Galen Rowell has been to the polar regions at least 20 times. It’s hard to give an exact number, he says, because “they’re hard to define. It would depend on areas like Mt. McKinley, how much you count them as polar regions. The top of Mt. McKinley is definitely Arctic in its climate and, even though it’s south of the Arctic Circle, it gets 24 hours of daylight for a few days a year.”
Rowell, 55, has been a mountain climber and nature photographer since the 1970s, working for magazines such as National Geographic, Life, Sports Illustrated and Outdoor Photography. He and his wife, Barbara, regularly lead wilderness excursions for photographers. His new book, “Poles Apart: Parallel Visions of the Arctic and Antarctic” (University of California Press; $39.95), presents side-by-side photographs of the Arctic and Antarctic regions, highlighting the stunning differences between the two areas.
“Mountain areas have been a major focus of my life,” Rowell says. “In some places I’d be going for the adventure and the photography would be secondary. But then, beginning around 1991, I had the idea for this book and was going to places with a very strong concept of producing the book of photographs. But I do have photographs going back to the ’70s.
Rowell enjoys pointing out the differences between the two polar regions. Both regions are cold, icy and relatively empty, he says, but the North Pole is in the middle of an ocean, surrounded by land, and the South Pole is in the middle of a continent with the highest average elevation on earth at 9,300 feet, surrounded by oceans.
“A related fact,” he says, “is that with the lands in the Arctic connected to all the continents where most of the world’s population lives–Europe, Asia, North America–the animals and human inhabitants are all pretty familiar to us, and closely related to our experience. There are wolves and foxes and bears; there are the same flowers.
“In the Antarctic it’s much more exotic. There are no land mammals because Antarctica drifted into its present position before the age of mammals, and it’s been isolated by the sea. So all you have of any size are marine creatures. There are birds, some that fly and some that don’t fly, and seals that may come to the edges of the continent.
“People might be surprised by 80-degree days in the Alaskan Arctic. In mid-summer you have 24 hours of daylight, depending on where you are, for a good period of time. It can be months if you’re fairly far north, and you can have quite high temperatures and be very comfortable.
“What would surprise you about the Antarctic are the dry valleys that are like deserts, and the beautiful sand dunes–even though it’s very cold–with essentially no snow. That’s not a world that you would think would be in the Antarctic.”
Rowell says there are definitely more tourists in the Arctic, but they’re spread more thinly because there are different countries they can go to. Still, he says, there are about 10,000 people a year going on Antarctic cruises. Antarctic tourism, for the sake of seeing the beauty of the Antarctic, is quite unique and popular, he says.
A trip for Rowell can last anywhere from one week to several months. The shortest, he says, was the winter week in Barrow, Alaska, taking regular flights with his frequent flier miles. The longest was two and a half months in Antarctica with the National Science Foundation.
Rowell prepares by making a good list of the gear he’s likely to need and by doing lots of reading.
“I’ve always found, in doing a book like this or any kind of project, that the kind of learning you do in school doesn’t always work. I’ve found that all your research, you do twice. If you don’t do it before you go, then you miss a lot. And if you don’t redo it when you come back and you have the experience in your mind, then you don’t catch a lot of things that gain new meaning from your experience.
“There’s no way to bypass doing it twice. I find a lot of people have been places, but they don’t understand some of what they’ve seen. Or they’ve forgotten stuff very quickly. Doing a book like this forces you to go through that process and it locks things in your mind and makes you understand what you’ve done and what it means in ways that sometimes a normal tourist doesn’t get.”
Rowell says, “I’ve been on some trips where I’ve been lecturing on photography, where there are some tourists who have more camera gear than I do. My essential camera gear, I can carry on the airplane with me. Maybe a big tripod or a bigger lens might be in my luggage, but essentially everything I use is in one pack that I can carry. I try not to go with a huge amount of equipment.”
Organization is the key to long trips, Rowell says, “and not taking too much. I think the worst thing on trips is to go from place to place and always have to be unpacking and repacking. If you can have things in modular units that you pull out, even if you have all your dirty clothes in a separate bag rather than having them spread through all your luggage, it just makes things so much more efficient.”
He also recommends learning to sleep on airplanes. “I bring along two earplugs, an Excedrin P.M. sleeping pill, a cover for my eyes and a little roll-up sleeping pad that you blow up and it takes away all the little rough spots on the seat. I can go from my home in San Francisco to New York on a red-eye and come back on one and feel rested.”
Rowell has seen more of the world than just the poles. He’s been on 24 expeditions climbing and trekking on the Himalayans and has been to South America many times.
“One of the more adventurous trips was with my wife,” he says. “She’s a pilot and owns a single-engine plane. One year she flew it north of the Arctic Circle from California. In 1990 we flew from California to Patagonia, along the whole coast of South America, crossed over the Andes and then up through Brazil, across the Amazon, through the Caribbean, along with a lot of stops along the way for ground-based travel. That was certainly a wild adventure in a single-engine plane. The entire trip took two and a half months.”
Rowell says there are a few gaps in his travel experience. He’s never been to Australia.
Rowell can’t pick a single most interesting place in the world, but says, “I find wild places, to me, are more interesting than modern cities. But when you can combine the two, when you can get a native culture that has a long tradition of living in harmony with a wild place, that intrigues me the most.
“So I’ve been intrigued at seeing how the Tibetans live, especially the Tibetan nomads out in the high places, and being out with the Eskimos when they’re doing their traditional hunting in sealskin boats. That really intrigues me, seeing how people live in balance with these wild environments, not how we adventure travelers bring all the stuff that we get from Eddie Bauer and spend a lot of money and go by motorized means and manage to spend two weeks. But how these people have lived in these regions for thousands of years with very little. That intrigues me.”
There have been some places Rowell didn’t like. “I’ve been to mainland China and I wouldn’t go back unless I had to. I’ve crossed it by railroad and written articles about it. It’s just the whole way the government and everything works and the oppression of the people.
“There are a lot of places in the world I’d much rather be. You know that things are right when you’re traveling and there’s nowhere else in the world you’d rather be. You’re into what’s happening and you’re not thinking about being home or some other place you’re comparing it to that’s better. You’re just in the flow of it and there’s no question in your mind that that’s where you want to be. I’ve had that (feeling) a lot of times when I travel to remote areas, but not in China.”
The biggest disaster Rowell has had to deal with happened when he was in China with his wife, taking a side trip while he was doing a story about Pakistan for the National Geographic.
“We had a rented vehicle, came back to Pakistan over a high mountain pass, and the Chinese turned us around at the border with AK-47’s and took our vehicle away and took our passports. They interrogated us for 24 hours, held us overnight, wouldn’t allow us to call our embassy and we were very worried.
“The Pakistan government called them while we were there. They lied to the Pakistan government and said that we had decided to spend extra time there of our own accord. We found that out later. They seized papers we had and all sorts of things. That was a close call because anything could have happened. I don’t know why they did it, maybe just to flex their muscles at some border post that isn’t too well controlled.
“I think I’m definitely more willing to take calculated risks in the mountains than putting myself into more human situations. I would rather be on Mt. Everest than in Miami.”
