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HISTORY OF BIG SUR COAST

  A new dawn:              Locals had long called for a road along the coast to aid shipwreck victims and improve access to isolated communities.  Construction started in 1919, and 18 years, 32 tonnes of dynamite and 33 bridges later, the Big Sur stretch of California Highway One was complete.               The implausible route, with its myriad twists and turns and dramatic drop-offs, became an instant classic.  The author and painter Henry Miller fled to Big Sur in 1944 and stayed for nearly two decades.  Photographer Edward Weston and Beat Generation bard Jack Kerouac fell under its spell.  By the late 1960’s San Francisco’s counterculture revolution had swept down to Big Sur, and the likes of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell performed on the cliff tops.              ...
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ANTARCTIC PENINSULA

 

Antarctic Peninsula:



                   Once described as a land that looks ‘like a fairy tale’, this lonely peninsula reveals the planet’s most sublime icy landscape.

                    The first person known to set eyes on this stunning scenery was Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen, a captain in the Russian Imperial Navy, but he did not recognise what he saw as land, believing it to be made up to ice.  As a result it was William Smith and Edward Bransfield of the British Royal Navy, arriving just three days after Bellingshausen in 1820, who became the first to identify a new continent: Antarctica. They charted the extreme northern part of the peninsula, which later became known a Trinity Peninsula, reporting ‘high mountains, covered with snow’.

                    In fact, the mountains here are an extension of the South American Andes, via a submarine ridge and the Scotia Arc of islands (such as South Georgia) that runs between the two.  They emerge in the rugged, icy mountain chain that forms the backbone of the peninsula, rising to its highest peak at Mount Jackson 3,184m (10,446ft) above sea level.

                      Some of the most dramatic scenery is found in Lemaire Channel on the west side of the peninsula, between the mainland and Booth Island.  Dark, snow-capped mountains with steep-sided cliffs line the waterway and at Cape Renard, at the channel’s northern end, stand two striking basalt towers capped with ice.  Just 500m (1,600ft) wide at its narrowest point, the channel enjoys millpond-like conditions, a rarity in the Southern Ocean.

Where on Earth?

                       The Antarctic Peninsula stretches northwest into the Southern Ocean towards South America. It can be reached by plane from Punta Arenas in Chile to King George Island in the South Shetlands, or by ship in a two-day journey across the Drake passage from the Port of Ushuaia in Argentina.

Location: Kiev Peninsula, Antarctica

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