We're about six hours into our tour when Graber calls, "lunch break!" From the position of the sun I guess it's nine o'clock. But that's nine o'clock at night because here, in early January, only two weeks past the Antarctic solstice, there is no night. We cache our skis and climb a short ridge at the southern terminus of the small range of granite spires we're circumambulating, ?nd a perch free of ice and have "lunch." The ice cap stretching endlessly before us extends southward to the pole. On both sides the peaks of neighboring ranges in this remote place called Queen Maud Land are tinged gold by the Antarctic half-light.

I pour a cup of tea from my thermos and hand it to Alex, who takes a sip and passes it to Conrad. There are six of us on this expedition: Alex Lowe, Conrad Anker, Jon Krakauer, and Gordon Wiltsie. Mike Graber and I are making a television film of the adventure. We finish the tea and gather our day packs. Our camp is on the opposite end of this range of spires that we are skiing around, and soon it will be midnight. But there's no rush: the weather is solid, and the daylight will hold for another seven weeks. We pause for one more look at the expanse of ice and rock sweeping to the distant horizon, and Alex says, "It'll be important to remember this. No matter how messed up it gets back home, we'll know there's still one place on earth as wild as the beginning of time."

Fourteen years earlier I had been on another expedition on the opposite side of Antarctica, looking across the icecap from a position high on Vinson Massif, 16,067 feet, the tallest mountain on the continent. From that lofty perch I could see the horizon- that sharp line of ice against sky-curve down on the ends. I guessed it was perhaps the only place you could stand on the planet's surface and actually see that the earth was round.

The year was 1983, and I was part of Frank Wells' and Dick Bass' Seven Summits Expeditions, trying to climb the highest peaks on each of the seven continents. We were the first private party to penetrate the vast, lonely interior of Antarctica. To get there, Frank had chartered an old DC-3 and hired a famed ex-British Antarctic Survey pilot named Giles Kershaw. We all made the summit-only the third time the 16,000-foot peak had ever been climbed-and flew home without incident. Two years later Dick went on to climb Everest, becoming the first to make the Seven Summits. Giles went on to found Adventure Network, a charter service that today is the only company that flies climbers, skiers and adventure tourists to the interior of the frozen continent.

All of Adventure Network's excursions, however, have been into the half of Antarctica that lies south of South America. Only one group of climbers had ever been to the "far-side of Antarctica," the remote place known as Queen Maud Land, south of South Africa. That team brought back photographs of rock spires that looked like giant lighthouses rising out of a frozen sea. When adventure photographer Wiltsie saw those images, he resolved to organize an expedition to attempt what would be the first big wall climb ever done in Antarctica, and also to ski across the little-explored expanses of snow and ice that extended between the spires.

The expedition required the planning of a military assault. Under the logistical guidance of Annie Kershaw, who now runs Adventure Network (husband Giles was killed a few years ago in a gyro-copter crash), a small team in a Twin Otter aircraft flew across Antarctica utilizing a string of fuel drums cached from one side of the continent to the other. Using these depots to refuel itself, the Twin Otter then carried Gordon-along with a surveyor specializing in ice and glacier work-to Queen Maud Land. Here they found an expanse of hard blue ice that, because of a natural confluence of cross winds, was perceptually free of snow.

They surveyed the "landing strip," and next season Annie contracted with Russia to buy 500 drums of fuel that had been carried in an icebreaker to the Queen Maud Land coast. A giant snow tractor brought the drums part of the way inland and a Twin Otter shuttled them the remaining distance to the previously surveyed landing area, "Blue Ice One." Finally, in December, 1996, everything was ready, and the six of us flew to Cape Town, South Africa, and boarded a cavernous C-130 transport that Annie had chartered. Nine hours later we saw those fairy book spires shimmering in the distance through the plane's windows as its big tires touched down delicately on the hard ice.

The C-130 refueled from the cached drums-leaving enough for its return flight scheduled in seven weeks-then took off back to Cape Town. We organized our gear, then, using the Twin Otter, shuttled forty miles to a tusk of granite called Rakekniven, "The Razor." We unloaded our gear once again, the Twin Otter took off, and we were left staring up at a 2,000-foot wall of granite, absolutely vertical-to-overhanging.

If we had any hope of scaling the monolith, that hope lay with Alex and Conrad. They are two of the world's best climbers (many think Alex is the best), and they would be rope-gunning, doing most of the lead climbing. Jon was also hopeful to lead a pitch or two; to get in "some real climbing" in a personal effort to exorcise the demons he had brought down earlier in the year from the debacle on Everest (the one he wrote about in Into Thin Air). As for the rest of us, we had all been to Antarctica on other climbing trips; for Gordon, this was his eighth photography assignment on the frozen continent.

The weather held, and Alex and Conrad drew numbers for the first lead. Our route on the spire was north-facing (that's good when you're in the southern hemisphere), and as the clocking sun reached its high point above the horizon you could actually warm your bare hands on the heat-absorbing rock. Once in shadow, however, everything cooled instantly, and soon Alex, Conrad and Jon, who had been belayed, rappelled down on fixed ropes. We all retreated quickly to our camp a quarter mile away. So it went for the next three days: Alex and Conrad swapping leads; Jon either belaying or muscling up the haul bags; the rest of us jumaring behind, working to get the best possible camera angles.

We took a day off the wall and returned to camp to celebrate Christmas, opening small presents by pre-plan we had thought to bring, and finishing the whisky that by lack of pre-plan we had failed to bring in sufficient quantity. Soon, a storm gave us another chance to rest. But "rest" is not a word in Alex Lowe's personal vocabulary. While we read our novels, Alex dug a ten-foot hole, tied his skis together with two nylon loops, positioned them over the pit and cranked 150 pull-ups. At home, when he is not climbing (which is the minority of the time), he is known to do in an average day about 400 pull-ups. When he grew bored with the pull-ups, he strapped on his randonee skies, skinned up the hill near the base of the wall and laid down in light powder the first of several sets of nice, tight S-tracks. That shamed the rest of us into setting aside our books. Storm day turned into a great ski day for all.

The storm was short, and back on the climb we found ourselves more than half-way up the route and ready to "commit"-to sleep on the wall in our port-a-ledge tents that we suspended from rock anchors. This was true big-wall climbing. It was so steep that if you dropped anything, it landed fifty feet from the base, so steep there wasn't a single ledge big enough to trap snow. For melt-water, we hauled two bags of ice, each weighing about 150 pounds. We all enjoyed the comic absurdity of that one-working our butts off to haul ice in Antarctica.

The physical work may have made the ascent what Alex laughingly called a "blue-collar climb," but the scenery transformed it into an adventure whose images will remain etched indelibly in our memories for the rest of our lives: the foreground monolithic wall as vertical as a plumb-bob, the background oceanic icecap as horizontal as a carpenter's level. Even though we were seventy miles from the coast, our days on the wall passed in the company of dozens of fairy-white snow petrels which circled the spire, and attended to nestlings secreted in the cracks and pockets on the rock faces.

Start to finish, it took ten days to reach the top, and Jon had the chance to lead his pitch. On the summit, he produced a small green burgee appliquéd with an orange gecko that his wife had given him to fly on top of Everest. In the hypoxic concern of getting down Everest alive, however, he had forgotten it in his pocket. Just as well. Jon figured this was a much better place to get the flag's summit photograph. His judgment was tied to the simple fact that Rakekniven was a spire nobody had heard of in a place few people had seen. In other words, it wasn't the kind of climb you hire a guide to take you up so later you can brag about your achievement on the New York cocktail circuit.

With the climb in the bag, we still had two weeks before the C-130 was scheduled to take us back to the known world. There were more spires to climb along the ridgeline of Trollslottet, "The Troll Castle." Between and around the spires sprawled icecap flats that surely rank as some of the most spectacular ski-touring in the world. Maybe even the most spectacular.

That's when we decided to make the ski-tour around the Troll Castle. We left in late afternoon, when the sun that circumscribes a continuous circle around the sky nevertheless dips closer to the horizon. This phenomenon provided Gordon, for his photography, and Mike and me, for our cinematography, ten hours of continuous golden light. The glacial ice was very lightly crevassed and we judged it safe to ski without the hindrance of a connecting rope. The Troll Castle was on our left-not exactly good karma if this were a Buddhist kora-but it gave us the best light. On occasion, I glanced to my right, looking for any anomalies, any dark spots or shapes, on the icecap.

I had read once that Antarctic scientists sometimes train themselves in this habit because on the icecap anything that isn't ice has come from somewhere else. In other words, the Antarctic icecap is prime real estate for meteor-hunting. I also remember reading in St. Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars the same thing about the sands of the Sahara. "Spread a blanket under an apple tree," St. Exupery wrote, "and you catch apples; spread sand-or ice-under the sky and you catch meteors."

In fact, we made a very unusual catch shortly after arriving at Blue Ice One. On reconnaissance, I thought I saw a dark dot far away across the flat ice. We detoured towards it, and indeed could see it was a foreign object. We were astonished then to discover the mummified remains of a seal at a place more than 70 miles from the coast. We later learned that a team of Norwegian scientists once had discovered a seal mummy about the same distance inland. When they took back a skin sample for dating, they found the carcass to be about 30,000 years old.

My companions and I leave the rock perch where, at the beginning of my story, we had "lunch," and we turn north, towards camp. The midnight sun is on our backs, and even though it is low, I can feel it's warmth on the side of my neck. From the top of one crest we make a long glide towards the next gentle rise. In the distance, the Drygalski Mountains rise in a series of towers that could keep all the climbers in Yosemite busy for their lifetime; beyond them, the tips of the Holtedahl peaks create a fantasy of shapes that defy belief. One peak has a side that rises in a steepening curve to the vertical, but then continues in the same arc until the face overhangs in a giant scythe-shaped wall that seems more than 2,000 feet high. All of us on this team are well-traveled in the world's remote regions, but none of us have ever seen anything that comes close to the Thousand and One Nights geology of this place.

As we round the end of the range, the great wall of The Razor that we just climbed comes into view. Beyond it lies the icecap that seemingly reaches to the edge of the world. There is something about this horizon-the sharp line of white-blue ice against blue-white sky-that pulls you toward it, something that wants you to keep making one gliding step past the next, towards that ever-receding line.

A couple weeks before, I left camp on my own and made a short tour toward that horizon. The urge to keep going, on and on, was palpable-until I paused to realize that indulging that urge would mean that my gliding steps eventually would slow and then freeze. That snapped me back to the here and now. But the drive was real, the desire to keep going across that vastness. Maybe it's the same force that pulls prophets on their long walks across deserts.

Just as magical as the shape of the scenery is the light that bathes it. Once I was on a winter flight into Calgary after a storm had covered the plains with snow. It was late afternoon, and through the plane's window, the low light colored the wings in a pale-yellow glow that at once felt warm and cold. Suddenly I was washed with a sense of déjá-vu like a smell that takes you to the memory of a place that at first you can't recall. Then I realized that the light on the plane's wing had the same ineffable quality as the light in Antarctica. But just what was that quality? I looked to the ground and saw the sun reflecting off the white plains, filling the shadows on the wing with a diffuse glow, and realized it was the same as the light that reflects and fills into every seam of the Antarctic landscape.

But Calgary isn't the only place on my own continent where I have been reminded of Antarctica. In our winter months, just past sunset on clear nights, we can see around the new sickle moon the ghost outline of the rest of its globe. The bright sickle is illuminated, of course, by the direct rays of the sun traveling through space. But the ghost shape is the shadowed part of the moon illuminated by sunlight reflecting off the summer ice of Antarctica.

I now have only a mile or so to reach camp and my companions have long since passed me. I'm on my own, skiing with only my thoughts for company, and the grandeur of this giant's garden of rock spires. It occurs to me that my daydreaming about the pull of the horizon, prophets in deserts and ghost-reflections on the moon is just that: daydreams that are distractions from the here and now.

Like a monk in meditation, I try to clear my head and focus myself on where I am and what I am doing. I listen to the swish-swish-swish of my skis, feeling the sun on one cheek and the cold on the other. I see a 2,000-foot tusk of granite in one direction, a distant line of similar monoliths marching to the horizon in the other. I ski towards the horizon, that sharp line of blue against white. Swish-swish-swish.

A few days later, we climb two more of the Bugaboo-like spires of The Troll Castle. Even then, we have two more days in our itinerary, so we split into two groups. Conrad, Gordon and Jon ski off in one direction and tour to the top of a neighboring peak with a gradually rising back-side slope. Mike, Alex and I cross the icecap the opposite direction, pushing through a ground blizzard to another peak fifteen miles from camp where we climb to the top in cramponed boots. Mike and I watch in awe as Alex, who has carried his skis to the summit, makes quick and confident turns down the 50-degree face of ice, rock and snow.

A day later, the Twin Otter arrives on schedule to take us to Blue Ice One, where the C-130 will ferry us to South Africa. We fly low around the spires, winging past thousands of acres of vertical rock and millions of square acres of horizontal snow. There are ranges of spires extending in a line 100 miles in one direction, 200 miles in the other. Alex and Conrad eye one El Cap-sized wall, and plot their return. My mind is back on the horizon, and that strange pull that lures you towards it.

What a place this would be for an extended ski tour, starting at one end of this line of spires and continuing for what, three weeks, four weeks, maybe more? It would require a lot of work lining up sponsors, getting other expeditions on board to share costs of the C-130. Even then it would be expensive. But you wouldn't expect the most impressive ski tour on the planet to come cheap.

PROFILES: 

Gordon Wiltsie   ·   Rick Ridgeway   ·   Alex Lowe