Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Bill Kutik, who for 30 years, has been known for what he’s done inside rooms: starting the HR Tech Conference, moderating 117 panels, writing hundreds of tech columns and hosting his video series Firing Line with Bill Kutik®. Here he reveals his secret life outdoors:
Financial planners are right: Once even semi-retired, you'll spend a lot more money on travel. I’ve always craved being on the edges of Nature where two of her essential elements collide – mountain tops, canyon walls, beaches, oceans (open or pounding on cliffs). Now with more time and money, I’m exploring even wilder edges – at the ends of the earth!
As the founding editor of Backpacker magazine – still published by Rodale Press on paper after 48 years! – I’d always planned my early adventures and did them the hard way. Often hauling 50 pounds on my back, walking for days to get to a spectacular place. There I was delighted to watch the sun go down and come up, even while having to sleep in a tent on the ground and – violating all civilized norms – cooking sitting down and going to the bathroom standing up!
Middle age found me seeking more comfortable wilderness adventures with the company that pioneered helicopter skiing in the Bugaboos, a spikey mountain range in Canada. Their daily fees of $1,000 to $2,000 per person had financed building expensive wilderness ski lodges. After keeping them empty all summer for years, they finally came to their senses and created a heli-hiking program that cut out all the hard parts!
The Guilty Pleasure of Using a Helicopter for Hiking!
A helicopter brings you to the lodge, where you get everything needed to hike. It deposits you, a guide and your group of nine others on a spectacular ridge above timberline. When that breath-taking walk ends an hour or two later at a 3,000-foot drop-off, the guide radios in the chopper to take you to another! All day long. Nights are spent in the lodge eating a splendid meal at a table for 10 and sleeping in a comfy bed with a private bathroom. And ski racks on the walls.
I started sailing the same tough way after learning as an adult. Once pulled into racing, becoming navigator was a natural with an easy pivot from topographical maps to nautical charts. My favorite races ran continuously for two or three days and nights on open ocean on sailboats 40-to-68-feet long. As navigator, I was always working – making the races seem like a week – catching cat naps in full foul weather gear lying on the sail bags on the cabin floor.
I started at the perfect time in 1980 as navtech took off, accomplishing ever more complicated tasks, and forcing the navigator into more strategic thinking. Sound familiar in enterprise software? It started with the question “Where are we now?” answered by interpreting the sine waves of Loran-A. That became “Where are we going?” plotted with the radio tower generated numbered “time difference lines” of Loran-C. Finally “How do we get there, and are we doing it most optimally?” just by looking at the GUI of chart-plotters with a real-time position overlaid from GPS. Just like business tech has made lots of low-level work obsolete.
Bring Your Apartment into the Wilderness
Eventually I skippered my own cruising boat. Well, OPB in the sailing world, “other people’s boats,” either borrowed or rented. Having navigated many cruises for others, I knew it had all the benefits of backpacking – staying overnight in beautiful places – with little of the physical effort and all the comforts of bringing your apartment along. Which secretly, I’d always wanted to do when camping instead of using a tent. A cruising sailboat, no matter how beautiful, is still just an RV like a motorhome, though much better designed.
Then I discovered Lindblad Expeditions had combined all my worlds. Unlike most cruise lines with ships having 3,000 cabins and indoor roller coasters, Lindblad has a growing fleet of four-star expedition boats (carrying 45 to 148 passengers). Instead of selling the cruising experience of being aboard, Lindblad emphasizes the expedition and the adventures to be had after being ferried ashore in 10-person inflatable Zodiacs. And how comfortable was it to explore the best places – always the hardest to get to – in torrid heat or freezing cold, never more than 15 minutes from the comfort and luxury of the boat!
But old habits die hard. I still prepared for their cruises as though I had to skipper the boat myself. Bringing all the right paper charts, a small Garmin GPS and hand-bearing compass (both standalone devices far superior to iPhone apps), and the traditional desk tools of navigation (parallel rules, dividers, pencils and erasers). All set up as a nav station on my cabin’s desk. Sometimes large enough not to move my laptop to the floor – with the all-voyage satellite WiFi package I’d purchase for $250 to stay connected 24/7 like at home. Great connectivity from satellites, even in Antarctica. And no problems with rain because unlike home dishes, shipboard dishes are encased in white domes.
NYT Says: Tourists Over-running Antarctica
No surprise: Tourists cover the earth just as thoroughly as the Internet. Two years ago, I ended a terrific three-week expedition to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia Island and the Antarctic Peninsula at this enormous dock in Ushuaia at the tip of South America, "The Gateway to Antarctica." One of the Orca scientists on board complained that his academic grants never covered travel so he was constantly hitching rides from that dock to Antarctica from the 30 (THIRTY!) big boats, some of them now Carnival Cruise Lines, taking tourists there. I had to find someplace less discovered.
Lindblad served up a new destination: Wrangel Island, which seemed perfect. A Russian wilderness nature preserve off the northeast coast of Arctic Siberia with no village except for the park rangers, the largest number of polar bears and walrus in the world and the last place wooly mammoths survived! When High Stakes in the High North told me only 500 people a year visited, I was sold. Particularly since Lindblad visiting the place – running three trips last summer carrying 100 passengers each – was increasing tourism by 60 percent!
But the charts!?! How do you get Russian charts? Happily, I discovered charts had undergone their own digital transformation! NOAA, and its foreign equivalents, had exited the chart printing, storage and shipping business, which always left them with thousands of out-of-date charts. Instead NOAA has licensed dozens of shops around the country to print their charts on-demand by sending the very latest huge graphic files to the shops’ giant laser printers! Got the two U.S. Bering Sea charts I needed (with both the Alaskan and Russian coasts) printed at a shop 15 minutes from my house!
Naturally, at least one company, East View Information Services in Minneapolis, had gone global and established similar electronic connections with countries around the world. Russian chart of Wrangel Island? No problem: It arrived exquisitely packaged in a mailing tube three days after talking with Josh Cardinal on the phone. He could have supplied me with a custom chart with English labels for a lot more money, but I can read Cyrillic from taking high school Russian.
So now I was ready to visit the officers of the National Geographic Orion with its “open bridge policy” allowing passengers entry anytime. There I quickly established my cred with the 32-year-old Swedish navigation officer by knowing most of the acronyms and data points on his dozen electronic displays. Then I whipped out my Russian Wrangel chart (he had the same one in a drawer), and we really got down to business finding out what the plans were for the trip. Basically, visiting one incredible place after another.
After leaving Nome, we docked in the Soviet-era town of Provideniya with its boring apartment blocks, where Russian immigration officials came aboard to check everyone’s passports and visas. Lindblad had hired two Russian nationals to live aboard and broker relations with all local authorities. On the way back, we went ashore and walked around. This time, we left when the paperwork was done and anchored off Cape Dezhnev, the northeastern tip of Siberia (and all of Asia!) forming the west side of the Bering Strait.
Ashore, we hiked to the remains of a 1,000-year-old village, whose inhabitants had lived off the sea and erected arches of whale ribs, also used as roof beams for their houses. I practiced my high school Russian with two soldiers stationed there in a tent. Leaving, our boat hung a left around the corner and steamed along Siberia's north coast to Kolyuchin Island, only three miles long, but lots going on. We did not land but circumnavigated in Zodiacs for a morning of viewing polar bears and walruses.
After lunch aboard, we were back in the Zodiacs to see thousands of birds in rookeries on the steep cliffs. Dinner was postponed by a pod of three humpback whales (a type of Baleen whale) feeding 20 yards off the bow. Swimming up out the water with mouths open to catch all the fish, their baleen (or huge filter) clearly visible.
On Wrangel we saw lots of bears and went ashore where we didn’t see them! The Russian park rangers carried shotguns and bear repellent because the polar bear is the only animal in the world that will smell a human from miles away and hunt you down for food! Grizzlies, nearly the same size, will mess with you if you mess with their cubs. But polar bears want to eat you: Yup, they are the top of the food chain. Thought you were? Surprise.
As we went ashore, all the deck officers kept watch outside the bridge with spotting scopes and binoculars looking for any bears heading our way. It was like a safari on foot in Africa, only you didn’t want to see the animals, except for the musk ox, Arctic buffalo that live outside year-round! We saw some from afar, which was enough for me since in 1980, field producing a documentary film in the Canadian Arctic, our bush pilot had buzzed a herd of musk ox sending them thundering across the tundra!
The highlight was visiting tiny Herald Island (not on the map), just two miles long and 37 miles northeast of Wrangel. The spikey landscape on Herald Island is an aberration like Bryce Canyon in Utah, not a typical Arctic landscape.
There normally solitary polar bears gathered in groups. Different animals all have their own group names. We all know about a “herd” of cattle or sheep, probably a “gaggle” of geese, maybe even a “pride” of lions. Well, a group of polar bears is called an “aurora,” like “aurora borealis.” Herald had plenty. Also an “ugly” of walrus, which seems so unfair given their beautiful tusks.
Auroras would come down the hills every morning to see if the sea had washed up anything large and edible. When finished, they would walk back up the hill following the switchbacks they had cut themselves! (click on image below to enlarge). That was my favorite thing besides seeing them come out of ocean-front caves and jump in and out of the water. (BTW, polar bears are classified as sea mammals like sea lions!) In short, what you’d only see them doing in the wild, not in captivity, where they lose their freedom but eat better and get to live longer.
The haul-outs of uglies were phenomenal: hundreds of walruses lying around on three different beaches, not making a sound but the smell filling our nostrils. When I complained to the Zodiac driver that we should get closer, he politely replied the last time they did, all the walruses jumped into the water. Disturbing the wildlife is an environmental no-no. So not all “sentiment” needs to be acted on – a tip for my HR friends.
One beach had two sets separated by the width of a sandy one-way city street. Clearly Hatfields and McCoys. Seeing them swim was a kick. Moving slowly, a dozen or more swim together with their heads and part of their tusks above the water. Sort of comical looking.
After they dive as deep as 300 feet to dig clams (their main food), they spout like a whale back at the surface but through their two nostrils, so quite a wide spray. Makes them easy to spot. Their whiskers are stiff as bone, controlled by muscles, and are used to sense all sorts of things.
We visited the ranger station on Wrangel, which had a collection of remarkable found objects including genuine mammoth tusks found sticking out of the gravel and various walrus and musk ox skulls.
Came upon one ox skull just hiking around, which was terrific.
Want to know about global warming near the poles? Historical September mean temperature on Wrangel was 32°. It was never below 48° when we went outside! As a result, the nearest sea ice and ice bergs were hundreds of miles north, disappointing my college roommate and travelling companion, Tom Harpin. My wife Nancy doesn’t even want to chance being cold on vacation.
So in July 2021, we are flying to the northern tip of Norway, boarding Lindblad’s new polar cruiser Endurance (see video below), which is a ruggedized ice-class Polar Class (PC5) vessel designed to navigate polar passages year-round. We will be visiting the Russian Arctic port of Murmansk and then steaming northeast to the islands of Novoya Zemlya, Ostrov Isachenko, Severmaya Zimlya and finally to 82° degrees North and Franz Josef Land. I’m sure Josh in Minnynowhere will have all the charts.
If you’ve never heard of any of them, that’s just fine with me.
Photo Credits for those not taken by Bill
Be Like Bill!
Posted by: Greg T | March 19, 2020 at 11:30 PM