indeed explore some truly wonderful places), please revisit last years post commemorating the death of Heinrich Harrer.

And while we're on the subject, please raise a glass to my father, who fell in the Tetons 16 years ago today. Some day a post on him will come, but not until I can scan the photo of him collecting a bounty on rats from the Chi-Coms.

Fascinating, if true:

To our amazement we learned that in valleys [in the Karakorum] where glaciers had disappeared, sometimes new, artificial glaciers are constructed by villagers. Glaciers are treasured in this dry country, for meltwater is the source of practically all irrigation. The last glacier to be started, we were told, had been made 35 years earlier by the grandfather of the present rajah. It had been built to an ancient formula, with ice blocks coming from male and female glaciers (their difference was not made clear). These blocks were deposited in a high valley and covered with charcoal and thorn bushes, on top of which 50 goatskins of water were placed. The water was to help keep the ice cool and to augment the ice supply when the water froze in winter. After 20 years of gradually adding ice and snow, the glacier became strong enough to support itself and send a constant supply of water in the nonwinter months to the dry fields below.

From Robert H. Bates' account of the 1932 K2 expedition, told in The Love of Mountains is Best, pg. 119.