Wilderness photographer and mountaineer Galen Rowell’s animated face stared out at me, smiling after another adventure, the area around his eyes crinkling, clothes dirty and face bearded.
He was clearly a happy man when the camera caught the moment, arm in arm with adventurers Conrad Anker, Rick Ridgeway and Jimmy Chin.
I’d like to remember him this way, letting the photograph in Ridgeway’s new book, “The Big Open: On Foot Across Tibet’s Chang Tang” (National Geographic) replace the one in my imagination, of this man so full of life going down in a plane crash with his wife, Barbara, soon after he returned to the United States.
His last assignment was for National Geographic, his photographs documenting the quartet’s search for the calving grounds of the rare chiru antelope.
It’s that story that Ridgeway tells so well in “The Big Open,” tracing their month-long, 275-mile trek in June 2002, pushing and pulling high-tech aluminum rickshaws that started out weighing, with supplies, 250 pounds, across an inhospitable landscape.
If they could find the calving grounds of the western population of chiru, the chance of persuading the Chinese government to protect the area would increase.
The endangered Tibetan antelope is slaughtered for its fur, which is smuggled into Kashmir and woven into shahtoosh, the most expensive woolen shawls in the world.
To make one woman’s shawl, three to five chiru must be killed. There are people who will pay up to $15,000 for a shahtoosh – to pay for what would better be called a shroud.
The Chang Tang chiru may have once numbered more than a million. Now the number has dwindled to endangered status, about 75,000.
The team brought world-class climbing experience to the effort; every ounce of tenacity was needed to make the trek across a landscape that averaged 16,000 feet in altitude, a place Westerners had never crossed.
They were driven to find the nursery before the poachers found it and slaughtered the animals.
“It was a challenge that, unlike past ones I had pursued, was larger than just me. It wasn’t just some, perhaps, ego-driven endeavor,” said Ridgeway in the book’s marketing material.
“It offered a genuine opportunity for me to give back to the wild world, which has been such an integral part of forming who I am as a person and the direction that my life has taken through the years.”
Too rough for vehicles, too barren for pack animals, too uninhabited for a resupply, the steppe land is windswept and often covered with permafrost that melts slightly in the sun, causing the cart wheels to sink in. The team began to leave two hours before first light, while the ground was still frozen.
After several harrowing experiences and 275 miles, Ridgeway noticed that some of the surrounding rocks were moving. It wasn’t until Rowell used his long lens as a spotting scope that he first saw a baby chiru.
“It was a very emotional moment for us. We were near tears, patting each other on the back, cheering,” Ridgeway said.
As we should cheer for four adventurers who made a difference, for all who stretch themselves to save endangered species or protect the wooded area down the street.
And to cheer the memory of Galen Rowell, who almost two years after his death is still missed for his insights as well as his photography, but who lives on in “The Big Open.”
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964, or www.songandword.com.
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