Patches of ice float on frigid water in the Antarctic Region. Photograph © Wolfgang Kaehler/CORBIS

Antarctica
By Barry Lopez

One damp fall evening in Portland, Oregon, midway through a local production of Terra Nova, I was struck by something personal—the odd privilege of my own life as a writer who travels. Here in this play by Ted Tally, about Robert Falcon Scott's disastrous 1911-12 journey to the South Pole, were the dramatic circumstances of travel in that harsh and very remote region, yet I had experienced most of them. I'd camped in tents in the Transantarctic Mountains and been forced to fuel cook stoves with kerosene so cold it poured like engine oil.

None of this made me feel unique or tough or even important. With the advent of planes and the support of the National Science Foundation, I was simply another part of the privileged vanguard of early visitors to the place some Australians call "down under Down Under."

If you're exploring the planet, Antarctica is the last stop on the train, a continent with no history of a native population, where passports are unnecessary, and where the fringing ocean still boils with life in a way great stretches of the Atlantic and Pacific no longer do. Unexplored valleys and unscaled mountains abound in this white brocade desert, with its ferocious winds and curve-of-the-Earth vistas.

What, really, will we find here?

Commercial travel in Antarctica has been confined largely to the Antarctic Peninsula, the continent's "banana belt," 600 miles south of Cape Horn. But with more ice-capable cruise ships, and with more aircraft-fuel caches established across the continent, well-heeled tourists will press farther and wider, making regular destinations of the once unfeasible South Pole, the McMurdo Dry Valleys, the Vinson Massif in the Ellsworth Mountains, even historic Beardmore Glacier, crossed by the early polar expeditions.

As I sat there that night in my suit and tie, watching Scott and his companions dying in their blizzard-bound tent in that March of 1912, I recalled Scott's last written sentence, "For God's sake look after our people." Whom more than the obvious—family and friends—might he have meant, I wondered, by "people"?

We travel partly to reengage a sense of wonder, which wanes under the press of modern circumstances. In Antarctica, a place where whiteness is as subtle as shades of blue in the sky, a visit can awaken in us a new sense of obligation as travelers. After Antarctica there are no more continents. It is in these, the planet's most desolate precincts, where we might learn to take loving and judicious care of the places that have nurtured us. It is here that we might rediscover the idea of land as a gift and not a commodity.

The information in this story was accurate at the time it was published, but we suggest you confirm all details before making travel plans.