Although I was too cold and exhausted to feel much at the time, pulling over the last cornice to the top of Antarctica's 16,059-foot mount Vinson ranks among my life's most ecstatic moments. Having spent five long days toiling on steep, icy slopes, carrying packs half our weight, four friends and I had crested the highest point on earth's most forbidding continent and gazed on a sight unique in all the world.
To every side of us sprawled the vast expanse of our planet's last great wilderness, partially wreathed in clouds and bathed in a rich, warm hue by a low-angle midnight sun. To the north and south ran the sharp, angular Ellsworth Range, swathed in glaciers and mostly unclimbed, unnamed, and unexplored eastward lay the treacherous Ronne Ice Shelf; and to the cap, so flat that from our high perch the horizon seemed to follow the earth's curvature.
A stiff wind made ice crystals hiss as they stung our faces, the only sound we heard; as far as our eyes could see, nothing crawled, flew, or grew. Not even lichens can survive the six-month night here, when winds gust at more than one hundred miles per hour and temperatures plummet to three digits below zero.
Except for our Twin Otter pilot and his engineer, camped in a tiny, tented tourist base 150 miles south, the next nearest human outpost was an American science base at the South Pole, more than 600 miles farther. Never before had I felt so much like a man standing at the end of the earth.
Indeed, what made our climb astonishing was not that we had climbed our mountain, but simply that we had even reached its base, which is 1,700 miles from the nearest paved airstrip, in Chile. Proud as I was of my own efforts, I recognized the true achievement was that of the team that had flown us there. We were just one of the many contemporary expeditions that would never have been possible without the dreams and daring of this team, and especially of its mentor - the late veteran British Antarctic Survey pilot Giles Kershaw, who was killed, sadly, in an air crash earlier this year.
Polar Flyboys
Less than a decade ago, when the first mountaineers turned to Kershaw to fly them to Mount Vinson as part of a race to climb in Antarctica's remote interior, the only humans to penetrate this wilderness were heroic explorers like Robert Falcon Scott, who perished in a quest for the South Pole, or hardy researchers who participated in programs encouraged by a remarkable treaty that has set the entire continent aside for peaceful scientific discovery. The many tourists who have visited the Antarctic Peninsula in icebreaking cruise ships see no more than the equivalent of Florida on a continent the size of the United States and Mexico combined. The rest of the land mass has always been impossible to reach without working through government channels to obtain a place on the few ski-equipped airplanes operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) or other nations' science programs.
From the moment Kershaw piloted the first Mount Vinson climbers in 1983, however, this began to change. A veteran polar adventure, Kershaw was one of the few who saw the value of Antarctic tourism. Based on the success of his pioneering flight, which involved moonshot-scale logistics and
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