the explorers journal - The Explorers Club

the 

e x p lor e r s 

j o u r n a l 

EST. 1921 

lost worlds, new worlds 

fall 2008 

Merle Greene Robertson 

into the land of the Maya 

Christoph Baumer 

into the land of no return 

Ross von Burg 

space is the place 

vol. 86 no.3 I $8.00 I www.explorers.org

MADE IN CANADA

the explorers journal 

fall 2008 

lost worlds, new worlds 

cover photo: K’inich Janaab Pakal (Pakal 

the Great)—who ruled Palenque from a.d. 

615 until his death, age 80, in 683—floats 

between the heavens and the underworld 

on the lid of his limestone sarcophagus. 

Merle Greene Robertson’s painting of Tikal in the Petén region of Guatemala 

features 

specials 

regulars 

space is the place 

by Ross von Burg, p. 12 

into the land of no return 

by Christoph Baumer, photographs by Christoph Baumer and Urs Möckli, p. 22 

Postcard from Pitcairn 

text and photographs by Mark Synnott, p. 48 

into the land of the Maya 

interview with Merle Greene Robertson, p. 30 

mapping Palenque 

by Edwin L. Barnhart, p. 46 

president’s letter, p. 2 

editor’s note, p. 4 

exploration news, p. 8 

expedition Medicine, p. 54 

extreme cuisine, p. 56 

reviews, p. 58 

what were they thinking, p. 64


Fall 2008 

president’s letter 

Exploring Earth from Above 

On October 17, 1980, Explorers Club President Charles F. Brush gave 

the Lowell Thomas Award for the first time on the Club’s seventy-fifth 

anniversary. Thanks to Rolex Watch, USA, and other members and 

contributors, the Club has been able to build this award ceremony and 

increase its attendance significantly in recent years. I expect 2008 to be 

another record breaker. 

The idea for this year’s dinner theme came about from a conversation 

with our new Honorary President, Don Walsh, Ph.D. Last March, Don and 

I began discussing the role of Explorers Club members in exploration in 

the past century. We agreed that, during the twentieth century, advances 

in underwater exploration and aviation had opened up the most new areas 

to research. Many club members broke new ground in these fields from 

the very beginning. Don said he appreciated the emphasis I had recently 

placed in recognizing his field, underwater exploration, but he said he 

thought enough had not been done to recognize the great aviators in our 

organization. I agreed, then and there, to change my original plans for 

the Lowell Thomas Awards Dinner 2008. This year, we will recognize the 

achievements of our amazing aviators at our dinner entitled “Exploring 

Earth from Above.” 

At the time of this writing, our recipients for LTAD 2008 will include: 

William Anders; Leroy Chiao, Ph.D., FN’05; Martha King; Scott E. 

Parazynski, M.D., FN’08; Dick H. Smith, FN’82; and Brig. Gen. Charles 

E. Yeager (USAF, Ret.), HON’63. 

These award recipients are only some of the great explorers who have 

made outstanding contributions to aviation and exploration. As Don 

continually reminds me, “Many of the greats have already gone,” so do not 

miss this event on October 16th in New York City. 

Alan Valdes, MR’00, Lowell Thomas Award Dinner Committee 

Chairman, his Steering Committee members, your Board of Directors, 

and I look forward to seeing you there. 

Daniel A. Bennett

Lowell Thomas Awards Dinner 

EXPLORING EARTH FROM ABOVE 

THE PRESIDENT, DIRECTORS, OFFICERS, OF THE 

EXPLORERS CLUB & ROLEX WATCH USA, SALUTE 

THE 2008 LOWELL THOMAS AWARD RECIPIENTS. 

William A. Anders, Major General, USAF Reserve, Ret.: Backup pilot 

for Gemini XI and Apollo 11, pilot for Apollo 8, the first lunar orbit mission. He 

has logged more than 6,000 hours flying time. 

Leroy Chiao, Ph.D. FN'05, astronaut, pilot, engineer, educator: Over 

36 days in space, including over 26 EVA hours, prior to commanding the 

International Space Station on Expedition 10. Has logged over 2,500 flight hours 

in a variety of aircraft. 

Martha King: The only woman to hold every category and class of FAA rating 

and every flight and ground instructor certificate offered by the FAA. Honored as 

one of 100 Distinguished Aviation Heroes in the first century of flight. 

Scott E. Parazynski, M.D., FN'08, physician, pilot, astronaut: Veteran of 

five space flights. Commercial, multi-engine, seaplane and instrument-rated pilot. 

Logged over 2,000 flight hours in a variety of aircraft. STS-100 spacewalk; repaired 

solar reflector. 

Dick H. Smith, FN'82: First person to fly around the world by helicopter via 

the poles, first helicopter flight to the North Pole, first solo helicopter flight around 

the world. Australian of the Year for 1986. 

Brig. Gen Charles E. Yeager (USAF ret.), HON'63: Fighter pilot ace and 

test pilot, was the first man to break the sound barrier. Yeager is considered by 

many to be one of the greatest pilots of all time. 

Thursday, October 16, 2008 • Cipriani Wall Street, New York City


fall 2008 

editor’s note 

lost worlds, New Worlds 

This past July, I journeyed down to the ancient Maya site of 

Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico. I was not there on any sort of 

flag-carrying expedition—far from it. I was there just to party. 

Yes, PARTY! With none other than Merle Greene Robertson, 

a fellow of The Explorers Club and a heavy hitter in the realm of 

Maya studies who was celebrating her 95th birthday. On hand 

for the occasion were Explorers Club fellows Lee Langan of 

our Northern California Chapter and Edwin L. Barnhart from 

Austin, members of Robertson’s extended family, and dozens 

of luminaries in the field of Maya research, many of whom credit 

her with piquing their interest in Mesoamerica or supporting 

them at critical times in their careers. 

“Forget Indiana Jones! Merle is the fearless model of an 

archaeologist—an ageless, irrepressible, five-katun queen,” 

says Barnhart, noting that when she first came to Palenque in 

the 1960s, she slept in the Temple of the Sun. In the decades 

since, she has explored every tunnel, tomb, and roofcomb. 

Barnhart knows the 1,500-year-old city all too well, having carried 

out the first digital survey of the site, which is proving to be 

an indispensable tool in the excavation and management of this 

jewel of the Maya world. For those venturing to Palenque today, 

the site is a far cry from the jungle-cloaked ruin Robertson 

found when she began working there more than four decades 

ago. In recent years, the site has been nicely cleared, consolidated, 

and interpreted; there are even paths around its most 

important structures to make them “wheelchair accessible.” 

Despite these “upgrades,” however, Palenque continues to 

surprise, yielding discoveries with each new field season. 

In addition to our coverage of things Maya, we join Christoph 

Baumer on a journey into the hostile desert of Lop Nor, where 

he has brought to light long lost sites on the ancient Silk Road, 

and look at what the future holds for commercial spaceflight. 

We hope you enjoy the ride. 

Merle Greene Robertson and Lee Langan display flag 

#139—upside down, of course—during their exploration 

of Palenque’s Temple XX in 2003. That season, they came 

upon a tomb inside the temple, exploring it digitally 

by lowering a camera through a ten-centimeter hole 

near the chamber’s capstone. 

Angela M.H. Schuster, Editor-in-Chief

THE EXPLORERS CLUB TRAVELERS 

A World of Adventures 

Atlantic Voyage: 

From the Strait of Gibraltar to Patagonia 

November 20–December 22, 2008 (33 days) 

New Zealand & its Sub-Antarctic Islands 

December 5–21, 2008 (17 days) 

Desert Kingdoms & Imperial Cities 

December 18, 2008–January 2, 2009 (16 days) 

The Seven Continents: An Around the World 

Expedition by Private Jet 

January 21–February 14, 2009 (25 days) 

Antarctica 

February 8–21, 2009 (14 days) 

The Route to Distant Islands: 

Argentina to South Africa 

February 28–March 23, 2009 (24 days) 

Splendors of Libya 

March 14–29, 2009 (16 days) 

Travel with Explorers Club members and friends on luxurious adventures 

far off the beaten path in the company of distinguished and engaging leaders. 

SELECTED JOURNEYS 

Voyage from the Cape of 

Good Hope to Gibraltar 

March 31–May 4, 2009 (35 days) 

Please contact us at: 

800-856-8951 

9am - 6pm Mon-Fri, ET 

Toll line: 603-756-4004 

Fax: 603-756-2922 

Email: ect@studytours.org 

Website: www.explorers.org 

COMMENTS FROM RECENT 

EXPLORERS CLUB TRAVELERS 

“Without a doubt the best trip of our lives.” 

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accessible by other tours and cruises. The staff did an 

excellent job in preparing safe Zodiac landings on 

islands where access was difficult.”


fall 2008 

the explorers club 

President 

Daniel A. Bennett 

Board Of Directors 

Officers 

PATRONS & SPONSORS 

Honorary President 

Don Walsh, Ph.D 

Honor a ry Direc tors 

Robert D. Ballard, Ph.D. 

George F. Bass, Ph.D 

Eugenie Clark, Ph.D. 

Sylvia A. Earle, Ph.D. 

Col. John H. Glenn Jr., USMC (Ret.) 

Gilbert M. Grosvenor 

Donald C. Johanson, Ph.D. 

Richard E. Leakey, D.Sc. 

Roland R. Puton 

Johan Reinhard, Ph.D. 

George B. Schaller, Ph.D. 

Don Walsh, Ph.D. 

CLASS OF 2009 


Kenneth M. Kamler, M.D. 

Lorie Karnath 

Theodore M. Siouris 

Alicia Stevens 

CLASS OF 2010 

Anne L. Doubilet 

William Harte 

Kathryn Kiplinger 

Daniel A. Kobal, Ph.D. 

R. Scott Winters, Ph.D. 

CLASS OF 2011 

Norman L. Baker 

Jonathan M. Conrad 

Constance Difede 

Kristin Larson, Esq. 

Margaret D. Lowman, Ph.D. 

Vice President, Chapters 

Robert H. Whitby 

Vice President, Membership 

Daniel A. Kobal, Ph.D. 

Vice President, Operations 

Garrett R. Bowden 

Vice President, Research & Education 

Margaret D. Lowman, Ph.D. 

Treasurer 

Mark Kassner 

Assistant Treasurer 

Kevin O’Brien 

Secretary 

Robert M.T. Jutson, Jr. 

Assistant Secretary 

Anne L. Doubilet 

Patrons Of Exploration 

Robert H. Rose 

Mr. & Mrs. Donald Segur 

Michael W. Thoresen 

Corporate Partner Of Exploration 

Rolex Watch U.S.A., Inc. 

Corporate Supporter Of Exploration 

National Geographic Society 


EDITORS 

ART DEPARTMENT 

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do not necessarily reflect those of THE EXPLORERS CLUB or 

the explorers journal. Subscriptions should be addressed 

to: Subscription Services, the explorers journal, 

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Editor-in-Chief 

Angela M.H. Schuster 

Contributing Editors 

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Jim Clash 

Michael J. Manyak, M.D., FACS 

Milbry C. Polk 

Carl G. Schuster 

Nick Smith 

Linda Frederick Yaffe 

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Jesse Alexander 

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Steve Burnett 

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exploration news 

edited by Jeff Blumenfeld, expeditionnews.com 

Gorilla troops Found 

alive and well in northern Congo 

A census just released by the 

Wildlife Conservation Society 

shows more than 125,000 

lowland gorillas alive and well 

in a 47,000-square-kilometer 

region in northern Republic 

of Congo. Previous estimates 

from the 1980s had placed the 

entire population of western 

lowland gorillas, which can be 

found in seven Central African 

nations, at less than 100,000. 

Scientists believed that number 

had since dropped by 

half, due to hunting and 

disease. 

The new census was the 

result of intensive fieldwork 

carried out by the Bronx 

Zoo-based WCS and the 

Government of Republic 

of Congo, where researchers 

combed rainforests and 

isolated swamps to count gorilla 

“nests” to accurately estimate 

the population. Gorillas 

construct nests each night 

from leaves and branches for 

sleeping. Population densities 

were as high as eight individuals 

per square kilometer 

in one particularly rich forest 

patch, which ranks among the 

highest gorilla densities ever 

recorded. 

Seventy-three thousand 

of the gorillas came from 

the Ntokou-Pikounda region 

and another 52,000 from the 

Ndoki-Likouala landscape— 

including a previously unknown 

population of nearly 

6,000 gorillas living in an 

isolated Raphia swamp. WCS 

cautioned that many of the 

gorillas live outside existing 

protected areas, though the 

Government of Congo has 

committed to creating a new 

national park in the Ntokou- 

Pikounda region. 

“We knew from our own 

observations that there were 

a lot of gorillas out there, but 

we had no idea there were 

so many,” said Emma Stokes, 

who led the survey efforts in 

Ndoki-Likouala. “We hope 

that the results of this survey 

will allow us to work with the 

Congolese government to establish 

and safeguard the new 

Ntokou-Pikounda protected 

area.” 

WCS says a combination 

of factors led to such high 

numbers of gorillas, including 

successful long-term 

conservation management 

of the Republic of Congo’s 

protected areas; remoteness 

and inaccessibility of some 

of the key locations where 

the gorillas were found; and a 

food-rich habitat, particularly 

in some of the swamp forests 

and the herb-rich Marantaceae 

forests. 

This discovery should be a 

rallying cry to the world showing 

that we can protect other 

vulnerable and endangered 

species, be they gorillas 

in Africa, tigers in India, or 

lemurs in Madagascar. The 

census data were released 

at a press conference at the 

International Primatological 

Society Congress in 

Edinburgh, Scotland. 

8

EXPLORATION NEWS 

Junk on the 

High seas 

sailing for cleaner oceans 

“Everybody’s plastic, but I love 

plastic. I want to be plastic,” 

said the artist Andy Warhol. 

Be careful what you wish for. 

A vast swath of the Pacific, 

twice the size of Texas, is full of 

a plastic stew that is entering 

the food chain. Scientists say 

these toxins are causing obesity, 

infertility…and worse. To 

call attention to the problem, 

two men set sail in the Pacific 

in a strange-looking raft, evocative 

of the fabled Kon-Tiki. 

With a cabin fashioned from 

the cockpit of a Cessna 310, 

the 1.5-ton, ten-by-six-meter 

raft, dubbed Junk, floats on a 

system of pontoons—made up 

of thousands of plastic bottles 

held together with recycled 

nets—and is propelled by currents 

and wind. It’s dangerous 

and makeshift, and that’s the 

point. 

The pilots of Junk—Marcus 

Eriksen, director of research 

and education at the Algalita 

Marine Research Foundation 

in Long Beach, CA, and Joel 

Paschal, a former employee 

of the National Oceanic and 

Atmospheric Administration 

(NOAA)—want to get your 

attention. The two are working 

to raise public awareness 

of a particularly dense accumulation 

of debris, which 

can be found in a holding 

pattern 1,800 kilometers 

off the California coast. The 

area, known as the central 

North Pacific gyre, is a calm 

core of a convergence of four 

major ocean currents rotating 

clockwise under a large highpressure 

zone. Plastics that 

work their way into the gyre 

can be trapped for decades. 

On June 1, the two adventurers 

set sail from Long Beach, 

bound for Hawaii. They used 

four sails to take advantage of 

varying weather conditions, 

including one they call the 

“Frankensail,” a mainsail that 

was “MacGyvered” at sea. 

The duo, who filmed the voyage, 

arrived at Ala Wei Harbor 

near Honolulu on August 27, 

having traveled more than 

4,800 kilometers in 87 days. 

For more information: www. 

junkraft.com. 

World’s smallest 

snake found 

microreptiles in Barbados 

The world’s smallest species of 

snake—a type of threadsnake, 

which is as thin as a spaghetti 

noodle and small enough to 

rest comfortably on a U.S. 

quarter—was discovered by 

Blair Hedges, an evolutionary 

biologist at Penn State, in a 

tiny forest fragment on the 

eastern end of the island of 

Barbados. Hedges believes 

the species is rare because 

most of its habitat has been 

replaced by buildings and 

farms. “Habitat destruction is 

a major threat to biodiversity 

throughout the world,” he said, 

adding that “the Caribbean 

is particularly vulnerable 

because it contains an unusually 

high percentage of endangered 

species and, because 

these animals live on islands. 

They have nowhere to go 

when they lose their habitat.” 

Hedges and his colleagues 

have also documented the 

world’s smallest frog and lizard 

species, which were also 

found on Caribbean islands. 

The most recent discovery 

is described in the journal, 

Zootaxa. For more information: 

www.science.psu.edu/alert/ 

Hedges7-2008.htm. 

the explorers journal


Kite-Skiing 

for Steger 

across the Greenland Ice Cap 

Death on Denali 

first fatality on famed summit 

James Nasti, 51, of Naperville, 

Il, a client on an Alpine 

Ascents International expedition, 

collapsed and died on 

the 6,193-meter summit of Mt. 

McKinley (aka Denali) on the 

evening of July 4. According 

to the two expedition guides, 

Nasti exhibited no signs of 

distress or illness throughout 

the trip, which began on June 

20, and was climbing strongly 

just prior to the collapse. 

Although the guides administered 

CPR for some 45 

minutes, Nasti did not regain 

a pulse. 

The guides immediately 

notified Denali National Park 

mountain rangers stationed 

at the 4,300-meter camp via 

radio. NPS rangers instructed 

the team to descend carefully 

with the remaining four 

clients to the 5,242-meter 

camp, as there was no safe 

means of recovering Nasti at 

that time. While conditions 

were initially calm and clear 

on the summit, the weather 

began to deteriorate as the 

incident progressed. 

The summit of Mt. McKinley 

features an exposed flat area 

roughly the size of a single car 

garage. Just below it, climbers 

must negotiate a 150- 

meter-long knife-edged ridge. 

A recovery along this ridge 

requires a highly skilled technical 

rescue team and a rope 

rigging system. Considering 

the high risk involved in such 

a ground lowering, as well as 

the excessive risk of a helicopter 

recovery at this elevation, 

the NPS announced that the 

safest alternative was to leave 

the remains of the deceased 

climber on the mountain for 

the time being. 

Nasti was a member of the 

Highpointers Club as well as 

the AAC, and Denali was his 

49th high point of the 50 U.S. 

states. According to his son 

Chris, Nasti had only White 

Butte, ND, left in his highpoints 

quest. 

According to the NPS, the 

incident represents the first 

time a mountaineer has died 

on the summit. In 1988, a 

climber died at an elevation 

of 5,974 meters on a descent 

from the summit; the body 

was never recovered. 

Polar explorer Will Steger, 64, 

recently returned from a training 

expedition in Greenland, 

where he took up kite-skiing in 

preparation for a spring 2009 

expedition. Next year, Steger 

and other accomplished 

young adventurers will kite-ski 

800 kilometers across the 

Greenland Ice Cap to document 

the rising summer thaw 

level and the impact climate 

change has had on it. 

This fall, Steger will once 

again be joined by youth 

leaders in the climate change 

movement during a domestic 

expedition, entitled The 

Longest Summer Tour. From 

October 13 to 22, Steger 

and company will travel 

throughout the Great Lakes 

Region to galvanize action in 

major cities, and at college 

and university campuses to 

address climate change. The 

tour will produce a series of 

high-profile public forums with 

local policymakers, including 

governors and mayors, to 

bridge generations in discussion 

of climate change action 

steps and support statewide 

initiatives across the region. 

“After more than 45 years 

of polar expeditions, I have 

traveled to places that no 

longer exist,” says Steger. “I 

hope that my upcoming tour 

will empower people to make 

real changes in policy and lifestyle, 

so that we can preserve 

what is left of the world we 

know.” For more information: 

www.globalwarming101.com. 

Denali photo by John Rhodes 

10


Neil Laughton, round-theworld 

yachtsman Robin Knox- 

Johnston, polar adventurer 

Tom Avery, round-the-world 

yachtsman Brian Thompson, 

round-the-world yachtswoman 

Dee Caffari, and roundthe-world 

yachtsman Mike 

Golding. — Nick Smith 

Cordon Rouge Club, photo by Nick Smith; Buzz Aldrin and Kelly Ripa at the Fly Me To the Moon premier, photo by Angela M.H. Schuster 

Mumm is the word 

toasting exploration in London 

Champagne G.H. Mumm 

recently inaugurated its 

“Cordon Rouge Club” amid 

great fanfare at the Royal 

Geographical Society in 

London. The new organization 

is not a club in a traditional 

sense but rather, according 

to event organizer Charlotte 

Bell, a way to “bring together 

and recognize exceptional 

people for their extraordinary 

achievements in the realms of 

exploration, sailing, adventure, 

and discovery.” 

The award ceremony, 

which was accompanied by a 

display of exploration memorabilia 

from RGS archives, 

was presided over by 2008 

Club Chairman, Bear Grylls. 

Grylls presented each of the 

inaugural members with a 

commemorative champagne 

sabrage sword, before leading 

an expedition across 

London in a double-decker 

bus to the Travellers Club in 

Pall Mall, where a celebratory 

dinner was held. 

The time-honored art of le 

sabrage (opening a bottle of 

champagne with a sword) 

dates back to the time of 

Napoleon. The French 

commander-in-chief’s men 

reputedly developed the 

technique as a way of opening 

the bottle without dismounting. 

Keeping control of 

their horses they drew their 

sabres and beheaded the 

bottle with a single stroke of 

the blade. 

According to Bell, the club 

will bring like-minded and 

inspiring people together 

on an annual basis: “Each 

year a new chairman will 

be appointed and together 

with existing members, they 

will approve and induct new 

members.” 

Inaugural members, pictured 

above left to right, 

include polar balloonist and 

adventurer David Hempleman- 

Adams, tribal expert and adventurer 

Oliver Steeds, polar 

adventurer Ben Saunders, 

Antarctic adventurer Patrick 

Woodhead, expedition artists 

Olly and Suzi, Bear Grylls, 

trans-Atlantic oarsman Ben 

Fogle, Everest mountaineer 

A buzz in New York 

Apollo 11 animated 

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz 

Aldrin and daytime talk-show 

host Kelly Ripa graced the 

red carpet at the Regal Union 

Square Theater in New York 

on July 31 for the premier of 

Fly Me to the Moon, a 3D animated 

feature film based on 

the historic 1969 NASA mission. 

Aldrin and Ripa are featured 

voices in the film, which 

chronicles the adventures of 

three brazen young flies who 

manage to sneak aboard the 

lunar flight and make history 

as the first insects to land 

on the Moon. The Summit 

Entertainment film, which is 

based on actual NASA transcripts 

and original blueprints, 

debuted in American theaters 

August 15. 


Space 

is the Place 

by Ross von Burg 

Test firing of a Falcon 9 rocket first stage with its full complement of nine Merlin 1C engines on 30 July 2008. Conducted at the Space X test facility in McGregor Texas, the nine 

Merlins produced nearly 832,000 lbs of thrust during the test, consuming 3,200 lbs of liquid oxygen and rocket grade kerosene per second. image courtesy Space X. 

12

The Earth is the cradle of humanity but mankind can’t 

stay in the cradle forever. 

—Konstantin Tsiolkovsky 

Just to the east of busy LAX lies Hawthorne 

Municipal Airport, formerly known as Jack Northrop 

Field, where the famed aviation pioneer began designing 

and building aircraft in the 1920s. Since 

October 2007, Northrop’s hangar has served as 

the design, assembly, prototyping, and launch 

control area for Elon Musk’s Space X. The Falcon 

1 rockets built here are currently launching from 

the Ronald Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in 

the South Pacific. The actual launch operations, 

however, are run from laptops in a trailer at the 

back of the hangar, and are linked via satellite and 

closed-circuit TV to the launch site. 

The Falcon rocket and the Dragon crew vehicle 

are being assembled in the hangar from 

components cut by computer-controlled milling 

machines located under the same roof. Powered 

by the Merlin 1C engine, the industry’s first regenerative, 

reusable engine, Falcon 1 is the first new 

orbital rocket to be designed and built in more 

than a decade. The Falcon rocket has suffered 

its share of setbacks during testing—most recently 

stage separation failure, which destroyed 

the vehicle on August 2. Nonetheless, Musk and 

his crew are confident they will make it into orbit 

with the new engine. Falcon 9—with 9 Merlin 1C 

engines—is scheduled to launch next year. The 

fuel tanks for the F9, which are being assembled 

at one end of the hangar, are the same size as a 

Boeing 737 fuselage. 

As I tour the Space X facilities with the company’s 

media coordinator, Roger Gilbertson, a 

coproducer and cameraman for the movie Who 

Killed the Electric Car, and Diane Murphy, an 

experienced hand in the aerospace and satellite 

industries and the company’s vice president for 

media relations, I become acutely aware that most 

of the people working in the rocket factory are incredibly 

young. Murphy is quick to remind me that 

the average age of the Apollo team was 26. She 

then goes on to tell me that in late 2009, Musk, 

37, will be moving his base of operations to the 

storied Titan launch pad area at Cape Canaveral. 

It is rumored that he ultimately plans to go all the 

way to Mars. 

Seeing what is on the floor and on the drawing 

board here at Space X, it is entirely possible that 

Musk or one of more than a dozen other enterprises 

that have entered the private spaceflight arena—including 

XCOR, Scaled Composites, Virgin 

Galactic, Orbital, and Bigelow Aerospace—just 

might achieve this lofty goal within the coming 

decade. 

For years, astronauts like Buzz Aldrin have been 

talking and writing about commercial space and 

orbital tourism as a way to allow aerospace entrepreneurs 

to shake manned-spaceflight out of the 

doldrums. To this end, Aldrin himself founded his 

own rocket design company, Starcraft Boosters, 

Inc., and launched the ShareSpace Foundation, 

a not-for-profit devoted to opening the doors of 

space tourism to all. 

Aerospace designers, dot-com billionaires, and 

visionaries like the X Prize Foundation have signed 

on to an already imagined blueprint for twentyfirst-century 

space exploration and exploitation 

by private enterprise. This combination of ready 

money, available technology, good policies, and 

individual initiative has created an ideal environment 

for a spaceflight renaissance. 

While most of the current players in the commercial 

spaceflight industry have set up shop in 

California, a few are operating out of Virginia, New 

Mexico, and Nevada. All, however, are working on 

new and cost-effective ways to get to orbit and 

stay there as part of the next technical revolution 

in transportation, materials, and Earth sciences, 

geared to a market they are sure exists. With a lot 

of hardware ready to fly over the next few years 

and the recent acquisition of Burt Rutan’s Scaled 

Composites by Northrop Grumman, this industry 

is on the verge of a major breakout. More people 

are sure to see the Earth from above in the next ten 

years than in the previous 50. The hope is that this 

access and incentivized competition will stimulate 

the investment needed to turn these maverick startups 

into the aerospace industries of tomorrow. 

The Race is On 

On June 14, 2004, Peter Diamandis filed an application 

to carry an Explorers Club Flag to an 

unspecified point 100 kilometers above the Mojave 

Desert. His wish was granted and on October 4, 

Flag #68 was carried to an altitude of more than 

100 kilometers twice in two weeks in Burt Rutan’s 

SpaceShipOne. Piloted by Mike Melville and Brian 

Binnie, it claimed the very first X Prize. 


i n t o t h e R o c k e t R a c e 

The Lynx, a shuttlelike space-tourism vehicle being developed 

by XCOR, is powered by a Methane LOX engine. Its 

encasement in a shield protects passengers from any kind of 

spontaneous disassembly.

Diamandis had trained to be an astronaut, 

studying physics and medicine. Training to be 

astronaut, however, didn’t guarantee you a berth, 

so he decided that the best way to get into space 

was to establish a prize for excellence in the endeavor. 

That’s how the first X Prize came about. 

According to Bob Weiss, vice chairman of the X 

Prize Foundation, the tale of the X Prize began 

some years ago when Diamandis was reading a 

biography of Charles Lindbergh on an airplane. 

Supported by a group of civic-minded citizens 

who outfitted the Spirit of St. Louis, which was 

named in honor of them, Lindbergh flew across 

the Atlantic to claim a $25,000 prize offered by 

Raymond Orteg, a St. Louis hotelier. Lindbergh’s 

winning that prize stimulated an industry that, within 

a few years, led not only to regularly scheduled 

flights and better aircraft, but to the establishment 

of NACA, the predecessor of NASA, which was 

essential for the development of commercial aviation 

in the United States and around the world. 

“Growing up, it was implied that if you wanted 

to go to space you would be able to go but then 

NASA started talking about what would happen 

in 50-75-100 years, instead of what could be 

done today and tomorrow,” Weiss told me. “Peter 

found another way.” The X Prize Foundation uses 

incentivized competition to prove that what people 

often accept as fact is very often wrong, just as 

Burt Rutan proved that one doesn’t need a really 

big rocket to make it to space. 

The X Prize Foundation, headquartered in 

Santa Monica, might have caught the public’s 

initial attention for suborbital flight, but to keep the 

competition going, it has established several other 

X Prizes—the Google Lunar X Prize, the Northrop 

Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, and a progressive 

automotive X Prize, which will culminate in a 

staged cross-country race for 100+ mpg vehicles. 

The future, according to Weiss, also holds an X 

Prize for a suborbital passenger transport that 

can take off from Los Angeles and be anywhere 

in the world in two to three hours. Not surprisingly, 

Diamandis seems to be involved in one way or another 

with many of the players in the commercial 

spaceflight industry. 

It’s all about the X 

After my tour of Space X’s facilities, Gilbertson and 

I retired to a well-stocked snack bar overlooking 

the factory floor. “There are a lot of Xs in this 

business—Space X, XCOR, and the X Prize. It’s 

a theme,” he says, “that seems to be sort of built 

into the names people choose.” X definitely stands 

for experimental, and the purpose of the so-called 

X vehicles, to develop advanced aeronautical designs, 

started out in government-funded programs, 

mostly for the U.S. Air Force. Among these were 

the Bell X-1, which broke the sound barrier; the 

X-15, which flew into space for the first time; the 

DC-X, or Delta Clipper, which was a single stage 

to orbit (SSTO) vertical launch system; the X-33, 

a space plane demonstrator since discontinued 

by NASA; and today’s X-35, better known as the 

Joint Strike fighter. 

While the evolution of government-sponsored X 

vehicles continues apace, many designs are now 

being more fully developed by commercial space 

operators who are building on previous research 

and testbedding to make flyable versions of experimental 

prototypes. This is consistent with the 

Air Force’s view of X vehicles. They are not commercial, 

they are highly experimental, and are not 

necessarily flight prototypes with operational capabilities. 

Failures are a part of the learning process. 

The Air Force has always had an aeronautical focus 

and is very good at encouraging cross-pollination 

with industry. It is, perhaps, a more open approach 

that grew out of the X program. 

Some years ago, NASA’s Exploration Systems 

Mission Directorate created Commercial Orbital 

Transportation Services (COTS), which has become 

an important program for people in private 

space. It stimulates and develops commercial 

partners to provide cost-effective access for crew 

and cargo to Earth’s orbit. While COTS constitutes 

a potentially powerful tool for NASA to use in 

the transformational development of commercial 

space, its one drawback is that it is more focused 

on rocket-powered vertical launch systems (VLS) 

than on aeronautical engineering. 

The Office of Commercial Space Transportation 

is responsible for licenses, the pace of commercial 

space development, and spaceports. In December 

2004, the Commercial Space Launch Amendments 

Act was passed, which outlines an explicit mandate 

to assist in the proactive development of commercial 

space for an initial period of limited regulation. 

The act is to be re-evaluated in 2012. 

According to Stuart Witt, director of the Mojave 

Airport, where much of the private space industry 

16

Lift-off of Space X’s Falcon 1, Flight 3 from Omelek Island in the Kwajalein Atoll, on 2 August 2008. The rocket system suffered stage-separation failure after reaching an altitude of 217 kilometers. image courtesy Space X. 

R and D is taking place, “There are huge collisions 

with NASA. They lose control if they allow commercial 

interests to take over. But for aerospace 

businesses to work, projects need to be funded at 

120 percent—enough to see them through. NASA 

allocates maybe 50 percent of the funding needed 

to see a project to completion.” 

Many commercial 

space companies have 

completed the testbedding 

of the elaborate 

engineering and are 

well into the next stage— 

either build-out in the 

hanger or nearly ready 

to take flight. The next 

year or two will prove 

critical to attracting 

the kind of large-scale 

investment needed to 

continue. Most of commercial 

space start-up 

companies are funded 

by private individuals, 

often dot-com billionaires. 

The long, expensive, 

and hazardous 

hardware development 

cycle is something most 

venture capitalists can’t 

justify on their balance 

sheets. Nor will they justify 

downside risk from 

potentially negative publicity following an accident. 

Nonetheless, the future investment possibilities in 

commercial space are evolving to the point where 

their potential is more attractive to investors. 

Desert Dreams 

The 1,500-hectare Mojave Airport, once thought 

of as little more than an airplane boneyard, is now 

at the center of the private space industry with 

more than 14 aerospace start-ups based there, 

a phenomenon many attribute to Stuart Witt’s 

skillful management. Witt, a former Navy pilot 

from the Top Gun school, is hoping to attract still 

more enterprises by offering free solar-supplied 

electricity. In many ways, Witt’s operation bridges 

the clean tech and commercial space industries, 

both of which share a similar investor pool, similar 

views on re-engineering technology, and similar 

go-out-and-change-the-world visions. 

It’s easy to become an enthusiast for this place, 

framed by more than 4,000 windmills on the mountains 

that overlook the desert, and the roster of 

companies located here represents a who’s who 

of the nascent commercial space industry. Scaled 

Composites, XCOR, 

Virgin Galactic, and 

Orbital are just a few of 

the tenants. The airport 

is also the home base 

for the National Test 

Pilot School where, as 

Witt dryly put it, “the 

State Department is 

afraid we are teaching 

takeoffs only”—his 

remark a reflection of 

the seriousness of the 

attention being paid to 

this industry by government 

agencies. 

Beyond pushing the 

envelope and fostering 

advances in new technologies, 

commercial 

spaceflight has raised 

national security concerns, 

particularly in 

the United States. If a 

rocket can be used to 

launch a crew or cargo 

vehicle into space, it can also lift a warhead, which 

is why private space communication links are 

monitored by the State Department. Launchers 

must be transparent in their business dealings 

with other countries or foreign corporations and 

must comply with numerous regulations or face 

even greater scrutiny. This is one of the reasons 

why the Russians currently have 85 percent of the 

launch market in the commercial space race. 

EKAD—East Kern Airport District—the real 

name of the Mojave Airport, or Spaceport as it 

is now known, is a short hop from Edwards Air 

Force Base. Located near China Lake, it boasts 

good fishing, hunting, and skiing in winter. The dry 

climate is ideal with plenty of clear days for flying, 

especially if you are a test pilot. CalTech originally 

began using the high desert for experimental 

aviation because the lakebeds made for low-cost 


S p a c e p o r t N e w M e x i c o 

If all goes according to plan, Richard Branson’s Virgin 

Galactic will eventually operate out of a home base in New 

Mexico, which is being designed by famed British architect 

Norman Foster.

takeoff and landing facilities and there was plenty 

of room to crash. Many of the people here are 

from families that have worked in aerospace for 

two or three generations, themselves products 

of California’s well-established network of aeronautical 

training and education institutions. The 

Mojave has the added advantage of being a short 

commute from L.A. and the suppliers of materials 

this highly specialized industry requires, such as 

cryogenic fuel valves, which can be picked up in 

the morning on the way in. 

“Part of my job description is to protect these 

companies from interlopers, unwarranted attention, 

and industrial espionage,” says Witt, “and to 

give them the freedom to control their own press 

releases. Mojave Airport functions as this industry’s 

incubator, like Silicon Valley did for high-tech 

firms.” To that end, Witt has turned EKAD into the 

premier commercial test facility in America and 

a mecca for this generation of the aeronautical 

designers behind innovative spacecraft. 

Grainger Whitelaw, founder of the Rocket 

Racing League, plans to bring rocket-propelled 

velocity racers to air shows. The Rocket Racing 

League craft are being developed and built by 

XCOR, which is located on the field. The planes 

are based on Burt Rutan designs, although part 

of the inspiration for them comes from technology 

developed by the Germans during World War II 

for rocket-propelled point defense interceptors. 

Test pilot Rick Searfoss is a shuttle commander 

who has already taken rocket racers up on 15 flights 

from static tests to touch-and-gos. After a twohour 

tanking procedure, which involved cryogenic 

liquids, XCOR’s Graham Douglas and I went out 

to the edge of the runway in 103ºF heat to watch 

Searfoss power a rocket racer off the runway and, 

after a short roll, into a near vertical climb powered 

by 1,500 lbs (6,750 Newtons) of thrust. “Mojave is 

a great place to live if you like to live!” Douglas tells 

me as we walk back to the XCOR hangar. 

Alita Jackson, one of the company’s co-owners 

is a third-generation aeronautical designer and 

takes kindly to being called a “rocketeer.” Her 

father worked on the Bell X-1, she worked on the 

Gemini Capsule, SDI, the Delta Clipper, and, before 

XCOR, the rotary rocket. They are now developing 

the Lynx, XCOR’s space tourism vehicle and 

a potential competitor to Rutan’s SpaceShipTwo, 

a model of which was unveiled in New York this 

past spring. 

The Lynx is a small shuttlelike craft that will 

give passengers a front-seat “right stuff” kind of 

experience, up and back to the edge of space, at 

$100,000 a trip. The Lynx, which will take off horizontally 

from a runway, is powered by a Methane 

LOX engine encased in a shield—protecting cabin 

occupants from spontaneous disassembly. XCOR 

believes that their highly dependable liquid-fueled 

engine will allow for much quicker turnaround than 

SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket engine technology, 

which needs extensive service after each use. 

It’s possible to think of XCOR, which employs 

26 people, as a space aviation incubator for the 

community. “We look for motivated individuals, we 

recruit locally—we get the kids out of the fast-food 

industry, we get them from high-school programs. 

That guy over there, his teacher said he would 

never amount to anything, now he’s a cryogenics 

handler in aerospace,” Douglas told me. “Out 

here, the rents are low and there’s plenty of crash 

room, but don’t hit a desert tortoise on the way 

in—you’ll be in real trouble.” 

What the Future Holds 

Back in London, Will Whitehorn, president of 

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, is working 

out the details for the first paying passengers on 

SpaceShipTwo, which will probably launch from 

the Mojave Spaceport before moving to a purposebuilt 

facility in New Mexico designed by Norman 

Foster. So far, Virgin Galactic has sold some 250 

tickets (totaling $35 million); they hope to get 

700 passengers up the first year SpaceShipTwo 

becomes operational. The craft will carry six passengers 

and two crew members. With the average 

ticket priced around $200,000, it is an expensive 

ride but, as one industry researcher pointed out, 

there are more than eight million millionaires on 

the planet and the price will inevitably come down 

as more players enter the field. 

Just before press time, Virgin Galactic rolled out its 

WhiteKnightTwo, the Rutan-designed carrier aircraft 

for SpaceShipTwo. Similar in design to their X Prizewinning 

predecessors, both craft will be substantially 

larger to accommodate the added weight of fuel and 

extra passengers. The rollout is just the beginning of 

an exhaustive testing procedure—entailing at least 

150 test milestones, one at every stage of the development 

process—which will continue until every 

possible contingency has been checked. 

20

In a telephone interview, Whitehorn told me 

that commercial flight will begin only after those 

milestones are reached. “When they are,” he says, 

“we will be the first FAA AST-certified Space 

Passenger carrier. We’re approaching this very 

conservatively, that’s our decision.” 

When SpaceShipTwo flies on the first of many 

test flights in 2009, Rutan and Branson plan to be 

on board. Among the passengers who have already 

signed up are James Lovelock, 88, who passed 

the demanding physical, and British theoretical 

physicist Stephen Hawking, with whom Virgin 

Galactic is working to accommodate his disability. 

Last April, Hawking, who suffers from ALS (Lou 

Gehrig’s disease), experienced weightlessness 

more than half a dozen times while riding aboard 

Zero Gravity Corporation’s G-Force-One, moving 

freely from his wheelchair for the first time in 40 

years. Before his disappearance, Steve Fossett 

had also signed up to go on SpaceShipTwo during 

its first year of operation. 

Whitehorn believes that after Virgin Galactic has 

done enough successful flights, they will be able to 

get Lloyds of London to create an insurance product 

specifically for these flights. If past statistics are any 

indication, the risks of spaceflight are considerable. 

“Some 460 people have been to space,” Witt 

told me, “and 10 percent of them have died. 

SpaceShipOne did 17 flights, 16 of which had 

deficiencies, and it still flew,” he says, adding that 

there are an exponential number of complexities in 

dealing with manned spaceflight. 

Federal legislation in the United States is explicit 

with regard to commercial space travelers: they 

venture into space at their own risk. Operators are 

required to provide information on their safety records 

but the U.S. government does not take any 

responsibility for civilian space travelers. Current 

liability is limited to protecting people not involved 

in the actual launch activity. 

So what if something does go terribly wrong 

with a flight and the industry finds itself on the 

wrong side of a lawsuit If a thousand people 

go up in a given year with the current 10 percent 

mortality rate for manned spaceflight, a really bad 

day is pretty much inevitable. While everyone I 

spoke to knows this may happen, they didn’t want 

to talk much about it. There is still a lot of testing to 

be done, they say, reminding me that this political 

and legal climate is vastly different from the early 

barnstorming days of aviation. It’s going to be a 

challenge to make suborbital and orbital flight as 

safe as the first jetliners. Despite the statistics, 

Witt told me, “I’m still here because I want to go.” 

And after you’ve spent $100,000, $200,000, or 

$20 million on a private space adventure and lived 

to tell about it, what happens Do you get astronaut 

wings Astronaut, cosmonaut, spationaut, and 

taikonaut are terms reserved for professional space 

travelers trained by government-sponsored human 

spaceflight programs, but what about civilians 

The FAA classifies civilian space travelers as 

“spaceflight participants,” a term likely to become 

the accepted designation for suborbital and orbital 

space tourists. According to the Federation 

Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), space begins 

at an altitude of 100 kilometers above the Earth. 

The U.S. Air Force says space begins above 80 

kilometers, and travel to that altitude and higher 

merits astronaut’s wings. Technically speaking, 

commercial spaceflight participants will be 

eligible for FAA astronaut wings when they have 

completed a suborbital flight. 

Beyond the sheer joy of flight, the commercial 

space industry is already spawning a host of 

subindustries. “While we can’t foresee the full 

extent of new industries to be born,” Space X’s 

Murphy told me, “there is going to be a demand 

for microsatellite-related services and CubeSats.” 

CubeSats are “pico-satellites,” satellites as small 

as ten cubic centimeters, often designed by university 

students to perform specific experiments 

in orbit. Some launchers like Space X plan to 

reserve space on their flights for CubeSat projects. 

At a mere $75,000, including launch, these 

relatively low-cost experimental satellite project 

packages may not only help to defray the high cost 

of personal spaceflight, but host the technological 

seeds of future industries. 

Acknowledgments 

This article is dedicated to Arthur C. Clarke, who never made 

it off this planet but whose visions of the future continue to 

inspire people to try. 

biography 

Born in Singapore and raised in Brussels and New York, where he 

currently resides, Ross von Burg works as consultant in the clean 

tech realm and as a public policy advocate. A sailor, he is currently 

finishing a book of humorous tales about cruising around the world. 


Into the Land 

of No Return 

an archaeological exploration 

in northwestern China 

text by Christoph Baumer 

photographs by Christoph Baumer and Urs Möckli 

No man can live [in the desert] and 

emerge unchanged. He will carry, however 

faint, the imprint of the desert, 

and will have within him the yearning to 

return. 

—SIR Wilfred P. Thesiger 

The 52,000 square-kilometer Lop Nor 

lies in the eastern and least explored 

part of the great Taklamakan Desert 

22 

of northwestern China, known in the 

local Uigur language as the “land of 

no return.” At its heart are the remains 

of a now dry lake once fed by the glacial 

waters of the mighty Tarim and 

Kum-daria rivers. The region’s fame 

derives from its harsh climate—where 

winter temperatures plummet below 

-40°C—and its more recent past as 

Driving through the desert

China’s nuclear test ground. Yet, 2,000 years ago, 

a branch of the Silk Road skirted the northern edge 

of Lop Nor and another crossed it. Both started at 

the Jade Gate Yumen Guan, 80 kilometers west of 

present-day Dunhuang, and ran westward to the fortified 

city of Loulan. The northern route then followed 

the Tarim River still farther west, while the central one 

led south to Miran, where it joined the southern Silk 

Road. The distance between Loulan and Miran was 

approximately 150 kilometers. Some 55 kilometers 

out of Loulan, caravans would reach two secondcentury 

b.c. fortresses known in the archaeological 

literature as L.K. and L.L. The original name of L.K., 

“Haitou”—hai meaning “sea/lake” and tou meaning 

“head”—attesting the presence of water in antiquity. 

A Uigur hunter Tokhta Akhun discovered L.K. 

in 1910, leading Sir Aurel Stein there in February 

1914. Stein followed the ancient central Silk 

Road from Miran to Loulan, briefly investigating 

L.K. and L.L. as well as a nearby settlement he 

dubbed L.M. A year later, his surveyor, Afraz Gul, 

chanced upon a second settlement, which he 

designated L.R. but did not investigate it. Apart 

from Afraz Gul, nobody ever saw L.R. and there 

existed neither sketch plans nor photographs. 

The mystery of L.R. was deepened by the fact 

that a Chinese expedition reached the fortresses 

in 1988, the only one since Stein, but failed to 

find either settlement. Like Stein’s expedition, the 

Chinese team came into the area from the south. 

No archaeological expedition ever attempted to 

reach these four sites from the west and to cross 

the central western part of Lop Nor. Collectively, 

these elusive ruins—which date from the Han (202 

b.c.—a.d. 220), Wei (a.d. 220–265) and Western 

Jin Dynasties (a.d. 263–316)—were the objective 

of our 2007–2008 expedition. 

On November 24, 2007, three Swiss colleagues 

and I stood at the western edge of the Lop Nor, 

bound for Haitou carrying Explorers Club Flag 

#60. Our first order of business, however, was to 

find a place where our three huge desert trucks 

could cross the dry bed of the Tarim River and pass 

through a thick forest of dead trees. It was essential 

that the trucks did not get entangled in this maze, 

cutting their tires on the razor-sharp tree roots. 

Haitou had caught my imagination more than 

three decades ago, at which time the region was 

closed to foreigners. In 1994, I was able to reach 

Loulan as one of the first Westerners allowed 

into the region since the 1930s. Due to a mishap, 

however, I missed Haitou by six kilometers. In the 

years that followed, I led two more expeditions to 

the Taklamakan—one in 1998, during which we 

rediscovered the lost city of Dandan Oilik, finding 

heretofore unknown Buddhist murals, and another 

in 2003, on which we searched in vain for the ancient 

capital of the Kingdom of Calmadana, as yet 

undiscovered. 

Now, Urs Möckli, who had been with my 1998 

expedition, and I bundled up and marched against 

the howling wind. A sandstorm was raging, obliterating 

the sun, and fog had descended, reducing 

visibility to less than 20 meters. The desert welcomed 

us by blowing a jet of sand into our eyes, 

mouths, and noses. Advancing into the sandstorm, 

we crossed the steep ravine and entered 

the forest. Following a small gully, we found a safe 

way out of the labyrinth of dead trees and into the 

open desert. Hurrying back to the roadhead, we 

encountered the semitrailers coming through the 

sandstorm. Within minutes, the trucks were offloaded, 

and we guided them toward the ravine. 

Night had fallen, and the trucks advanced cautiously. 

With their headlights on in the fog, which 

was thick with sand, they looked like fire-breathing 

dragons. We had entered the “Vault of Lop Nor.” 

Located in a part of the desert unfamiliar to our 

experienced Chinese drivers, Haitou was some 

113 kilometers as the crow flies from our desert 

entry point at N 39° 59' 17.4" E 88° 21' 49.2". No 

map exists of western Lop Nor, and Stein’s map 

of the region around Haitou was useless, being 

riddled with triangulation errors. Our only guide 

was a satellite picture showing the dune systems 

and faint traces of L.K. and L.L. 

On the second day, high dunes came into 

view. Some of them had virtually perpendicular 

walls blocking our path while others looked like 

immense stepped pyramids, which could only be 

surmounted in stages. Our advance was further 

handicapped by the fact that the wind was blowing 

from the northeast, necessitating that we 

climb the dunes on their soft lee sides. Even our 

enormous trucks with tires high as a man reached 

their limits on these steep slopes. They shuddered, 

got stuck, or skidded sideways. The tank 

truck, which was loaded with 5,000 liters of diesel 

fuel, was in danger of tipping over more than 

once. Although we started at dawn and stopped 

at dusk, on several exhausting days we covered 

less than six kilometers. Despite the hardships for 


oth men and machines, the desert is a place to 

rejuvenate the mind, offering two of the greatest 

luxuries for modern urban man—infinite space and 

complete silence. 

During the journey, 

we came across areas 

covered with ancient 

freshwater snail shells, 

reminding us that in 

this utterly dry, sandy 

desert, there once was 

water. The snails were 

Basommatophora, 

family of Lymnaeidae, 

probably of the species 

Lymnaea stagnalis 

or Stagnicola palustris. 

Pieces of petrified 

horsetails—one of the 

oldest plants on Earth—were further clues that life 

once did flourish there. As we neared Haitou, we 

saw kilometer-long lines of standing dead poplars 

and dry riverbeds, indicating that the region, until 

about a.d. 350, consisted of a patchwork of meandering 

rivers, shallow waters, poplar groves, and 

advancing sand dunes. It was the delta of a tributary 

of the former Tarim, comparable to today’s 

Okavango Delta in Botswana in the dry season. 

Apart from one heretofore unknown dwelling 16 

kilometers east of the desert entry point, which 

could be dated to approximately a.d. 1500–1700, 

no man-made relic was found, until we entered the 

search area. Here we found three Neolithic axes 

made from green jade, a worked piece of yellow, 

translucent bowenite 

(similar in appearance 

to jade), worked flints, 

three stone spindles, 

and coarse pottery. 

After ten hard days 

of travel, we reached 

the fortress of Haitou. 

Although abandoned 

for 16 centuries and 

battered by the wind, it 

was still an impressive 

site. An irregular oblong 

structure of 190 x 102 

meters, its massive 

walls, built of alternating thick layers of clay, poplar 

trunks, and strong branches laid crosswise, still 

stood 6.5 meters high in some sections. A wide 

gateway on the northeast side—closed by two 

wooden doors, one of which was still lying on the 

ground—provided entry to the fort. Relentless raging 

winds, the worst enemy of anything man-made 

in this desert, had breached the walls. As one of 

our drivers remarked, “The wind in Lop Nor never 

sleeps.” It is like a gigantic sanding machine, the 

sand its abrasive paper. 

Expedition members Ernst Rüegg, Christoph Baumer, Urs Möckli, and Ueli Nüesch unfurl Flag #60 at L.M.i.

Neolithic and historic findings around Haitou 

Countless heavy wooden beams and posts 

littered the ground inside the structure. Still we 

managed to identify all the rooms mentioned by 

Stein and discovered, next to the gate, an additional 

one that once belonged to a two-story building. 

Although we excavated it to the ground, we 

only encountered minor finds such as fragments 

of coins, a clay spindle, blue glass beads, strings 

made out of camel hair, and pottery shards. Like 

Stein, we didn’t find any inscriptions. 

The second fortress, L.L.—five kilometers northwest 

of Haitou—measures 67 x 42 meters and 

includes a two-story bastion of 20 x 20 meters. 

L.L.’s interior was far more deteriorated than that 

of Haitou. Aside from a few huge posts lying on 

the ground, all else had been swept away by desert 

winds. 

We wondered why the two fortresses had been 

built in this utterly barren landscape, standing only 

five kilometers apart, and speculated that perhaps 

they had been built at different times. At Haitou, 

I had noticed layers of heavily singed poplar 

trunks inside the outer walls. Perhaps the fort had 

burned, after which L.L. was built. In any case, the 

forts were abandoned in the late fourth century 

a.d. due to lack of water and wars in northwestern 

China, which disrupted Silk Road trade. About 

a.d. 320, the Tarim changed its course, initially depriving 

Loulan of water and, within a few decades, 

Haitou as well. A century before the river shifted, 

a deteriorating environment in the region had 

become of great concern to the local inhabitants, 

evidenced by a strict law of the time: “Who fells a 

tree with its roots will be fined one horse and who 

fells a young tree, will be fined one cow.” 

After a week of exploration, we left both forts to 

search for the settlements L.M. and L.R. Finding 

them was a challenge, since neither was visible on 

the satellite picture. We divided the vast target area 

into three sectors, systematically searching each of 

them in a grid pattern. Looking through our binoculars 

on December 12, we spied several wooden beams, 

regularly placed, jutting out of the sand. Ninety-three 

years after Stein we had rediscovered L.M.! 

The first ruin stood south of an ancient riverbed 

with four other houses located north of it. On the 

floor of the first house, which we designated L.M.1, 

lay dozens of thick poplar posts, some elegantly 

carved. Scattered on the ground were blue and 

amber glass beads, a large wooden ladle, a piece 

of woolen tapestry with colored geometric patterns, 

and two pieces of fine, yellow glass with 

line decorations. These likely came from a vessel, 

for which the glass had been blown into a mold—a 

Roman technique invented in the last century b.c. 

Finding such an import here attests ancient trade 

between East and West. 

One kilometer northwest of L.M.1 stood L.M.2. 

In the main room of this structure lay four large, oblong 

poplar bases with sockets, marking the place

Night falls on a fortress 

The second-century b.c. fortress of L.L., first investigated by Aurel 

Stein, measures 67 x 42 meters and has a two-story bastion.

where the massive beams had once supported the 

roof, and dozens of small bronze coins littered the 

floor. Some were piled on top of each other and 

had corroded together. The hoard consisted of two 

types—a few wuzhu (meaning “five grain”) coins, 

but mostly small coins devoid of inscriptions. Such 

coins of low value were strung together on a string 

through their center hole. These strings usually 

numbered 1,000 coins weighing almost three kilograms. 

In contrast to the West, where coins were 

struck, Chinese coins were cast in molds. As with 

all other finds, we left the coins in situ. 

A few days later, we also rediscovered the remains 

of L.R., the settlement Afraz Gul noted in 

1915. Four structures were identified at the site. 

At the one we designated L.R.2, only one huge 

poplar pillar still stuck in the socket of its base. At 

the larger ruin, L.R.3, we found all four wooden 

pillars that had supported the roof next to dozens 

of poplar posts and beams, as well as one large 

base with a socket and two wooden capitals that 

had scroll-shaped brackets at each end, reminiscent 

of Ionic volutes. Excavating the main room, 

we found the three other bases in pristine condition. 

This house consisted of six living rooms and 

three stables for goats and sheep and for storing 

millet. Thousands of cereal grains were scattered 

throughout the sand. 

The principal ruin, L.R.1, turned out to be a 

surprise for it was neither a dwelling, as Stein 

had assumed, nor a stupa, as it appeared from 

a distance. Instead, it consisted of two sections 

lying on the top of separate small mesas, 3.5 and 

5.5 meters high, respectively. On the lower one 

lay fine poplar posts, on the higher one piles of 

unusually thick, long beams. The top of the mesa 

was crowned with a tight layer of poplar branches 

and covered with rough blocks of clay, recalling 

28

A beacon tower 

Among the ruins of L.R. were the remains of a beacon tower, 

the first found in Lop Nor. In antiquity, it would have been in 

visual contact with the fortresses of L.L. and L.K. 

the construction method used at the fortresses 

we investigated earlier. Two 4.5-meter-long beams 

with 11 holes once served as architraves for the 

wall-supporting pillars lying next to them. In two 

other shorter beams, wooden pegs were stuck 

into both ends—these formed window frames. 

It soon became clear that this was the ruin 

of an ancient beacon tower—the first one ever 

found inside Lop Nor. Like those standing west of 

Dunhuang, this tower would have consisted of a 

five-meter-high concrete mesa with a room on top, 

built of strong wooden beams and thick layers of 

mud. The entrance was reached by a rope ladder. 

The two window frames formed the embrasures 

for archers. 

Obviously, this settlement, threatened by bandits, 

needed protection. The four sites formed a 

14-kilometer-long corridor, stretching from Haitou 

in the southeast to L.R. in the northwest. The 

beacon tower at L.R. and both fortresses would 

have had direct contact with each other via smoke 

signals in the day and fire signals at night. 

A location L.R. 4, 1.2 kilometers northwest of 

L.R. 3, was scattered with dozens of coarse black, 

grey, and red pottery shards and a worked flint. 

These fragments indicated a minor early Bronze 

Age settlement. A survey farther northwest yielded 

no additional findings. 

Wrapping up our expedition on January 1, 2008, we 

welcomed in the New Year wondering whether more 

ancient dwellings and traces of an unknown route of 

the Silk Road are still hidden in the dunes. 

biography 

Christoph Baumer, FI’04, is president of The Society for the 

Exploration of EurAsia. Urs Möckli is a photographer specializing in 

extreme environments. 


Into the Land 

of the Maya 

catching up with Merle Greene Robertson

For more than four 

decades—or two katuns 

by ancient Maya 

calendrical reckoning—Merle 

Greene 

Robertson, a fellow 

of The Explorers 

Club since 1990, has 

been a driving force 

in Maya studies, venturing 

off the beaten path to preserve and document 

the fragile heritage of one of the New World’s greatest 

civilizations. In 1994, the Mexican government bestowed 

upon Robertson its highest honor for a noncitizen, the 

Order of the Aztec Eagle, in recognition of the seminal 

role she has played in Maya scholarship. On the occasion 

of her 95th birthday celebration this past July, the explorers 

journal caught up with Robertson at the 1,500- 

year-old Maya city of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico, one 

of several important archaeological sites Robertson 

has been closely associated with throughout her 

illustrious career. 

EJ: You have spent nearly half a century traipsing 

through the jungles of Central America to record archaeological 

sites. What brought you to the jungle 

in the first place 

MGR: Being a painter, I was attending the University 

of Guanajuato’s San Miguel de Allende Art Institute, 

working on my MFA. During a week’s break in 1962, 

Doris Jason from Japan and Waldemar Sailer—who 

later became famous for his rubbings of the footprints 

of Buddha for the birthday of Her Majesty 

Queen Sirikit of Burma—decided to see some Maya 

ruins. We went to Palenque where I did a couple 

of rubbings; it was my first time there. Later in the 

semester, another friend at the Instituto and I decided 

to take a day trip to Tikal in the Petén Region 

of Guatemala. Back then it was a far cry from the 

tourist attraction it is today. Much of it was buried 

in jungle—large portions of the temples little more 

than jumbled heaps of stone. Archaeologists from 

the University of Pennsylvania were about halfway 

through their 15-year excavation of the site. I met 

Paper and Stone 

Robertson awaits pigment to dry on a rubbing of Bonampak Stela 1. 

The enormous monument, which was found in eight pieces, depicts 

Yajaw Chan Muwaan (Lord of the Sky Hawk), who ruled the Maya 

city in the late eighth century a.d. 


Patrick Culbert and Peter Harrison, who were the 

project’s field directors at the time. Wilbur Pearson, 

Ed Hinderliter, and Hans-Ruedi Hug from Zurich 

were busily recording the site’s architecture. It turned 

out they needed an expedition artist and asked if I 

would join the project. So I stayed. School could 

come later. My life literally changed overnight. 

Within days, I was up on scaffolding in the Central 

Acropolis, recording the finely carved friezes on the 

palace complex. I just loved it—the gorgeous blue, 

red, and yellow guacamaya (parrot), the quetzal, the 

mischievous spider monkey who once unlocked the 

lab door and emptied all of the bottles of ceramic 

solutions, the wild peccary, the snakes, even the 

puma that once dashed in front of me as I was hiking 

down from the Plaza Mayor to the campsite. My colleagues 

were dedicated archaeologists from whom 

I learned so much, especially in the evenings when 

we would gather in the sala and discuss the day’s 

work and try to find answers to the many questions 

we had about this huge site. Much of what I learned 

at Tikal prepared me for my later excavations at sites 

such as I’xtutz, Aguateca, and Dos Pilas. 

EJ: You are particularly well known for the thousands 

of magnificent rubbings you have done of Maya 

monuments. What led you to use such an innovative 

technique 

MGR: The technique I use is basically the same as 

that used by the ancient Chinese before the printing 

press was invented. They made a clay impression 

of the text, then pressed damp rice paper onto it 

and then stamped sumi ink on the paper to bring 

out the text. 

One of the first rubbings I did at Tikal was of Altar 

5. It is a magnificent monument more than two meters 

in diameter encircled with 31 glyphs recording 

the date a.d. 703. It shows two lords dressed in the 

guise of gods kneeling on a bench with the piled 

femur and skull of a royal woman named Lady Tanto- 

Ksywak and her child. I used a bedsheet anchored to 

the altar with rope and stones to do the rubbing. As 

it was so large, I used oil paint on my thumb instead 

of sumi ink. This took thousands of impressions to 

complete and I had a very sore thumb. 

A human heart in his paw 

A jaguar holding a human heart is one of six carved images 

of the animal on the 1,000-year-old Platform of the Jaguars 

and Eagles in the Central Plaza of Chichén Itzá. 


EJ: How did you handle working with such delicate 

materials in such a demanding environment 

MGR: For a large jungle monument, I first had to see 

that it was clean—that there were no lichens adhering 

to it. I then put large sheets of rice paper on 

the monument, securing it around the edges with 

duct tape. The paper was then wet down using 

a 2” badger brush, and then gently pounded into 

the carved stone with a wad of little towels that 

Pan Am had donated to the project. When the rice 

paper was almost dry, I would take a small cotton 

ball wrapped in china silk, tap it against the sumi 

ink pad, and then tap it onto the rice paper. If done 

correctly the back of the paper would remain white 

with no ink having seeped through. The paper was 

then left to dry, rolled up, and put in one of my four 

meter-long waterproof black bakelite cases. On occasion, 

I used oil paint when so many lichens and 

moss had to be removed that the stone would never 

fully dry. The paper was put on the same way and let 

dry as much as possible, then oil paint was tapped 

on using my thumb. This was very time-consuming 

as thousands of thumbprints had to be applied 

to achieve the desired effect. Very large subjects 

such as the sarcophagus lid in Pakal’s tomb in the 

Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque as well as 

many large monuments deep in the Guatemalan 

jungle had to be done this way. 

EJ: After several seasons at Tikal, you moved on to 

other sites, many in incredibly remote areas. How 

did that come about 

MGR: Alfred Kidder II of the Carnegie Institution had 

seen my work at Tikal and suggested that I “just go 

down the jungle rivers and record all the monuments 

there.” Sure, why not just go up and down the jungle 

rivers with a native guide in a small cayuco (canoe) 

where I had never been before Forget the snakes, 

forget that we would have to cut our own trails into 

the sites. My response was of course I would do it, 

even if my only previous jungle experience had been 

right there at Tikal. 

EJ: Which sites have been the most challenging to 

work 

MGR: Definitely Dos Pilas, one of the early sites 

I worked. It is up the Petexbatún River from 

Sayaxché, a small village at the junction of the 

Usumacinta and Pasión rivers. It took one and a half 

hours for Tranquil Flores—a young man from Belize 

who worked with me the whole time I was in the 

34

Petén—his two brothers, Jesus and Poncho, and I 

to make our way up the Petexbatún. The water was 

so high. Huge mahogany trees were growing right 

out of the lagoon and it was so thick with vegetation 

we could not see the riverbank. We had to get 

out of the cayuco and pull it through the trees until 

we found the start of the trail into the site. Once 

on shore, the boys fixed tumplines on their heads 

with our packs of equipment weighing about 80 

lbs each. It was 17 kilometers up to Dos Pilas, a 

miserable long way considering that the old trail had 

been covered over with fallen trees from a hurricane 

the year before. We were soaked before we started, 

plowing through mud in boots so caked they could 

hardly be lifted, climbing over and under huge trees, 

and jumping back every time a snake appeared. It 

was exhausting to say the least. We killed or jumped 

over 13 snakes on the way up—barba amarillas (ferde-lances) 

and two boas. The last three kilometers 

were straight up hill with no visible trail. 

A storm was brewing when we reached the site. 

Champas had to be built—one for cooking, one for 

sleeping, and one for supplies. Rain had started 

during dinner so we turned in early, hoping for a 

good night’s sleep. No such luck. At 3:00 a.m., the 

raging storm blew down our sleeping champa, its 

center support pole landing on me. I wasn’t hurt, but 

pinned at the knees beneath it. The fellows quickly 

rescued me, but a new champa had to be built in the 

dark in pouring rain, which continued the following 

day. Not much work was done that day except making 

trails to the stelae and discovering the beautiful 

Processional Stairs. We also cleared out six barba 

amarillas—the darned snakes seemed to be following 

us. Although they were not nearly as bad as the 

pesky mosquitoes. 

The weather lifted the next day. As we cleared the 

vegetation in front of the stairs, the sun illuminated 

the steps for the first time in perhaps a thousand 

years. They were in almost pristine condition—the 

Maya lords breathtakingly beautiful in their long 

flowing gowns. There were rows and rows of 

hieroglyphs—long inscriptions that contained what 

was readily identifiable as Tikal’s emblem glyph, 

suggesting the two sites were in some way related. 

Doing a rubbing of Stela 2—5.55 meters tall when 

on the warpath 

Warriors dressed for battle grace the pillars of the Northeast 

Colonnade at Chichén Itzá. 


put together—was a joy, even as mosquitoes were 

devouring me. I was working under a plastic tent in 

the rain. One of the boys kept a termite nest burning, 

hoping to keep them away, but it did no good. 

Once I start on a rubbing, I cannot stop. I finished 

this magnificent stela with the main figure’s saucy 

little owl pectoral and huge feathered headdress by 

evening. Soaked with perspiration, I had so many 

mosquito bites that the critters had started biting 

on top of the previous bites and through the double 

layer of cloth of my jeans’ pockets. These rubbings 

have burned places, and some of my blood on them 

where mosquitoes were so gorged they had no 

more room in their stomachs and wound up wasting 

the overflow on the paper. 

EJ: I gather you have had your fair share of encounters 

with looters and guerrilla forces of one sort 

or another. What has been your most frightening 

moment 

MGR: Probably the time we had a run in with guerrillas 

at the site of Itsimte not far from Sayaxché in 

the Petén. We had taken a jeep to the site, which we 

parked at the foot of the hill upon which the site was 

built. When we arrived at the ruins, we could see that 

looters had been at work—deep saw cuts were in all 

A valiant King 

A rubbing of Bonampak’s late eighth-century ruler, Yajaw 

Chan Muwaan, made during the 1962 field season and shown 

in process on the opening spread.

of the stelae, tops were missing off some. While I 

did the rubbings, the boys either helped me pound 

the rice paper into various monuments or scouted 

the site for clues as to who was doing the looting. 

The place was littered with cigarette cartons, oil 

cans for fueling fires used to split the monuments 

into transportable pieces, and saw blades. 

When we returned to the jeep, I began to take 

off my boots when an armed policeman emerged 

from the jungle, followed by four more. I began to 

reach for my permission letter from the authorities in 

the Petén, but Tranquil urged me to just stay calm. 

The guys ransacked the jeep, in search of what I will 

never know. Finally, I could not stand a machine gun 

pointed at my stomach any longer, so pulled out my 

papers and showed them to the leader. They then 

let us go. I thought it very strange that they didn’t 

apologize. Paul Saffo, one of my students who 

was with me, noticed that one of the guys had a 

paper insignia on his arm, identifying him as one of 

Sun temple tablet 

A carved tablet from Palenque’s Temple of the Sun, previous 

spread, depicts the city’s late seventh-century king K’inich 

Kan Bahlam—eldest son of Pakal the Great—both as a child of 

6, when he was, according to the tablet’s inscriptions, designated 

heir to the throne, and as a grown man and ruler. 

40

the guerrillas we had heard about. Upon arrival in 

Sayaxché, we immediately went to the police. We 

were told that it was a wonder we weren’t killed, or 

held as hostages as Tranquil recognized the men 

and they would have eventually recognized him. 

This meant that his life was in danger, as were the 

lives of his entire family. 

EJ: Of all of the great Maya sites you have worked 

on, you are most closely associated with Palenque. 

What do you find so alluring about the place 

MGR: Every Maya site has its special qualities. 

Yaxchilán on the Usumacinta is known for its 

beautiful lintels, Tikal is famed for its stelae, Copán 

in Honduras is notable for its magnificent sculpture. 

At Palenque, we find the Maya world’s finest 

portraiture and stucco in an absolutely idyllic location. 

The Maya always took advantage of the local 

landscape when it came to urban planning. This 

is particularly true at Palenque, which flourished 

between a.d. 440 and 790. It was a large city that 

covered some 16 square kilometers and had more 

than 1,400 buildings. 

When I first visited the site during my art student 

days, the tiny village near the ruins was little more 

The feathered serpent 

Images of Kulkulkan (the Feathered Serpent) appear on many 

of the monuments at Chichén Itzá. These are from the High 

Priest’s Grave.

than a rutted dirt road with a couple of buildings. 

Years later, after I had married Bob, we realized 

that we were spending so much time at Palenque 

recording the ruins that it made sense just to build 

a house that could double as a research facility. In 

1970, we built Na Chan-Bahlum (“House of the 

Serpent Jaguar” in Chol), which served as the field 

house for the Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, 

a not-for-profit we set up to support our work. 

Since then, the site has really been developed— 

perhaps overdeveloped—for tourism, but we are 

still making wonderful discoveries there. In 1996, 

we began the Cross Group Project with Mexico’s 

Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. 

Alfonso Morales was our principal investigator, responsible 

for the excellent restoration of Temple XIX 

with its throne showing the Palenque ruler K’inich 

Ahkal Mo’ Nahb. The restoration of this temple is an 

example of how restoration should be carried out. 

In 2003, Lee Langan, a fellow of The Explorers 

Club and an expert on remote sensing, and I carried 

Flag #139 during our work at Temple XX. There, 

we found a tomb with murals depicting Maya lords, 

painted in red on three of the chamber’s walls. The 

images had been executed by expertly applying 

paint with a long brush with a fine point. On the 

floor are many intact vessels. Although we have 

not been inside the tomb, we know what is in there 

from the digital images we took 

by lowering a camera through 

a ten-centimeter hole near the 

chamber’s capstone. 

EJ: So many advances have been 

made in Maya studies since you first entered the 

field, many in the living room of Na Chan-Bahlum, 

where you sponsored the first groundbreaking 

Mesa Redonda (roundtable) in the winter of 1973. 

Tell us about some of the changes you have seen. 

MGR: When we hosted that first meeting–which 

brought together historians, archaeologists, and 

interested laymen–it in many ways started a worldwide 

rush to decipher the glyphs. On the last day of 

The world in-between 

K’inich Janaab Pakal (Pakal the Great)—who ruled Palenque 

from a.d. 615 until his death, age 80, in 683—floats between 

the heavens and the underworld on the lid of his limestone 

sarcophagus, which lies deep within the Temple of the 

Inscriptions. 

42

the First Mesa Redonda, Floyd Lounsbury [a noted 

expert on Native American languages from Yale], 

Peter Mathews [La Trobe University in Australia] 

and Linda Schele [University of Texas, Austin until 

her death in 1998] announced that they now had 

the Palenque “king list” with birth, accession, and 

death dates for the rulers. At the meeting, Fray 

Facunda Ramirez from Tumbala suggested that 

they be translated to Chol as that was the language 

of these ancient people. Today more than 75 percent 

of the Maya glyphs have been translated and 

we can read nearly all of the texts from Palenque. 

EJ: You have had some extraordinary experiences. 

MGR: I loved the beauty of the forest, the gorgeous 

birds, and their lovely symphonies played every 

morning. I so love the rivers—the Usumacinta, the 

Pasión, and the Petexbatún—and the animals, even 

the snakes, just as long as they stayed out of my 

way. I once sat in the jungle at Tikal doing a watercolor 

when a coral snake came by. I watched it for 

half an hour as it slithered here and there among 

the rocks and bushes. It was a delightful experience. 

Most wonderful of all have been the people 

of the jungle—so kind, so helpful, so accepting of 

this blond gringa who didn’t belong there. When 

I look back on my wonderful years in the jungle, 

it grieves me deeply to see what is happening to 

the jungle environment today, and how all of these 

new roads that are supposedly making it so much 

easier for tourists, are actually not only destroying 

the forest, but taking away the habitat and livelihood 

of thousands of jaguars, ocelots, puma, peccary, 

our beloved monkeys, and other animals, as 

well as the canopy home and food source of the 

guacamaya, quetzal, and thousands of other rare 

jungle birds. —AMHS 

information & Acknowledgments 

For more on Merle Greene Robertson’s work, visit www. 

mesoweb.com/pari/. The Explorers Journal would like 

to thank Lee Langan and Joel Skidmore of Mesoweb for their 

help in preparing the text and digital images for this article. 

victorious warrior 

A victorious warrior seizing a captive by the hair is depicted 

on Bonampak Lintel I. 

44

mapping Palenque 

text and map by Edwin L. Barnhart 

Ever since the remains of Palenque first came 

to light in the late eighteenth century, adventurers 

and archaeologists have been lured to the 

ancient Maya city, considered among the most 

important in the Maya world due to its extraordinary 

sculptural program. Until recently, however, 

no one knew just how large Palenque actually 

was or how many buildings remained at the site, 

despite more than two centuries of exploration. 

In the 1970s, Merle Greene Robertson— 

along with Linda Schele, Robert Rands, and 

Jay Johnson—undertook an extensive survey of 

the Palenque, recording some 329 structures 

and labeling swaths of jungle embracing the 

site core as “unmapped, but full of buildings.” 

In 2000, we launched the Palenque Mapping 

Project—with the support of Robertson’s 

Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute (PARI) 

and the Foundation for the Advancement of 

Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI)—to determine 

the true extent of this ancient metropolis. 

Our goal was to take the latest technology to 

the field to systematically record every trace of 

identifiable architecture. Given the density of the 

vegetation and the extraordinary toll wrought by 

time, this would be no easy task. We mapped 

every section of the jungle twice, first by tape 

and compass and then with a laser-theodolite 

and computerized data-collection system. 

We often found ourselves wondering whether 

stretches of masonry were staircases leading 

to other plazas and buildings or simply bits of 

wall dislodged by centuries of jungle growth. 

Several structures were so severely destroyed 

that we chose to exclude them from the map 

rather than make something up as the jungle had 

literally devoured them. Every night we returned 

to camp and downloaded the data, checking for 

accuracy. If the searing heat had affected our 

brains on a given day and produced a bad section, 

we returned to map it again. 

Since the project began, we have recorded 

1,481 structures and an amazing 16 linear kilometers 

of agricultural terracing. The most abundant 

structures are housing compounds; we 

have found hundreds of them. Their discovery 

has confirmed that Palenque was very much an 

urban city, not the isolated ceremonial center it 

was once believed to be. Each of the city’s seven 

rivers was channeled and most neighborhoods 

had residential plumbing. Some homes had 

purpose built spring-fed pools. During our survey, 

we were surprised to discover Palenque’s 

largest structure, the Templo Escondido, which 

had eluded detection for so long. In many ways, 

it looks more like a mountain than a building. 

Though this massive structure has yet to be 

excavated, it may be the palace of Toktan, the 

city’s “place of origin,” which is mentioned in the 

hieroglyphic texts found at the site. 

The map we have created is not only complete, 

but very accurate, with more than 25,000 

individual points of data collected within an area 

of 220 square hectares. Our overall positional 

error was ± 20 cm, less than a single masonry 

block. Although GPS mapping systems have 

been available, the thick jungle canopy and 

karstic terrain render them useless in the field. 

The information we collected, however, has 

been entered into a GIS database and is proving 

crucial to both excavation planning as well 

as overall site development. As Palenque continues 

to receive more and more visitors each 

year, demands are being made for expanded 

facilities. National Geographic is working on a 

new reconstruction view of the site, adding in 

the hundreds of residences we encountered. 

Our years of hard work and adventure have 

given humanity a new view of an ancient city, 

one that we hope to replicate at other capitals 

of the classic Maya world. 

A Fellow of The Explorers Club, Edwin L. Barnhart, Ph.D., is director 

of the Austin-based Maya Exploration Center, mayaexploration.org. 

46


Postcard 

from Pitcairn 

climbing high on a storied isle 

text and photographs by Mark Synnott 

When I stumbled up into the 

Picasso’s cockpit at first light, 

the wind was ripping at the 

South Pacific and shrieking 

through the ship’s rigging. The 

ocean was black and covered 

in tendrils of white froth, and 

the 66-foot Ron Holland cutter 

was continuously launching off 

the head-on four-meter swell 

and smacking down so hard I 

seriously wondered if it might 

snap in half. “It’s blowing a gale,” 

yelled Mike Griffith, the boat’s 

captain, as another huge wave 

broke over the deck. “We just 

hit 46 knots.” Mike was outfitted 

in full storm gear and tethered 

to the boat with a body harness. 

He was soaked and had dark 

bags under his eyes. While I had 

been whimpering and puking in 

48

my berth all night, he had been at the helm, making 

sure our vessel stayed afloat. Looking at my 

green visage, he smiled, probably for the first time 

all night. “Toughen up, dawg,” he said. 

It’s fair to say that this trip would never have 

happened if I hadn’t come across Caroline 

Alexander’s 2003 book, The Bounty. Halfway 

through, I flipped to a stunning painting of a 

wooden longboat attempting to land on Pitcairn 

Island. It was dated 1825, 35 years after the famous 

Bounty mutineers first landed on the rock. 

The painting’s background was dominated by majestic 

spires rising directly from the South Pacific. 

As a freelance journalist and member of The North 

Face Climbing Team, I’m constantly on the lookout 

for exotic places with untapped climbing potential. 

“Pitcairn Island,” a voice inside me said. “I wonder 

if anyone has ever climbed there” 

Some 5,500 kilometers from the nearest major 

landmass (Australia), Pitcairn is one of the most 

remote inhabited places on Earth. There are no 

airstrips on the four-square-kilometer island, no 

harbors where a boat can be safely anchored. 

The only way to get there is aboard supply ships 

that pass by three or four times a year. And even 

then, it’s not guaranteed that you can get on or 

off, or unload any goods, because the sea is often 

too rough for the Pitcairners to launch their long 

boats to bring you to shore. That’s why I enlisted 

Captain Mike, a 43-year-old Aussie, to take my 

team—climbers Kevin Thaw, Greg Child, and 

Jimmy Chin—on the 550-kilometer trip from the 

tiny island of Mangareva. I was lucky to have found 

him and the Picasso through a U.S.-based charter 

company, Ocean Voyages. 

Before we even set sail, I first had to apply 

for visitation with the Pitcairn Island Council. As 

it happened, when I first made contact with the 

Pitcairners back in 2004, their little island was embroiled 

in a huge sex scandal. Seven of Pitcairn’s 

men were charged with sexual abuse of some of 

the island’s young girls. Paradise was in trouble. In 

October that year, six of the seven were convicted 

and given sentences ranging from community service 

to six years. Jay Warren, the island’s mayor at 

the time, was the only one acquitted. 

Ever since the scandal, the council has been 

routinely denying journalists’ requests (and there 

have been many) to visit the island. This might 

have been my undoing as well, except that they 

liked my idea of bringing in a group of climbers 

to assess Pitcairn’s potential as a rock-climbing 

destination. And even if the climbing turned out 

to be complete choss, I’d at least get to see how 

life is lived in one of the world’s most remote and 

bizarre outposts of civilization. 

Pitcairn Island would likely have remained 

forever a lonely uninhabited rock sticking out 

of the middle of nowhere if it hadn’t been for a 

man named Joseph Banks. As president of Great 

Britain’s Royal Geographic Society, Banks served 

as Captain James Cook’s botanist on his historic 

first voyage to the Pacific aboard Endeavor (1768– 

1771), one of the first ships to visit Tahiti. It was 

during his long stay in that earthly paradise that 

Banks first sampled breadfruit, and concluded the 

Polynesian staple would make an ideal food for the 

slaves working on British plantations in the West 

Indies. Upon his return to Britain he immediately 

set about organizing an expedition to transplant 

the species. Cook’s navigator, William Bligh, was 

named the expedition’s leader and captain. 

The HMS Bounty arrived in Tahiti on October 

26, 1788, after a 50,000-kilometer journey around 

the world. The crew spent the next five months 

collecting breadfruit plants, during which time they 

lived ashore with the island’s beautiful and freespirited 

women. When Bligh finally announced 

five months later that it was time cast off, several 

of his men were expecting children. 

On April 28, 1789, three weeks after raising 

the mainsail in Tahiti, first mate Fletcher Christian 

and nine fellow sailors took control of the Bounty. 

Bligh and 18 crewmen were set adrift in a 23-foot 

long boat, left to find their way 7,400 kilometers to 

Dutch East Timor—a 62-day epic voyage. 

The Bounty’s new crew of 28—including 12 

Polynesian women and 6 Polynesian men, which 

the crew picked up back in Tahiti—spent the next 

nine months searching the South Pacific for 

an uninhabited island on which to settle. Nine 

months later when Fletcher Christian first set eyes 

on the rockbound Pitcairn, he knew they’d found 

it. The British Royal Navy would never think to look 

for them on a tiny rock with no harbor, sticking 

out of the middle of the Pacific Ocean. No one 

knows exactly what happened on Pitcairn Island 

in those early days, but the story goes that four 

years after landing, Fletcher Christian, and all the 

other men on the island except one, had suffered 

violent deaths. When the American sealing ship 

Topaz landed on Pitcairn in 1809, they found John 


Adams, the last surviving mutineer and sole adult 

male on the island, presiding over a community of 

27 women and children. 

At daybreak on July 1, I scampered up on deck 

to find Mike alone at the helm again. This time, 

though, the sea was calm and he pointed to a 

tiny green emerald poking out of the ocean. “Well 

mate, there’s your effing island,” he drawled. The 

island was essentially a giant rock sticking out of 

3,000 meters of ocean, ringed with soaring grey 

and orange sea cliffs, and topped with a cap of 

vibrant green jungle. 

After first circumnavigating the island (a trip of 

about 13 kilometers), we made contact with the 

Pitcairners by radio and arranged for them to send 

out a longboat to pick us up. An hour later an aluminum 

motorboat pulled up, manned by two scrappy 

looking Pitcairners. We quickly made the transfer, 

and Hermie, the little boat’s skipper, motored us 

out into the huge swell. Rocks stuck out of the 

water in every direction, and I could see clearly 

why one of captain Mike’s logs suggested that no 

sailor should ever try to land their own dinghy on 

this island—only the locals know the exact route 

through the maze of rocks that guard the shore. 

Nearing the boat house, Hermie let a couple 

waves pass under us, then gunned it, cresting a 

wave over a rock outcropping and cutting a quick 

turn into a small eddy behind the jetty. 

The half-dozen-member welcome committee 

pulled us out of the longboat like the day’s catch. 

For the most part, they looked almost exactly as 

you’d expect: a cross between Polynesians and 

Brits. They had dark skin and dark hair, but their 

facial features were decidedly Anglo-Saxon. One 

of them I recognized instantly as Brenda Christian. 

Dark-skinned, lean, with long brown hair, Brenda, 

52, was barefoot and wearing cut off jeans and a 

tattered T-shirt. I had first seen her picture on her 

website and then later in Time magazine next to 

a blurb about her being the first female mayor of 

Pitcairn Island, before she was defeated by Warren 

in the 2004 election. “Welcome to Pitcairn Island,” 

she said, with a bizarre accent that sounded like a 

Cockney sailor with a lilting island drawl. 

After a round of introductions and handshakes, 

we all jumped on the back of ATVs and set off up a 

super steep, muddy trail named the Hill of Difficulty. 

At the top we passed Adamstown, Pitcairn’s only 

village with its Seventh Day Adventist church, 

library, post office, museum, and general store, all 

50 

packed around a paved courtyard. It looked like 

a well kept Caribbean village. Most of the whitewashed 

wooden public buildings appeared in 

good repair, although plants were growing up the 

sides of them and the jungle seemed to be crowding 

in everywhere I looked. Soon we all split off in 

different directions on rutted muddy trails. Since 

there are no hotels on the island, I had arranged 

for each of us to stay with a different family. 

My first full day on Pitcairn was spent exploring 

the island on the back of an ATV with Mike Lupton, 

Brenda’s husband. The island is riddled with little 

roads and trails, but there are also vast areas that 

are essentially inaccessible. Mike pointed into valleys 

of dense vegetation, ringed with cliffs, which 

probably hadn’t been explored in decades. Every 

panorama seemed to include three things—lush 

jungle, sea cliffs, and the biggest, deepest, bluest 

ocean in the world. 

Our first stop was a place called Ship’s Landing 

Point, the summit of a 150-meter-high wall of grey 

rock that rises directly above Bounty Bay. From 

the Picasso it had appeared to be the island’s 

best cliff, but when I leaned over the edge and 

grabbed a hold, the rock crumbled in my hand like 

over-baked clay. “Uh, oh,” a little voice said. “Had 

I traveled halfway across the world to climb this” 

When we arrived back at Mike and Bren’s after 

a full day’s recon, the table was piled high with 

fresh grilled fish called Nanwe that Bren had 

caught that afternoon. There was also a pot roast, 

breadfruit chips—which taste just like French fries, 

only better—and coleslaw. Their house is one of 

the nicest on the island, a sprawling single-story 

cement block ranch that looks directly out over 

the Pacific. At the table sat a barefoot, 80-year-old 

Len Brown, one of the island’s oldest residents. 

“Len,” I yelled while leaning over the table. “Any 

ideas where we should look to find some good 

rock climbing” 

Len nodded and turned to Bren. They began 

to speak in Pitkern, the island’s unique pidgin 

language, a strange amalgamation of eighteenthcentury 

English and Polynesian, which many of 

the old timers use to speak among themselves. 

Pitkern hasn’t changed much since it developed 

as a way for the English sailors and the Tahitians 

to communicate, and it features some words you 

can figure out, like musket (gun), and others you 

probably wouldn’t, like Tin-tola (girlfriend), or 

Wettles (food). Later, Bren translated: 

Having set sail from the Gambier Islands in French Polynesia, the Picasso makes its way to Pitcairn Island

Bren’s Tower—named in honor of Brenda Christian, a descendeant of Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian—rises more than 30 meters above St. Paul’s Pool on the eastern tip of Pitcairn Island. 

“Mebe gut sum good side fer clime Down 

Rope” replied Len. Maybe there is some good 

climbing at Down Rope. 

The next morning, Andrew Christian, Brenda’s 

19-year-old son, pulled his ATV over on a rugged 

trail that skirted the edge of a steep precipice. 

“Over here,” he said, dropping down a near vertical 

slot that had been hacked into the vegetation. 

The trail eventually led us to a staircase chopped 

into the side of a 150-meter cliff of compressed 

mud and black ash. 

At the bottom we took off our shoes and strolled 

along Pitcairn’s only sand beach. The spot was 

idyllic and would have made a great boat landing 

if the bay wasn’t encircled with jagged rocks. At 

the back of the beach, Andrew showed us some 

Polynesian hieroglyphs carved into the base of a 

60-meter cliff. Archaeologists believe that Pitcairn 

was home to a thriving Polynesian community 

from approximately a.d. 1200 to 1500. Because 

Pitcairn Island is volcanic, rather than a coral 

atoll like most of the other islands in this part of 

Polynesia, its rocks were prized and widely traded 

by the Polynesians. Looking down between my 

feet, I could see many of these water-smoothed 

stones rolling in the surf. To my surprise, the cliff 

at Down Rope was actually solid and would have 

made for some decent rock climbing. We quickly 

decided, however, that due to the sensitive nature 

of the site we would leave it untouched. 

I knew that elusive cliff of solid rock had to be 

somewhere, and sure enough, we finally found the 

spot on the very eastern extremity of the island. 

St. Paul’s Pool is a jaw-dropping aqua blue, sixmeter-deep 

tidal pool ringed within an enclosure 

of three rock pinnacles that rise straight from the 

open ocean. The Pitcairners have installed a metal 

gangway leading down from a crumbling shoreline 

cliff to the edge of the pool, the only spot on the 

island where you can safely swim in the ocean. 

To get to the towers, we scrambled across a 

knife-edge ridge leading to the tallest and skinniest 

of the three. One look at it and we knew that 

no Pitcairner had ever climbed it. It poked out of 

the water for about 30 meters and was vertical 

and smooth-faced on all four sides. Every few 

minutes the ocean swell would crash against the 

base, sending huge clouds of spray into the air. 

Kevin, the strongest and craziest free climber of 

our group, took the lead, starting with a down 

climb into a notch, where he timed his step across 

to the tower and just missed getting doused by a 

huge wave. In less than 30 seconds he was off 

the slime and onto dry rock. Amazingly, the tower 

was bullet hard, no doubt picked clean by eons of 

relentless pounding from the South Pacific. 

Bren had been sitting next to me the whole time 

while I belayed, and I could tell she wanted to 

climb. I gave her my harness, but she refused the 

rock shoes, preferring instead to climb the razorsharp 

rock barefoot. With Kevin belaying her from 

above, and me shouting encouragement from 

below, Bren carefully climbed into the notch and 

made the stem across to the tower. She moved 

smoothly, even on the wet part, as though she’d 

been climbing her whole life. Hanging from her 

fingertips, with her toes slotted into pockets in the 

rock, she was briefly stymied by the crux move. 

Then suddenly, using technique she shouldn’t 

have known, she threw a foot over her head, 

hooked her heel behind a small protrusion, and 

levered herself, ninjalike, right past the overhang. 

As Bren scampered up onto the summit, a huge 

wave exploded against the tower, spewing up a 

cloud of seawater that nearly licked her feet. She 

let loose a wild cry that echoed off the sea cliffs. 

A few minutes later all of us were crowded onto 

the table-sized summit. After a round of congratulations, 

we quickly decided that we’d name the 

sea stack Bren’s Tower. As the sun beat down 

on our necks, we sat on the square cut edge and 

dangled our legs over the void. To the south the 

ocean stretched endlessly, mottled only by the 

shadows of slowly drifting, puffy white clouds. 

Looking over at Bren, I couldn’t help but imagine 

that with people like her committed to making a 

life on this island, they can’t help but succeed. 

Bren is not the type who gives up easily, and nor 

are any of the other people who love this island 

and call it home. The future of Pitcairn Island may 

be very uncertain, but that actually seems to be 

just fine with the Pitcairners. Because not knowing 

what tomorrow will bring is exactly what has 

always made life on Pitcairn Island such a grand 

and worthy adventure. 

biography 

Mark Synnott, a Jackson, NH-based member of The North Face 

Climbing team, is the author of Baffin Island: Climbing, Trekking and Skiing. 

For more information, visit www.NewHampshireClimbing.com. 


Extreme medicine 

your heatlh and safety in the field 

Bite Me! 

vipers, cobras, mambas, and more 

Few things evoke greater primeval fear in man 

than snakes. Just yell “Snake!” on the trail and 

see how quickly people scatter. While only 

about a quarter of the 2,700 known species of 

these elongate reptiles are venomous, there are 

some 40,000 deaths annually worldwide from 

snakebite, many occurring in rural areas in undeveloped 

countries. Historically, the incidence of 

envenomation, as it is known, increases in areas 

freshly perturbed by violent tropical storms. In 

the United States, anywhere from 5,000 to 

8,000 venomous snakebites are reported each 

year, with about 3 percent from captive exotic 

species. Unfortunately, snakes responsible for 

by Michael J. Manyak, M.D., FACS 

25 percent of the bites are unidentified, making 

treatment with specific antivenin difficult. During 

the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, more than 60 

percent of the snakes brought to rescue facilities 

were improperly identified. Despite the statistics, 

however, snake envenomation presents a 

small risk on most expeditions unless deliberate 

handling of local reptiles occurs. 

In the United States, vipers—which include 

copperheads, cottonmouths, and rattlesnakes— 

account for 99 percent of the native venomous 

snakebites and are responsible for 9 to 15 

deaths per year, mostly among the young and 

elderly. Bites from vipers interrupt coagulation 

A False-Horned Viper captured at Al Asad Air Base, Iraq. Photograph by James Kraizel, courtesy Armed Forces Pest Management Board 

54

and cause hemorrhage, severe pain, swelling, 

and death of muscle tissue. The cottonmouth is 

frequently confused with more common harmless 

water snakes. While behavioral studies 

have shown cottonmouths are rarely aggressive 

unless grabbed or restrained, copperheads, on 

the other hand, will often strike when provoked 

and account for a majority of snake envenomations. 

Certain rattlesnakes produce a neurotoxin 

that can lead to visual disturbances and respiratory 

paralysis. 

Coral snakes are secretive and seldom seen 

and, despite their highly neurotoxic venom, 

account for only 1 percent of U.S. venomous 

snakebites. And these almost always result from 

intentional handling. It is important to note that 

the country adage “Red on yellow, kill a fellow” 

to distinguish coral snakes from similar looking 

harmless snakes applies only to North American 

coral snakes, not to their southern counterparts. 

The medically important snakes in other 

parts of the world include the family of cobras 

(Africa, nondesert tropical and subtropical 

Asia), mambas (tropical Africa), kraits (south 

Asia), and sea snakes (tropical and subtropical 

western and eastern Pacific and Indian oceans). 

Australia harbors many highly venomous snakes, 

including the taipan and common brown snakes, 

considered to have the most toxic venom in the 

world. Sea snakes evolved from Australian land 

snakes and these usually nonaggressive snakes 

live an entirely marine existence and are found in 

only two landlocked fresh water lakes, one each 

in the Philippines and Solomon Islands. 

There are about 120 species of pit vipers in 

the Americas and much of Asia and 40 species 

of Old World vipers in Africa, Europe, and Asia, 

all of which are venomous. Many of these are the 

sources of bites with low death rates. However, 

the highly lethal Russell’s viper—found from 

Pakistan to Taiwan—is one of the world’s most 

dangerous snakes because it is well-adapted to 

agricultural areas. The saw-scaled vipers found 

in arid and semi-arid regions of India, the Middle 

East, and Africa may cause more fatalities than 

any other snakes in the world. The stout-bodied, 

wide-headed African vipers such as the rhinoceros 

viper and Gabon viper are rarely causes of 

envenomation. Puff adders, which prefer grasslands, 

are a major cause of snakebite in Africa. 

In the neotropics, about 30 species of moderate 

to heavy pit vipers, often lumped together under 

the name fer-de-lance, account for most of the 

serious snakebites in Latin America. The bushmaster 

is the largest neotropical pit viper, and 

while bites are rare they are usually fatal. 

Constrictors are not venomous although nasty 

bites can result from handling them. These ambush 

predators rarely attack humans; however, 

eight cases of suspected death from pet constrictors 

have occurred in North America in the 

past 20 years, half of them children. There have 

been no deaths attributed to South American 

anacondas, the largest constrictor species. 

Somewhat disturbingly, however, Burmese pythons 

released in the wild have now established 

breeding colonies in the Everglades and in other 

southeastern states. 

Snakebite Prevention Tips 

• Familiarize yourself with indigenous venomous species 

and their habits. 

• Wear loose-fitting bloused trousers and boots. 

• Avoid placing hands and feet in places that cannot be 

visually inspected. 

• Avoid blind contact with brush or tree limbs in flood 

water areas. 

• Move out of the strike range of an identified snake—at 

least one body length. 

First Aid for Snakebite 

• Keep the victim calm, warm, and rested. 

• Identify the snake and photograph if possible, even by 

means of a cell phone. 

• The injured body part should be freed of jewelry and 

any constriction, immobilized with a loose-fitting dressing, 

elevated at heart level. 

• Evacuate the victim as soon as possible to the nearest 

medical facility. 

• Closely monitor progression of swelling during transport; 

marking the advancing edge can provide valuable information 

to the physician. 

• Encourage fluid intake. 

• If a suspected neurotoxic species (coral snake, mamba, 

cobra, krait, or sea snake) caused the bite, a pressure bandage 

wrapped from the phalanges over the entire extremity 

with immobilization helps impede toxin spread. 

• Do not cut and suck bites, apply venom extraction kits or 

tourniquets, or place cold packs on snake bites as these have 

all been shown to potentially worsen the bite outcome. 


Extreme Cuisine 

food for the epicurean adventurer 

light and compact 

beautiful soups 

by Linda Frederick Yaffe 

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green, 

Waiting in a hot tureen! 

Who for such dainties would not stoop 

Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup! 

Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup! 

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 

When pack space and weight really count— 

while kayaking, backpacking, or long-distance 

trekking—dehydrated homemade soups provide 

featherweight nutrition and warming satisfaction. 

At home, fill your soup pot with hearty 

proteins, vegetables, and carbohydrates; cut 

all ingredients into small pieces for faster drying. 

After the soup has been cooked and dehydrated, 

you can save even more volume: grind 

the dried soup to a powder in a blender or 

food processor. In camp, cover the soup with 

water, bring it to a boil, stir, and enjoy warm, 

comforting “beautiful soup” along with some 

Whole Grain Romano Cheese Crackers. 

Quick Clam Bisque 

serves 4: Weight, one dried serving=3 ounces 

1. Stir together in a soup pot and bring to a boil: 

• 2 cups clam juice 

• 19½ ounces canned minced clams plus juice 

• 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes plus juice 

• 2 shallots, minced 

• 1½ cups whole wheat bread crumbs 

2. Reduce heat to low and stir in: 

• ½ teaspoon celery salt 

• ¾ cup milk or cream 

• dash of cayenne pepper 

3. Puree until smooth. 

4. Spread on covered dehydrator trays; dehydrate for 5 hours at 145ºF. 

5. To rehydrate, cover with water 1 inch above level of food in 

pot. boil, stir, and serve. 

Biography 

A California-based writer, Linda Frederick Yaffe is the 

author of Backpack Gourmet, High Trail Cookery, and the 

recently released Solar Cooking for Home and Camp. 

56

Pinto Corn Chowder 

serves 4: Weight, one dried serving=4 ounces 

1. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a Dutch oven or large stock 

pot over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add, stirring 

occasionally for 5 minutes: 

• 1 onion, minced 

• 3 strips pork, beef, or soy bacon, diced 

2. Reduce heat to low. Add and cook, stirring, for 5 minutes longer: 

• 2 cloves garlic, minced 

• 4 fresh mushrooms, minced 

• 2 tablespoons whole wheat flour 

3. Stir in gradually: 

• 2½ cups chicken broth 

4. Add and bring to a boil: 

• 3 red potatoes, scrubbed but not peeled, diced 

• 15-ounce can pinto beans, rinsed and drained 

• 1 whole bay leaf 

• 1 teaspoon minced fresh thyme, or ½ teaspoon dried 

5. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 1 hour. 

6. Stir in and simmer for 5 minutes longer: 

• 3½ cups corn kernels, fresh, frozen, or canned 

• 12 ounces evaporated milk 

• 1 tsp salt 

• ½ tsp freshly ground black pepper 

7. Turn off heat, remove bay leaf, and stir in: 

• ½ cup finely grated Parmesan cheese 

8. Spread on covered dehydrator trays and dehydrate for 6 

hours at 145ºF. 

9. To rehydrate, cover with water 1½ inches above level of food 

in pot. boil, stir, and serve. 

. 

Stuffed Cabbage Soup 

serves 4: Weight one dried serving=4 ounces 

1. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a stock pot over medium heat, then Add: 

• 1 onion, diced—Stir in, cook for 5 minutes, then add 

• ¾ pound lean ground beef, turkey, or soy—stir in and cook for 5 minutes longer 

2. Add and bring to a boil: 

• 5 cups beef, chicken, or vegetable stock 

• 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes plus juice 

• 1 small head of dark green cabbage, cored and finely shredded 

• ¼ cup raw brown rice, rinsed and drained 

3. Reduce heat to very low and simmer for 70 minutes or until 

rice is tender. Then stir in: 

• ½ teaspoon salt 

• ¼ teaspoon sweet paprika 

4. Spread on covered dehydrator trays and dehydrate for 6 

hours at 145ºF 

5. To rehydrate, cover with water 1½ inches above level of food 

in pot, boil, stir, and serve. 

Whole Grain Romano 

Cheese Crackers 

serves 7: Weight, one dried serving (15 crackers)=2½ ounces 

1. Stir together in a large bowl: 

• 1½ cups whole wheat flour 

• ¼ cup unbleached white flour 

• 2 tablespoons brown sugar 

• 2 tablespoons rolled oats 

• 2 tablespoons toasted wheat germ 

• 2 tablespoons wheat bran 

• 1 teaspoon baking powder 

• ½ teaspoon salt 

• teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 

2. Cut in: 

• cup chilled butter or margarine 

• ½ cup finely grated Romano cheese 

3. Stir in: 

• ¾ cup cold water 

4. Knead briefly then turn the dough out onto a floured board. 

Roll the dough as thin as possible. 

5. Preheat oven to 350ºF. Oil two large baking sheets. 

6. Using a knife, slice the dough into 1 x 2½-inch rectangles; they 

need not be even. 

7. Place the crackers on the oiled baking sheets and prick them 

all over with a fork to prevent buckling. Bake for 5 to 10 

minutes or until lightly browned. 

8. Let cool completely on wire racks before storing in individual 

serving-size bags. 

Protect crackers, cookies, and other fragile baked goods in waxed milk or juice cartons. 

Wash and dry the cartons. Pack individual servings of crackers in plastic bags, then pack 

them tightly into the cartons. Date and label the cartons and bag them in larger plastic 

bags. When empty, flatten the cartons; use as insulated seating while packing them out. 

ownership statement 

1. Publication Title: The Explorers Journal. 

2. Publication Number: 0014-5025. 3. 

Filing Date: 09/1/08. 4. Issue Frequency: 

Quarterly. 5. Number of Issues Published 

Annually: 4. 6. Annual Subscription Price: 

$29.95. 8. Complete Mailing Address of 

Headquarters or General Business Office 

of Publisher: The Explorers Club, 46 East 

70th Street, New York, NY 10021-4928. 

9. Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses 

of Publisher, Editor, and Managing 

Editor: Publisher: Daniel A. Bennett, 

President, The Explorers Club, 46 East 

70th Street, New York, NY 10021-4928. 

Editor: Angela M.H. Schuster, The Explorers 

Club, 46 East 70th Street, New 

York, NY 10021-4928. Managing Editor: 

N/A. 10. Owner: The Explorers Club, 46 

East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021- 

4928. 11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, 

and Other Security Holders Owning 

or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total 

Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other 

Securities: None. 12. Tax Status: The 

purpose, function, and nonprofit status of 

this organization and the exempt status 

for federal income tax purposes has not 

changed during preceding 12 months. 

13. Publication Title: The Explorers Journal. 

14. Issue Date for Circulation Data 

Below: Summer 2008. 15. Extent and 

Nature of Circulation: Average Number 

of Copies Each Issue During Preceding 

12 Months: 4,000. Number of Copies of 

Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing 

Date: 3,400. a. Total Number of Copies 

3,400. b. Paid Circulation: 3,158. (1) 

Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions 

Stated on PS Form 3541: 2,864. 

(2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions 

Stated on PS Form 3541: 294. (3) Paid 

Distribution Outside the Mail, Including 

Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, 

Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other 

Paid Distribution Outside USPS®: 0. 

(4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of 

Mail Through the USPS: 0. c. Total Paid 

Distribution: 3,158 d. Free or Nominal 

Rate Distribution: (1) Free or Nominal 

Rate Outside-County Copies included 

on PS Form 3541: 0. (2) Free or Nominal 

Rate In-County Copies Included on PS 

Form 3541: 0. (3) Free or Nominal Rate 

Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through 

the USPS: 100. (4) Free or Nominal Rate 

Distribution Outside the Mail: 72. e. Total 

Free or Nominal Rate Distribution: 172. f. 

Total Distribution: 3,330. g. Copies not 

Distributed: 70. h. Total: 3,400. i. Percent 

Paid: 94.83%. 16. This Statement 

of Ownership will be printed in the Fall 

2008 edition of this publication. 17. I certify 

that all information furnished on this 

form is true and complete: Angela M.H. 

Schuster, Editor-in-Chief.

eviews 

edited by Milbry C. Polk 

e x p l o r e r s 

of the infinite 

304 pp • New York: Tarcher, 2008 • 

ISBN-10: 1585426512, ISBN-13: 978- 

1585426515 • $26.95 

Maria Coffey’s latest book, 

Explorers of the Infinite, examines 

the lure of extreme 

by Maria Coffey 

adventuring and the near-mystical 

experiences of some who 

come close to that very thin 

line between life and death. 

Coffey’s explanation for what 

drives individuals to challenge 

themselves physically in remote 

locations is compelling. “My 

premise is that reaching a spiritual 

state of being is the principal 

lure of extreme adventure.” 

And, she argues, this spiritual 

experience is not limited to explorers, 

but that for everyone, 

challenging situations “can enrich 

our existence…awakening 

us to a greater awareness of 

our own potential and opening 

us to the infinite beauty of the 

universe.” But explorers tend 

to take this to an extreme. Their 

yearning for the exhilaration 

felt upon reaching a physically 

demanding goal compels them 

to return again and again to a 

mountain, to a desert, to that 

special place where they were 

most challenged because, 

she argues, it is only when life 

hangs in the balance, that there 

can be spiritual breakthrough. 

Sadly, for some who try to 

reach for that moment, it is often 

their last. And, inexplicably, 

others closest to them sense 

those last minutes. Some who 

return from the brink speak of 

sensations of communication 

with the others who have died. 

For this thoughtful yet 

charged book, Coffey interviewed 

dozens of ultra-adventurers 

and explorers who have 

had encounters with a spiritual 

essence or an out-of-body experience 

in the field. She also 

peruses medical literature on 

brain function under duress 

as well as the beliefs of various 

cultures around the world 

regarding spiritual encounters. 

58

life in cold blood 

by David Attenborough 

288 pp • Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 2008 • ISBN-10: 

0691137188, ISBN-13: 978-0691137186 

• $29.95 

In 2004, scientists working in 

the Arctic discovered a fossil of 

Tikaalik roseae a crocodile-like 

animal that was “one of the first 

backboned animals to leave the 

primeval waters and venture 

onto the land.” The latest tour 

de force of naturalist and prolific 

author, David Attenborough, 

Life in Cold Blood takes us on 

a fascinating tour through the 

often bizarre and alien world of 

Tikaalik’s amphibian and reptile 

descendants. In the discussion 

of frogs, for example, he introduces 

the reader to frogs that 

give birth through their backs, 

male frogs that nurture babies 

in their throat sacs, a frog with 

babies that go through larval 

stages in the mother’s stomach 

and exit through the mouth, and 

frogs that bloat themselves with 

water then bury themselves 

to survive in the desert. Some 

species have matched their 

niches so well that they have 

REVIEWS 

remained virtually unchanged 

for eons, like the six-meter-long 

saltwater crocodiles, which 

have been hunting for 215 million 

years. The variety of adaptations 

to environmental conditions 

is astounding. The author 

reveals fascinating facets of 

evolution, unusual traits, life 

processes, and, above all, the 

importance of amphibians and 

reptiles to our life on Earth. Yet 

much about the cold-blooded 

world is still little known or 

understood. 

Sadly, Attenborough notes 

that, by the time one finishes 

reading the book, some coldblooded 

creatures will have 

become extinct. 

last flight of the 

scarlet Macaw 

by Bruce Barcott 

336 pp • New York: Random House, 

2008 • ISBN-10: 1400062934, ISBN-13: 

978-1400062935 • $26 

Opposition to corrupt elements 

of government and multinational 

corporations bent on 

destroying environments and/ 

or cultures that get in the way 

of profit has been a quixotic endeavor 

at best. Bruce Barcott’s 

latest book, The Last Flight of 

the Scarlet Macaw, documents 

the efforts of one individual 

who took on the government 

and its partner corporations 

in an attempt to save a pristine 

piece of Belize. 

Sharon Matola arrived in 

Belize in the early 1980s to 

work on a film that featured animals. 

When the film wrapped, 

Matola stayed on to care for 

the animals left behind. When 

people began bringing Matola 

wounded and orphaned wild 

animals, her camp morphed 

into the Belize Zoo and Matola, 

called the “Zoo Lady” locally, 

found her mission in educating 

the nation’s children about 

their spectacular natural world. 

When she heard that the Macal 

River Valley, a place of splendid 

natural beauty, biological diversity, 

and the last nesting site of 

the Scarlet Macaw, was going 

to be flooded to create the 

Chalillo Dam, an energy project 

of dubious long-term value, she 

flew into action. For six years 

she led an international coalition 

to save the Macal Valley 

by conducting environmental 

surveys, exposing the fraud, 

kickbacks, and collusion on the 

part of the government, finally 

ending up in court. 

Almost every region of 

the world has its own Macal 

Valley. Unique habitats are 

disappearing daily and species 

are vanishing at an unprecedented 

rate. Humanity 

needs more Matolas to speak 

up and more Barcotts to 

broadcast their story. 


motionless journey: 

from a hermitage in 

the himalayas 

60 

by Matthieu Ricard 

128 pp • New York: Thames & Hudson, 

2008 • ISBN-10: 0500543526, ISBN-13: 

978-0500543528 • $45 

Photographer Matthieu Ricard, 

a practicing Buddhist monk 

and humanitarian, documented 

a year he spent in retreat at 

the hermitage of Pema Osel 

near Kathmandu. He used his 

photography as a pathway to 

meditation—never moving far 

from the hermitage and limiting 

himself to shooting only a 

few choice frames a week. His 

stunning images capture both 

the essence of his contemplative 

experience and the natural 

beauty of his surroundings. 

Each image is a visualization of 

his meditative journey, radiating 

both calmness and rapture. 

He writes, “The immensity 

and ever-changing beauty of 

this sublime scenery permeate 

my whole being like an 

REVIEWS 

elixir.” Ricard’s gift is this book, 

Motionless Journey: From a 

Hermitage in the Himalayas. 

While few of us can spend a 

year in the Himalayas, we all can 

learn to stop and really look at 

where we are to find the beauty 

in our own surroundings. 

Mean and Lowly Things 

by Kate Jackson 

336 pp •Cambridge: Harvard University 

Press, 2008 • ISBN-10: 0674029747, ISBN- 

13: 978-0674029743 • $27.95 

Slogging through swamps in 

the Democratic Republic of 

the Congo, hunting venomous 

snakes, is the dream job of herpetologist 

Kate Jackson, who 

chronicles three of her fieldcollecting 

expeditions in Mean 

and Lowly Things: Snakes, 

Science, and Survival in the 

Congo—a compelling, candid, 

and adventure-filled memoir. 

Her first expedition began 

during the early days of a bitter 

civil war and ended shortly 

after, when she was flown out 

due to a bad infection. The second 

was in a meager camp near 

the village of Impongui. Note to 

self, “Next time bring a tent!” 

Near the end of this expedition 

she was in the village clearing a 

brick pile, searching for snakes, 

when she lunged for one she 

thought was harmless. Too late, 

she noticed the slight difference 

in coloration of the scales signifying 

that this one was a cobra. 

Bitten in the hand, she was 

bothered not so much by the 

agonizing pain or the realization 

that she may very well die, but 

rather by the bad example she 

had set. “My greatest fear was 

having a child get bitten by a 

snake by having seen me do it.” 

The third expedition she writes 

about took place in 2006, when 

she returned to the flooded forest 

with two Congolese grad 

students, one of whom was terrified 

of snakes. Jackson’s passion 

for her subject helps her 

overcome obstacles and brilliantly 

navigate a large cultural 

divide. In the end, her honesty, 

commitment to her work, and 

sense of humor carry the day. 

This should be required reading 

for anyone contemplating 

fieldwork.

T H E E X P L O R E R S C L U B c h a p t e r c h a i r s 

46 east 70th street, New York, NY 10021 I 212-628-8383 I www.explorers.org 

National chapter chairs 

interNational chapter chairs 

Alaska 

John J. Kelley, Ph.D. 

Tel: 907-479-5989 

Fax: 907-479-5990 

ffjjk@uaf.edu 

Atlanta 

Roy Alexander Wallace 

Tel: 404-237-5098 

Fax: 404-231-5228 

awallace3@bellsouth.net 

Central Florida 

G. Michael Harris 

Tel: 727-584-2883 

Fax: 727-585-6078 

gmh@tampabay.rr.com 

Chicago/Great Lakes 

Mel Surdel 

Contact person: 

Cheryl Istvan 

Tel: 312-640-0741 

Fax: 312-640-0731 

ssn578688@aol.com 

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Tel/Fax: 937-885-2477 

jer937@aol.com 

Greater Piedmont 

Nena Powell Rice 

Tel: 803-777-8170 

Fax: 803-254-1338 

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Fax: 772-283-3497 

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Pacific Northwest 

Matthew Stubbs 

Tel: 206-774-1655 

matthew_stubbs@comcast.net 

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Doug Soroka 

Tel: 215-257-4588 

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Rocky Mountain 

William F. Schoeberlein 

Tel: 303-526-0505 

Fax: 303-526-5171 

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William T. Everett 

Tel: 760-765-3377 

Fax: 760-765-3113 

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Southern California 

David A. Dolan, FRGS 

Tel. 949-307-9182 

daviddolan@aol.com 

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Pamela L. Stephany 

954-568-5938 

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Southwest 

Brian Hanson (Chapter Liaison) 

Tel: 512-266-7851 

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Col. Gerry W. Bass 

Tel: 239-594-5224 

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Hugo Castello, Ph.D. 

Fax: 54 11 4 982 5243/4494 

hucastel@mail.retina.ar 

Australia-New Zealand 

Ann McFarlane, Ph.D. 

Tel: 61-2-9328-4883 

Fax: 61-2-9328-4888 

amcfarlane@bigpond.com 

Canadian 

Joseph G. Frey 

Tel: 416-239-8840 

explorersclubcanada@hotmail.com 

www.explorersclub.ca 

East Asia 

Dr. Michael J. Moser 

mmoser@omm.com 

Great Britain 

Barry L. Moss 

Tel: 44 020 8992 7178 

barola2780@aol.com 

Iceland 

Haraldur Örn Ólafsson 

Tel: +354 545 8551 

Fax: +354 562 1289 

haraldur.orn.olafsson@ivr.stjr.is 

India 

Avinash Kohli 

amber@nda.vsnl.net.in 

Norway 

Hans-Erik Hansen 

Home Tel: 47 22-458-205 

Work Tel: 47 67-138-559 

hans-e-h@online.no 

New England 

Gregory Deyermenjian 

Tel: 978-927-8827, ext. 128 

Fax: 978-927-9182 

paititi@alumni.clarku.edu 

North Pacific Alaska 

Mead Treadwell 

Tel: 907-258-7764 

Fax: 907-258-7768 

meadwell@alaska.net 

Northern California 

Lee Langan 

Tel: 415-931-3015 

Fax: 415-398-7664 

lee@langan.net 

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Mabel Purkerson, M.D. 

Tel: 314-362-4234 

purkerm@msnotes.wustl.edu 

Texas 

Ted D. Lee 

Tel: 210-886-9500 

Fax: 210-886-9883 

tedlee@gunn-lee.com 

Washington, DC 

Dr. Lee Talbot 

Tel: 703-734-8576 

Fax: 703-734-8576 

ltalbot@gmu.edu 

Poland 

Marek Kaminski 

Home Tel: 48-69-5664000 

Work Tel: 48-58-5544522 

Fax: 48-58-5523315 

mkaminski@gamasan.pl 

m.rogozinska@rp.pl 

Russia 

Alexander Borodin 

Tel: 7-095-973-2415 

Alexanderb@sibneft.ru 

Western Europe 

Lorie Karnath 

Tel: 49-1723-95-2051 

lkarnath@yahoo.com

62 

Bombay Anna 

by Susan Morgan 

300 pp • Berkeley: University of 

California Press, 2008 • ISBN-10: 

0520252268, ISBN-13: 978-0520252264 • 

$24.95 

English professor Susan 

Morgan has researched probably 

as fully as anyone could 

the elusive and secretive life 

of the remarkable Anglo- 

Indian, Mrs. Anna Leonowens 

(1831–1915). She is best 

known as the governess to 

King Mongkut of Thailand’s 

82 children. Her years with 

them were immortalized in 

the play and movie, The King 

and I. Celebrated at the time 

for her books on Thailand and 

the royal harem, Anna called 

Bombay, Singapore, Siam, 

Halifax, and Germany home— 

an immense accomplishment 

for a widow in the Victorian 

period. Surprisingly well (self) 

educated, she spoke a number 

of Indian and European 

languages and even taught 

Sanskrit at Harvard. Morgan 

managed to uncover fascinating 

aspects of Leonowen’s life, 

REVIEWS 

not the least of which was the 

truth of Leonowen’s origins, 

which was never suspected 

during her lifetime by anyone, 

including her own children. 

Because of this, her achievements 

as a social reformer, 

author, adventurer, traveler, and 

educator who hobnobbed with 

the rich and famous literati are 

all the more remarkable. 

beyond ufos 

by Jeffrey Bennett 

238 pp • Princeton: Princeton University 


13: 978-0691135496 • $26.95 

One of the more reasoned 

arguments for intelligent 

life in the universe is astrophysicist 

Jeffrey Bennett’s 

Beyond UFOs: The Search 

for Extraterrestrial Life and 

Its Astonishing Implications 

for Our Future. His masterful, 

thoughtful, and accessible 

style brings even the staunchest 

disbeliever into the conversation. 

Well informed about the 

state of what we know and can 

infer about life in the universe, 

Bennett effectively and reasonably 

walks through a range of 

subjects, including the origins 

of life, what constitutes life, 

the meaning of time and how 

we assess it, the nature of 

intelligence, and the likelihood 

that there is other intelligence 

in the universe, and how we 

might recognize it. Given what 

we can surmise about the universe, 

he offers a very conservative 

guestimate that there are 

at least 100,000 other civilizations 

in existence—and he is not 

talking about microbes. Some 

are most likely 50,000—if not 

millions of—years in advance of 

us and have the technological 

ability to travel across space 

and time. As to whether or not 

they have visited Earth, he is 

more careful, saying we don’t 

yet have the ability to conceive 

of the technology these beings 

would have had to master to 

visit us. And for those worried 

that our television programs, 

which have been traveling 

through space for the last 40 

or so years might lure hostile 

aliens he says, “Relax. There is 

nothing the Earth can offer that 

they can’t manufacture closer 

to home.” 

Bennett also questions 

whether any civilization—including 

our own—can endure long 

enough to develop the highly 

sophisticated technologies 

needed for interstellar travel. 

He says that we humans must 

first “grow up” and overcome 

our limitations or we are sure 

to go the way of the dinosaurs. 

This is an important book on 

so many levels because it 

examines philosophical issues 

that divide us and prevent our 

intelligent evolution.

Lost Worlds: 

A d v e n t u r e s i n t h e 

Tropical Rainforest 

by Bruce M. Beehler 

272 pp • New Haven: Yale University 


13: 978-0300122282 • $28 

An expert on birds and tropical 

ecology and vice president of 

Conservation International, 

Bruce Beehler has written an 

insightful book about his extensive 

field trips over several 

decades to the rainforests of 

Papua New Guinea, India, 

Madagascar, Indonesia, the 

Philippines, Panama, and Ivory 

Coast. Beehler says that one of 

the more exhilarating aspects 

of his work has been working 

alongside indigenous naturalists 

who have helped him 

understand the complexities of 

their rainforests so they could 

determine together “how the 

best of these rainforests could 

be preserved for generations 

to come so that our greatgrandchildren 

could hear the 

rainforest whisper its secrets.” 

Often called the lungs of 

the Earth, rainforests are rich 

REVIEWS 

and diverse biological zones. 

Today, only half the rainforests 

of a century ago still stand and 

these are imperiled by a surge in 

human population, large-scale 

plantation agriculture, logging, 

hunting for the bushmeat trade, 

and a “loss of tradition among 

forest-dwelling cultures.” 

Sadly, the wholesale 

destruction of our planet’s 

rainforest regions is often off 

the international radar. It is 

appalling to read about the 

notorious American Freeport 

Mine Company, the bête noire 

of conservationists and human 

rights activists for its massive 

gold-mining activities, which 

combined with the collusion 

of the Indonesian army, has 

resulted in the poisoning of a 

swath of the Earth and in the 

murder of local people. 

Despite the escalating loss 

of rainforest, Beehler assures 

the reader that it is not too late 

to save the best of what is left 

of these complex “biodiversity 

islands” upon which so much 

life, including ours, depends. 

He suggests the solution is to 

value the input and knowledge 

of local populations to find the 

solutions that sustain their livelihood 

because, Beehler says, 

poverty is also an environmental 

issue. 

Our hope, he says, lies in 

“good governance, sensible 

economics, strong planning, 

enforcement, engaged local 

stewardship, and, yes, 

creation and management of 

protected areas to preserve 

the most precious places on 

Earth.” Beehler’s prose has a 

captivating immediacy, allowing 

a fuller appreciation of this 

amazing world. 

downstream 

by Karen Halverson 

160 pp • Berkeley: University of 

California Press, 2008 • ISBN-10: 

0520253469, ISBN-13: 978-0520253469 • 

$34.95 

In Downstream, landscape 

photographer Karen 

Halverson has produced a 

beautiful if provocative portrait 

of the Colorado River. 

She begins at its headwaters 

in the canyons of Colorado, 

winds south past Native 

American ruins to the most 

well-known section, the 

Grand Canyon. Although 

beloved for its wildness and 

beauty, the river is anything 

but as it exits the canyon. 

There, a dam captures its 

mighty waters in Lake Powell, 

which is then drained to feed 

the voracious life-styles of 

thousands of people living 

by golf courses in the desert. 

Halverson’s most heartbreaking 

image is her last: the once 

mighty river ends dripping 

into a drainpipe in the desert. 

To tell this story, Halverson 

walked, rafted, or drove the 

entire length of the Colorado 

from Dinosaur National Park 

to that drainpipe in Sonora, 

Mexico. Her work is a wakeup 

call that shows how little 

we understand about what 

we are steadily destroying. 


WHAT WERE THEY THINKING 

great moments in exploration as told to Jim Clash 

walking on the Moon 

with Neil A. Armstrong 

On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 crew touched down on the 

moon, becoming the first humans to journey to another 

world. In a rare interview, Armstrong, 78, shares a firsthand 

glimpse into that significant historical moment. 

JC: Landing on the lunar surface was rougher 

than you expected. Were you close to aborting 

NA: The unknowns were substantial, the systems 

were heavily loaded, and it was the first time 

these sequences had been attempted in flight. 

Fortunately, our practice on the Lunar Module 

simulator and in the free-flying Lunar Landing 

Training Vehicle had given us high confidence 

in our piloting ability. Aborting required shutting 

down the landing engine and separating the 

ascent stage from the descent stage with explosive 

charges and igniting the ascent engine. As a 

very high-risk procedure at low altitude, it was to 

be avoided unless absolutely necessary. Apollo 

11 was always closer to landing than aborting. 

JC: When you did land, how did the real thing 

differ from the checklist simulations on Earth 

NA: The real thing differed from simulation because 

it was “the real thing.” It was a real Lunar 

Module, alive and operating. It was a real Moon’s 

surface outside our window. It was really more 

than 200ºF outside. 

JC: Beyond, “One small step for a man, one giant 

leap for mankind,” what else were you thinking 

when you stepped onto the Moon 

NA: The landing was a very high-risk situation. 

Walking on the surface was, in my opinion at the 

time, far less risky. But it was genuine exploration 

at a place where no other human, as far as 

we knew, had ever stepped before. We were focused 

on doing the very best job of completing 

our observations and experiments in the limited 

time we had available. 

JC: Your joy must have been tempered with a 

realization you had to get back to Earth safely. 

NA: I had been very concerned about the technical 

details of ensuring that the ascent engine 

could be started and would get us back into lunar 

orbit. But that was in the two years prior to the 

flight. On the lunar surface, it did not weigh on 

my mind at all. It was a time to think positively. 

More of Jim Clash’s columns and video shows can be found 

at www.forbes.com/tothelimits 

64


The official quarterly of 

The Explorers Club since 1921 

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Dare to go 

where no one 

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subscribe online to The Explorers Journal today! 

From vast ocean depths to 

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The Explorers Journal offers 

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Founded in 1904 to promote 

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image by Cristian Donoso, diving in western patagonia

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