Avaunt issue 4 by Avaunt

ISSUE

WINTER

2016/17

I N N O VA T I O N

ADVENTURE C U LT U R E

STYLE

O M O VA L L E Y

V I RT UA L R E A L I T Y

E X P L O R I N G M E X I C A N C AV E S / S U R V I V I N G

R E BE L L IO N / DE F E AT I NG SU P E R BUG S /

G R AV I T A T I O N A L WAV E S / A D V E N T U R E S I N

LE MANs

WHY THE MOON IS VISIBLE IN THE

D AY / A D V E N T U R E B O O K S / H E B R I D E A N

S E AW E E D FA R M E R S / T H E

E X T R AO R DI NA RY L E T T I C E C U RT I S

sUPERBUGs

P. 2 2 0

MEXICO

P. 2 2 6

AsCENDING K2

ALAsKA

P. 2 3 2

P. 2 1 0

P. 1 6 4 P. 4 2

MOD. AR6041

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FRONT

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Sandy Allen and Rick Allan made the first ascent of the Mazeno Ridge, culminating at the summit of Nanga Parbat at 8,126m

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INTRODUCING ISSUE FOUR

EDITORS’ LETTER

Einstein was, of course, right: there are gravitational waves, caused by violent explosions and neutron stars, rippling through the universe. Earlier this year the Italy-based physicists of the Virgo research team announced that they had finally detected such waves caused by two merging black holes. Avaunt was granted exclusive access to Virgo’s interferometer, a device that can measure quantities so infinitesimally small that they are almost impossible to comprehend. As we explain in our story, Virgo’s pioneering work will allow humankind to view the universe in completely new ways, right back to the big bang. Einstein would be delighted. On the other side of the world, in what seems a different universe, the urbanisation of ancient land in Ethiopia is bringing potential freedom and greater power for the region’s population, as well as profound disruption. For the Omo Valley and the 500,000 people who live along its epic winding river, development is bringing environmental calamity to a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and an end to a way of life that the Mursi, Suri, Nyangatom, Dizi and Me’en tribes have known for centuries. The creation of a hydroelectric dam and the implementation of aggressive agricultural programmes have sparked inter-ethnic battles over dwindling resources among tribes who have long relied on the annual floods to maintain their fertile farmland. The Ethiopian government dismisses criticism of the ventures as “patronising the national interests of Ethiopia and romanticising traditional valley lifestyles”. But what are we losing in the name of progress? See page 164 for Matilda Temperley’s extraordinary photo essay. Elsewhere in this issue we bring you previously unexplored underwater caves in Mexico; a story from the front line of the battle against antibiotic-resistant superbugs; an attempt on the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, and accounts of two generations of pioneering female pilots. Lettice Curtis took to the skies almost every day of World War II – despite the RAF’s ban on women flying in combat – and, in this century, we feature Leighan Falley, who pilots ski planes in the frozen wilds of Alaska, and whose very own plane graces the cover of this issue. This is Avaunt’s final biannual issue, as our first quarterly issue will be published in spring 2017. We look forward to ramping up the adventure and sharing some big news with you then. Onwards! —Ben Saunders and Dan Crowe

FRONT

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THE COVER PROJECT

A N OT E O N T H E C OV E R ( S )

AVAUNT

ISSUE 04 WINTER 2016/17

2016/17 ADVENTURE

C U LT U R E

STYLE

WHY THE MOON IS VISIBLE IN THE

D AY / A D V E N T U R E B O O K S / H E B R I D E A N

S E AW E E D FA R M E R S / T H E

E X T R AO R DI NA RY L E T T I C E C U RT I S

LE MANs

P. 2 2 0

I N N O VA T I O N

P. 2 3 2

This issue gave us two features that we felt deserved to be cover stories, so we decided to run both. On the right is our limited-edition cover, in which an Ethiopian Mursi tribeswoman from the Omo Valley presents an imposing sight with her clay lip plate and loaded AK-47 assault rifle – perhaps a harbinger of the

ISSUE

WINTER

O M O VA L L E Y

P. 2 1 0

P. 1 6 4

ALAsKA

MEXICO

sUPERBUGs

G R AV I T A T I O N A L WAV E S / A D V E N T U R E S I N

R E BE L L IO N / DE F E AT I NG SU P E R BUG S /

E X P L O R I N G M E X I C A N C AV E S / S U R V I V I N G

V I RT UA L R E A L I T Y

Female Alaskan Bush Pilots / Olly Hicks / Antibiotic Resistance / Michael Christopher Brown Change in the Omo Valley / Tom Kristensen / Autumn and Winter Fashion / Joss Naylor

AsCENDING K2

Issue 04 Winter 2016/17 P. 2 2 6

P. 4 2

increasing inter-ethnic warfare in the region. This extraordinary story – the result of a 10-year project by photographer Matilda Temperley – begins on p164. Our principal cover sees some of the Avaunt team landing atop a glacier on the edge of the Denali National Park, Alaska, as part of a

journey with the pioneering Talkeetna Air Taxi. We meet with pilot, mother and mountain guide Leighan Falley, to find out what drives her to fly 1960s ski planes in America’s largest wilderness, and how she balances work, adventure and family life in this remote outpost town.

ADVENTURE

STYLE

I N N O VA T I O N

C U LT U R E

Celebrating 50 years of audio excellence 800 D3 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2016

GUIDE

CONTENTS

02: STYLE

110

122

Words: Alex Doak Photography: Kate Jackling

Photography: Tom Craig Styling: Dan May

Space, Time, Continuum

Iceland

01: FRONT Higher Vision

Adventures in Rebellion

34 36 40

David Hellqvist

Return to K2 Ben Saunders & Jake Meyer

Surviving Pressure

Lettice Curtis

Rowland White

Tristan Rutherford

Twixt Land and Sea

Justin Marozzi

George Widener

Airlander

Reading List Pip Harrison

Garrett Fisher

After the Meltdown

George Upton

Bowers & Wilkins

Michael C. Brown

George Upton

Godwin-Austen

Catherine Moorehead

Addis Ababa

Guillaume Bonn

Just in Time

Photography: James McNaught

On Piste

Alex Doak

Surviving Virtual Reality

Henry Stuart

Adventures in Music

Speed on the Salt Flats

Paul Frith

Rich in History

David Hellqvist

Joss Naylor

George Upton

Farming Seaweed

David Hellqvist

Words: Ben Saunders Photography: Thomas Prior

Photography: Joakim Blockstrom Styling: Alex Petsetakis

104

FRONT

03: FEATURES

190

Newfoundland

198

Accompanied by text from the 19th century explorer, Joseph Jukes, Avaunt travels along the coast of the Atlantic island Words: Joseph Beete Jukes Photography: Tobias Harvey

Virgo Interferometer

Antibiotic Resistance

210

Is antibiotic resistance the greatest threat humanity has ever faced? Words: Brendan Borrell Photography: Daniel Stier

220 Mr Le Mans

EVENTUALLY VIRTUAL REALITY WILL BE PART OF WHAT STOPS US BEING HUMAN Avaunt visits the twin 2.5-mile-long arms of the Virgo interferometer in Italy as it searches for proof of Einstein’s century-old theory of relativity Words: Davide Castelvecchi Photography: Enrico Sacchetti

232

Alaskan Bush Pilots

Frédéric Lagrange takes the Talkeetna Air Taxi to discover how planes are an essential part of daily life in America’s Arctic state Words: Ben Saunders Photography: Frédéric Lagrange

Henry Stuart — P.72

Avaunt meets one of the greatest racing drivers of all time Words: Rory FH Smith

164

226

Matilda Temperley on the effects of modernisation on the people of Africa’s Omo Valley Words & Images: Matilda Temperley

Klaus Thymann reflects on his experience diving Mexico’s breathtaking underwater cave systems Words & Images: Klaus Thymann

Change in the Valley

Mexico’s Hidden Caves

Stockists

252

Last Page Comic

254

Illustration: Robert G. Fresson

MASTHEAD

AVA U N T Editor-in-Chief

Contributing Editors

Words

Publishers

Dan Crowe

Alex Bellos

Guillaume Bonn

Dan Crowe

Shereen El Feki

Brendan Borrell

Ben Saunders

Editor

Alastair Humphreys

Davide Castelvecchi

Matt Willey

Ben Saunders

Tom Jenkins

Michael Christopher Brown

Rupert Kelton

Nick Cobbing

Associate Publisher

Creative Director

Robert Macfarlane

Alex Doak

Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono

Matt Willey

Ray Murphy

Chris Dowson

Alex Vadukul

Garrett Fisher

Head of Business Development

Jolyon Webber

Paul Frith

Fergus Scholes

Fashion Director Dan May Design Director

Pip Harrison Circulation

David Hellqvist

Group Brand & Partnerships

logicalconnections.co.uk

Justin Marozzi

Manager

Catherine Moorehead

Natasha Ingham

Alex Hunting Managing Editor

Distribution

David Reay

seymour.co.uk

Tristan Rutherford

Chief Technology Officer

Ben Saunders

Pete Barr-Watson

Emily Bell Photographic Director

Podcast Editor

Rory FH Smith

Barney Rowntree

Henry Stuart

Director of Operations

Matilda Temperley

Pip Harrison

Madeleine Penny Senior Editor George Upton Senior Fashion Editor

Production Director

Klaus Thymann

Emma Viner Costa

George Upton

AVAUNT

Rowland White

Unit 6

George Widener

Albion Riverside Building,

Alastair Philip Wiper

8 Hester Road

Alex Petsetakis

London Photography

SW11 4AX

Contributing Fashion Editor

Joakim Blockstrom

+44(0) 20 31193077

Scott Stephenson

Guillaume Bonn

info@avauntmagazine.com

Michael Christopher Brown Sub-Editor

William Bunce

Printed by Taylor Bloxham

Kerry Crowe

Nick Cobbing

Tom Craig

in whole or in part, without written

Junior Designer

Garrett Fisher

permission, is strictly prohibited.

Bethany Lall

Jean Gaumy

Embrace the unknown.

Harry Gruyaert Watch Editor

Peter Harrington

Alex Doak

Tobias Harvey Kate Jackling

Film Editor

Frederic Lagrange

Anthony Austin

James McNaught Jake Meyer Laura Pannack Thomas Prior David Ryle Enrico Sacchetti Daniel Stier Matt Stuart Matilda Temperley Klaus Thymann Greg White Alastair Philip Wiper Illustration Tavis Coburn Robert G. Fresson Infographics La Tigre

BEYOND EXPECTATION This is the Survival GORE-TEX® PrimaLoft® Parka. We developed it with Arctic explorers. We tested it in Antarctica. And we are yet to find an environment that it does not keep you dry, warm and protected. The best insulation on the market, lightweight PrimaLoft® Gold Insulation Down Blend, is wrapped in the best waterproof material in the market, GORE-TEX® fabric. This is protection without compromise.

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Image taken from Joseph Michael’s Antartic Expedition, March 2015

ARCHIVE LETTER

THREE SPORTY GIRLS

Having secured funding for his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, Sir Ernest Shackleton set about rallying a team to crew his two ships, Endurance and Aurora, for a pincer movement attack on the Antarctic continent. In early 1914, so the story goes, Shackleton

posted an advertisement worded: Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success. The overwhelming response from volunteers was not limited

to men, but the reply from Shackleton’s office to these ‘three sporty girls’ was one of regret, writing that there were no vacancies for the opposite sex on the expedition. Thanks to University of Cambridge, Scott Polar Research Institute

paulshark.it

PEOPLE

CONTRIBUTORS

164

198

226

Photographer

Geologist

Photographer

Matilda Temperley trained at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine before being inspired to take up photography while working in Uganda, where, over the following decade, she would document the changing effect of modernisation on indigenous tribes in the region. She has also produced a series documenting the devastating flooding in her native Somerset, for which she received the Royal Photographic Society’s Vic Odden Award, and is currently working on a project focusing on tackling the stigma around leprosy in Ghana.

Joseph Jukes was born in 1811, studied at Cambridge University under Professor Adam Sedgwick, one of the founders of modern geology, before journeying to Newfoundland in 1839. His Excursions, published a year later, was one of the first complete surveys of the island. Having returned to England, he would leave again two years later as the naturalist on board HMS Fly, circumnavigating Australia twice and visiting the islands of Oceania – his record of which became established as a classic of Australian geology. He died in 1867.

Danish photographer and filmmaker Klaus Thymann has ventured to some of the most extreme locations on Earth to explore and document the natural world. In addition to producing fashion and advertising campaigns, he is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Guardian, and in 2013 received the Sony World Photography Award. Thymann is also the founder of Project Pressure, a crowd-sourced glacier archive that marries scientific research with the work of celebrated photographers to highlight the effects of climate change.

Matilda Temperley

Joseph Beete Jukes

Klaus Thymann

IT’S EQUIVALENT TO MEASURING THE CHANGE OF A HAIR’S WIDTH IN THE DISTANCE FROM THE SUN TO THE NEAREST STAR. Davide Castelvecchi – P.190

220

Rory FH Smith

Writer

Born and raised in north Yorkshire, Smith began his career as a journalist covering current affairs in India’s southern states for the New Indian Express, one of the country’s largest national newspapers. Having spent time in Shanghai, investigating China’s growing appetite for luxury cars, Smith is now based in the United Kingdom where he spends his time driving, travelling and writing about all things automotive. His writing has been published in the Gentleman’s Journal and Bentley, and on Goodwood Road & Racing.

The work of British photographer Laura Pannack focuses on social documentary and portraiture, exploring the complex relationship between subject and photographer through her award-winning and widely exhibited work.

FRONT

Daniel Stier is a London-based photographer whose images of research laboratories, engineering projects and the natural world form a dialogue between art, design and science.

THE MIRACLE DRUG OF THE 20TH CENTURY, THAT HAD SAVED MILLIONS OF LIVES SINCE WWII, WAS BECOMING EVER MORE INEFFECTIVE. Brendan Borrell – P.210

122 Tom Craig

190

Enrico Sacchetti

Photographer

Musician

In the course of his career, British-born photographer Tom Craig has visited some 100 countries, often in the company of writer A.A. Gill, and his work is influenced by the storytelling born of these journeys. Regularly featuring in Vogue, Esquire and Vanity Fair, and shooting campaigns for the likes of Persol and Louis Vuitton, Craig has also partnered with the international medical humanitarian organisation, Médecins Sans Frontières, to produce Writing on the Edge, a collection of first-hand accounts from inside conflict zones.

Enrico Sacchetti specialises in scientific and industrial photography. From a mile beneath the Italian mountains to the Italian-French research base on the Antarctic Plateau, Sacchetti’s subjects take him to the furthest reaches of technological and scientific innovation. Based between London and Rome, Sacchetti has contributed to scientific and technology publications around the world, appearing in New Scientist and Wired. He has also been exhibited at the Royal Photographic Society as a finalist in the 2015 International Images for Science.

Composer and musician Paul Frith worked with the likes of Sufjan Stevens, Local Natives and Radiohead before establishing his own musical venture, The Sea and I. Based on a collaborative concept, Frith and his three band members are always joined, on stage or in the studio, by a fifth element that can vary from a lone violinist to a 50-piece choir. Having spent time writing scores for art-house films, Frith’s sweeping, cinematic sounds embrace the art of narration with his songs celebrating forgotten historical characters and stories.

Paul Frith

UP CLOSE

Cable by Alastair Philip Wiper I found this cable when I was poking through the office of Professor Joachim Holbøll, the professor in charge of the High Voltage Laboratory at the Technical University of Denmark, just outside Copenhagen. I was there to photograph the labs, which were built in the early ‘60s and are full of beautiful, huge, old sci-fi-looking equipment. But when I got to the professor’s office I came across three large cabinets filled with all sorts of strange electrical components that he uses when teaching. As with the larger devices in the lab, many of these purely practical devices had an almost sculptural aesthetic that I couldn’t resist, so I ended up paying as much attention to them as to the lab itself. Alastair Philip Wiper is a photographer based in Copenhagen

AERONAUTICS

Stripped of all but the essential tools, pilot and photographer Garrett Fisher explains how flying low over the ground in a vintage aeroplane offers a new perspective on human civilisation. Words: Garrett Fisher

Higher vision

THE MOON

I have been called a traditionalist for flying an aeroplane manufactured in the 1940s. It is a simple craft, weighing less than 800 pounds when empty, with seating for only the pilot and a passenger. Cruising at a meagre 80 miles per hour, the aeroplane has only the essential instrumentation: compass, airspeed, altimeter, RPM, oil pressure, oil temperature and fuel. If the law allowed less, my grandfather, who bought the plane in 1988, would have slimmed it down to save weight. He restored the plane with no radio, transponder or starter, deeming such things unnecessary, particularly because they did not exist when he took flying lessons. When it comes to flying, I am a committed individualist. It is just me, the stick, the rudder and looking out the window. Forget complicated dials, panic buttons, airframe parachutes and autopilot – modern aeroplanes make flying boring. It has become fast and brainless, meticulously planned and horrifically expensive. I am in pursuit of freedom and it is hard to find freedom if

I have a machine thinking for me, or if the flight is planned down to the minute and millilitre of fuel. Instead I have a three-hour fuel supply and I fly and photograph inside those limits, picking the flight path as I go. Today’s pioneers are planning manned travel to Mars, the colonisation of the Moon and the mining of asteroids. To be at the forefront of current aeronautical innovation requires a willingness and ability to outrun a wave of people racing one another to be the first to develop the next big thing in space flight. In the process, we have normalised flying above 9,000 metres and at any time there can be as many as 6,000 flights in the air. For me crossing an ocean on an airliner, where the biggest inconvenience is choosing a seat and trying to sleep to avoid jet lag, is an act of following the crowd. Happily, though, the area just above the surface of the Earth, where I can take the best photographs, has become the emptiest part of the sky. Humanity’s fixation on automation and instrumentation has reserved the areas nearest the

ground for some of the most flexible flying. Other than around airports, few aeroplanes are there, all opting to get away from the landscape and meteorological interactions – while I head straight for them. Photographing these sites is an expression of my drive to explore and to document. Light, weather and vegetation are constantly changing and the terrain I fly over is always in conflict with the sky – mountains making or breaking clouds, the weather shaping the surface of the Earth and the snow and rain forming rivers. I like to identify the individual pieces of large systems. Whether it is during my day job working with theoretical economics or surveying a region from my aeroplane, it is usually the small elements in these large spaces, populations or timeframes that define the entirety of a system. As I fly, I try to record these things, passing over incredible expanses of land, inaccessible by car, putting together the pieces of the puzzle of human civilisation. At the very least, it prevents me from getting bored in the air.

At any one place on Earth, the Moon is above the horizon for roughly 12 hours every day. But this period almost never exactly coincides with the roughly 12 hours of night, so the Moon appears in the daytime sky almost every day. However, it can only be seen when it is high enough and reflects enough sunlight to penetrate the sky’s blue light. And our satellite cannot be seen in daytime during new moons, when it is obscured by the Sun, or during full moons, when it is exactly opposite the Sun and therefore visible only at night.

FRONT

Photography by William Bunce

Lights, action, camera

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ESCAPISM

Celebrated artist George Widener reflects on how he found refuge in the complex patterns of numbers and dates of his art while growing up in the ghetto in the 1970s. Illustration: Robert G. Fresson

Adventures in rebellion

My mother was a Kentucky country girl who went to Cincinnati at 16 to look for work. She got a job as a barmaid and eventually became an alcoholic who did not mind a street fight, so the police took me away from her when I was 10. After my father disappeared she married a black blues pianist and Korean War veteran, and I was allowed to visit occasionally. Their neighbourhood was a ghetto and violent – there were dealers and pimps on every corner. I remember once, when I was 11, being taken to a bar that no white person, at that time of widespread segregation, would have dared

enter – dressed by my mother in bell bottoms and a silk shirt. Everyone was dancing to Soul Train, jumping around and cheering me on. Eventually, my black sister became a drug dealer while I went to engineering college in the suburbs. We would often laugh at the absurdity of it. Like children often do, I rebelled against my environment – in my case excelling at school and never touching drugs or alcohol. It worried my mother. I also had a fascination with specific number patterns and the act of drawing. It was a natural calm space, away from the chaos around me.

My biological father, Bob Nicholson, was what was then called a ‘box man’, a safecracker. Pulling his first amateur burglary in Ohio in the early 1930s as a teenager, he is recorded to have crossed paths with former Dillinger Gang associates and other notorious gangsters of that era. Escaping in 1937 from Mansfield Reformatory (the place portrayed in The Shawshank Redemption), he was recaptured in 1941 and did federal time at Leavenworth alongside the Holden-Keating Gang and George ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly. He was released in the 1950s and pulled a few major heists over the following 20 years, many

of which are still unsolved today. Growing up I was ashamed of my father’s exploits but I have come to love and respect him, as well as my mother. My father had a code of ethics that would make a lot of politicians today look like real crooks. While he might hold up a bank, he would go out of his way to not take from individuals, planning each heist carefully to avoid violence. My mother might fight in bars but then she would save the life of an alcoholic by dragging them out of the snow and letting them sleep it off in her hallway. I have learned from my parents and I do not make quick or easy art. I am not anyone’s ‘outsider’ artist. I am simply doing my own thing which, on occasion, has some relevance to contemporary art. As a result of my family and natural inclination, I retreated into my numbers and the dates which I began secretly, perversely hiding at an early age. I have enjoyed letting others wonder what the good boy was really up to. For me, good art is fun and has a sense of mystery about it. And you get to keep the cash. These stories of my parents and my early years stand behind the grids and numbers in my artwork, where the subtle connections, codes and meanings are so complex that it would take an advanced artificial intelligence to figure it out. I thank God that I have been able to turn to my art – I am a survivor both in my life and my work. I think my parents would be proud of me, and find it funny to see their DNA in my work. That is more satisfying than any critical success. Artist George Widener lives and works in Waynesville, North Carolina, USA

35 PH. JACKIE NICKERSON

FRONT

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AERONAUTICS

FRONT

Avaunt discovers the future of aviation – the world’s longest aircraft and a vessel with lofty ambition. Words: Tristan Rutherford, Photography: Greg White

The airship revolution

David Burns, the world’s most experienced airship test pilot, puffs out his cheeks. “The possibilities are endless,” says the Scotsman. His latest vessel, the Airlander 10, can stay aloft for 21 days. It requires no runway nor aircrew and can cruise silently in any direction at speeds of up to 87mph. “From here to Cape Town would be nice,” muses Burns at the Airlander’s base near Bedford. “Congo; safari; you could swoop over migrating wildebeest or sail slowly past every European capital, stop at each one to take on salamis, cheeses, champagnes…” If Burns is nervous, he doesn’t show it. In a few short hours, the chief test pilot for Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) will captain his ship during the most celebrated flight of its life. In front of assembled investors, Burns will perform a thorough second test in what is easily the world’s longest aircraft. If it goes well, bids will be made, orders will be processed and a second airship revolution will sweep the globe. Does Burns carry a lucky charm? “Don’t be silly now. It’s true flight up there. The airship is running silently. You can open the cockpit window, look down on Earth and hear the birds sing. I’ve got a parachute of course, but it’s just regulations.” (In actuality, Burns’ 100minute test flight in late August 2016 was a roaring success, aside from a nasty nose bump on landing.) Before we examine the Airlander up close, we sit in the hangar that, until last week, housed the gargantuan vessel. At 210 metres long and 52 metres high it gapes and soars like a cathedral of modernity. Situated in an RAF balloon-testing base that was rendered off-limits to the public – the ‘Area 51’ of rural Bedfordshire – the history of the Grade II-listed building outlines neatly the airship industry’s first golden age.

The story starts a century ago. Balloonist brothers Eustace and Oswald Short were commissioned to build two airships to counter the Zeppelin menace of warring Germany. By 1916 the brothers had constructed their work hangar at Cardington, 56 miles north of London. A workers’ village, named Shortstown, was built alongside. In July 1918, the 187-metre-long R31 drifted out of the hangar like a giant cigar. Armed to the teeth with cannons, and twice as long as today’s Airbus A380, it must have terrified locals more than the deadly Luftstreitkräfte, though it never saw action. In 1930, the even longer R101 emerged from the Shorts’ Cardington hangar. This passenger-carrying craft crashed on its maiden voyage to India and put an end to Britain’s airship industry. Until now. “Two factors that have permitted the development of the Airlander,” claims Chris Daniels, HAV’s head of partnerships and communications. “First is computer power, so we can test anything in theory before we leave this hangar. Second is new materials, so we can fly lighter, faster and safer than people dreamt of, even a decade ago.” HAV purchases unbreakable carbon composite struts from the same firm that supplies Formula One cars, and the Airlander 10 is skinned with a high-tech fabric woven with Tedlar, Mylar and Vectran, the same lightweight, highstress sheeting used in America’s Cup sails. Daniels delivered a lecture this summer, at the time of the Rio Olympics. “Several sailing teams complained about the noise and turbulence from TV helicopters.But the Airlander could stay airborne for the entire duration of the Olympics’ sailing events and have almost

AERONAUTICS

limitless cameras aboard.” The Tokyo 2020 games could easily feature an airship emblazoned with the Olympic rings, likely adjoined by the logos of global sponsors. To quote test pilot Burns, the possibilities are endless. “Aside from acting as a frontline surveillance craft, we envisage two other markets for today’s airship industry,” says Daniels. By reducing the size of the fuel tanks the Airlander 10 becomes a glorified cargo truck – one that can transport 10 tons of payload anywhere on the planet. “Over 50 per cent of people live out of reach of a paved road,” he explains. “If you want to deliver a hydroelectric plant to the Brazilian rainforest, or hover with supplies next to an Afghan mountain top, Airlander is for you.” But replace cargo with passengers, and you have a whole different ball game. “From sightseeing flights over Bedfordshire to internal layouts with bedrooms and panoramic lecture theatres for use over the subcontinent, we can tailor the

ship to any use,” Daniels says. The airship was only released from the Cardington hangar a week ago. Up close its beauty is subtle but contradictory – it is brutal yet refined, massive yet weightless. Thanks to its helium-topped ground weight of a single ton, it is as easy to push as a Mini Cooper with the handbrake off. Evidently – as we were regaled with the ship’s parentage, birth, growth and release – the Airlander 10 is easy to poeticise. It flies silently as the bird; as swift as the breeze. Tethered before its test flight, it quivers and shivers in the morning sun. It’s the longest aircraft in the world, ready to set more records than Concorde (including longest flight and farthest flight, to name but two), yet its presence is bashful, modest – perhaps even embarrassed by its own simplicity. “The technology is so simple it’s unbelievable,” says Daniels. There are no wires, rivets or struts inside, just the same lighter-than-air technology from a century ago. The absence of heavy materials means

these airships can be delivered to order in as little as 12 months. While Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner cost a reported $32bn to produce, the Airlander 10 needed just £3.5m to see it through the final months of production: a sum which was raised by crowdfunding. There’s something winsome about being part of such a futuristic yet time-honoured machine. Like most things, success will boil down to the bottom line. Back in the hangar it is make-orbreak week. Phones ring. Sensitive screens are shielded from us and we’re encouraged to leave before the final test briefing. At £25m each (the price of a business jet but with a quarter of the running costs), HAV hope to sell 100 of these ultra-efficient airships over the coming decade. If the orders stockpile they can fulfil their dream of the Airlander 50, the ne plus ultra airship that can deliver the equivalent of 50 hatchback cars or sail 400 passengers safely through the ether. Never has the future of aviation depended so much on hot air.

Previous spread: David Burns, Airlander’s chief test pilot, in the 210-metre-long Cardington Airship Sheds. Having been repurposed in the century since their construction for, among other things, film studios and model-aircraft-flying, the hangars returned to their original purpose in 2007 when Hybrid Air Vehicles was established there. Below: Though, being filled with helium, Airlander is already buoyant, the airship’s hull creates 40% of its lift.

IT’S THE LONGEST AIRCRAFT IN THE WORLD, READY TO SET MORE RECORDS THAN CONCORDE YET ITS PRESENCE IS BASHFUL, MODEST, PERHAPS EMBARRASSED BY ITS OWN SIMPLICITY. NUMBERS

38,000 Envelope Volume (metres cubed).

4880 Altitude Ceiling (metres).

10,000 Payload Capacity (kilogrammes).

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CAP TURED BY DANIEL JENSEN

STYLE

Blurring the boundary between fashion and technology through their use of innovative fabrics, Stone Island has turned its hand to the art of weaving. Avaunt learns about their latest textile design. Words: David Hellqvist

Twixt land and sea

When you bathe or swim, the water and/or chemicals soon rinse away the oils that cover and protect the skin. This makes its surface, the epidermis, more permeable. The outer epidermis is made up of dead cells that contain keratin, a hydrophilic protein that strengthens the skin. These absorb the water and swell up, but remain rooted to living cells below, leaving little space to expand. This ‘push/pull’ effect forms ridges on the outer epidermis. Wrinkling is most pronounced on fingers, palms, toes and soles as they have thicker keratin layers. The process probably evolved to give apes better grip.

Even fashion brands can fall prey to predictability at times; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, you might say. But in the end it’s a philosophy that could become restrictive; there’s beauty in the unexpected – that’s often where the magic happens. It was, perhaps, with that in mind that Italian high-tech clothiers Stone Island decided to surprise us for Autumn/Winter 2016. Beside its usual, top-of-thegame technology-infused garments – like the polypropylene denim and featherweight leather down – this season its creative director, Carlo Rivetti, decided to add another layer. For the first time ever, Stone Island has designed and produced its very own check pattern on a wool fabric. Usually, we’re excited

about Stone Island innovations like fabrics that change colour depending on the temperature, but this is something new. The company collaborated with 174-year-old French textile company Dormeuil on the House Check. Though started by a Frenchman, Jules Dormeuil, the company makes all its fine fabrics in Huddersfield – an English town that’s been synonymous with wool and worsted cloth manufacturing since the early 19th century. Over in Stone Island’s laboratory in Bologna, the plan for House Check had always been to integrate the brand’s compass logo within the horizontal and vertical lines of a plaid pattern. This meant that an intricate structure for the weave had to be created, so Rivetti decided to

use a rare antique Jacquard Dobcross fly-shuttle loom, meaning it could be woven at a slower pace, allowing the loom to delicately navigate the complex design. Remaining true to the company’s innovative ethos, House Check has since been transplanted on to more technical fabrics, such as Nylon Metal. Here, the trilobate structure of the nylon yarn, with its grey and white tones, results in a distinctive metallic sheen. Carlo Rivetti can’t help himself, and therein lies the brand’s charm. Whether it’s high or low-tech, natural or manmade, the ultimate purpose of the material and the final garment is to test boundaries, and to go where no other check has gone before.

Photography by William Bunce, Styling by Alex Petsetakis. Resin-T shell down ice jacket by Stone Island

W R I N K LY F I N G E R S

British Ingenuity.

The Toothbrush William Addis, London, 1780

The Leather Saddle John Boultbee Brooks, Birmingham, 1882

brooksengland.com

In a world full of products soon to be obsolete, unfashionable, or no longer functional, Britain has a long history of iconic inventions. Brooks Saddles have been moulding to the contours of cyclists since cycling began, and continue to do so for the very good reason that leather is a remarkably suitable material for bicycle saddles. Breathable and durable, with flexible, hammock-like performance for natural, all-day comfort. Brooks Saddles. The Best for Riding, Whatever the Century.

MOUNTAINEERING

Avaunt meets one of Britain’s leading mountaineers, Jake Meyer, to discuss what motivated his return to K2, the infamous mountain that defeated him seven years ago. Words: Ben Saunders & Jake Meyer

Jake Meyer started rock climbing aged 12. Two years later, barely into his teens, he declared that he wanted to become the youngest person to climb the Seven Summits – the highest mountain on each continent. It’s a precocious goal for a 14-year-old, but he ticked them off – including Everest and Antarctica’s Mount Vinson – and held the record by the time he was 21. In 2009, Meyer set his sights on K2, the highest point in Pakistan and the Chinese province of Xinjiang, and a mountain so treacherous that for every four successful summit attempts, one person has died. It was described by Italian mountaineer Fosco Maraini as “just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human. It is atoms and stars. It has the

nakedness of the world before the first man – or of the cindered planet after the last.” Meyer reached 7,700 metres before turning back due to adverse conditions. Seven years later, now 32, he returned to one of the most dangerous mountains on Earth. Avaunt asked what drew him back: I remember trips to Rougemont, a village near Gstaad, when I was five or six. There was a mountain behind the village, Le Rubli, that we would go and climb every year. Towards the top of it, there were even some little sections of via ferrata, old chains and things in the rock. I can just remember going up there and having this extraordinary sense of being out in an environment where you felt incredibly small. I can’t actually remember getting to the top of Le Rubli, but

it was always there in the back of my mind as something that would be special to achieve. I’ve always found motivation in the challenge itself, and in setting myself progressively bigger goals. I’m unashamedly attracted to ticking off lists. Whether or not it’s a formal challenge like the Seven Summits, or a looser set of objectives strung together, I love the idea of creating a connection that forces you to go to places you wouldn’t necessarily have chosen. It creates an incredible diversity of experience. There are many 6,000metre mountains to climb, all over the world, and when I travelled to Argentina it became so much more than just Aconcagua; experiencing the culture of the environments in which these mountains reside is a part of the adventure.

In many ways I still have that same youthful sense of invincibility that I had when I was 14, wanting to climb Everest. The absolute belief that it will never happen to me, that it will always be somebody else. However now, being a father and a husband, I’ve come to realise that it’s about so much more than just my dreams and aspirations, even if that’s still what drives me. Has that specifically made me take fewer risks? Probably not. Has it made me more aware of the risks? I think absolutely. And it’s twice, or three times, the reason to come home safe. I’ve been in some scary situations, but I can’t put a finger on a moment in the mountains when I’ve been genuinely scared. And I’ve seen many others around me being fearful, and making poor decisions based on that emotional reaction. So a healthy respect for the environment is vital, rather than blind optimism or an absence of fear. I’ve heard it said – especially in the military – that you want to feel the frisson of the moment. Those who have no fear, they’re the ones that get killed or do stupid things. And I think it’s very similar for those of us operating in these extreme conditions: respect the environment, but treat it like any other risk. Do everything you can to decrease your vulnerability, to mitigate against the risks, but don’t let them stop you from getting out of bed in the morning. If you look at the statistics for K2, nearly a one in four summit-todeath rate, that’s worse than Russian roulette. But that degree of risk has also been part of the attraction for me, especially with K2. If it was just any other old mountain, I wouldn’t be that interested in it. Jake Meyer is a British mountaineer and management consultant

Photography by Jake Meyer

Return to K2

FRONT

From the jungles of South America to the clifftops of the British Isles; by foot, car, ship and bus, these authors set off in search of new places, forgotten routes and lost ways of life. Words: Pip Harrison, Photography: Peter Harrington Books

Reading list

S I LV E R B U L L E T

Japan’s high-speed Shinkansen – or bullet train – network was a revelation when it was first unveiled in 1964. But now, with 16-carriage trains travelling at 199mph every three minutes in places, something had to give. Enter the L-Zero Series. Developed by the Central Japan Railway Company, this ultra-modern train uses magnetic levitation to glide above its track at up to 375mph, a world rail-speed record. It is currently undergoing trials, but the distinctive long-nosed trains should be plying the 202-mile Tokyo to Nagoya route in just 40 minutes by 2027. The cost of the project is set to exceed $46.5 billion.

Ninety-Two Days by Evelyn Waugh This account of a journey on horseback into the jungles of then British Guiana is certainly a lesser-known work by the Brideshead Revisited author, but is nonetheless a hilarious catalogue of complaints, with Waugh crafting a wonderfully eccentric sketch of an underprepared trip in uncharted territory. In Xanadu by William Dalrymple In 1986, Dalrymple set out to retrace Marco Polo’s iconic journey. Contending with local transport, he travelled across Syria, Iran and Pakistan, before finally reaching China. Dalrymple weaves historical anecdotes into his colourful record of a summer spent roaming the ancient trading paths of the Silk Route.

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane Following the ancient tracks that criss-cross our landscape, Macfarlane’s poetic narrative explores the relationship between roads, the land and our past. Rich with observations, The Old Ways is a tribute to the natural world that surrounds us. Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck A poodle might seem an unusual companion for an adventure but, as Steinbeck and his eponymous hound meander through 38 American states, together they witness a country on the verge of unprecedented change. Driven by wanderlust and a desire to recapture his homeland, Steinbeck’s chronicle is an exquisite piece of travel literature.

Down to the Sea in Ships by Horatio Clare The oceans are the domain of hundreds of thousands ships that doggedly traverse the globe in all weathers. Stowing aboard two container ships, acclimatising to the ships’ time zones and immersing himself in the itinerant seafaring community, Clare’s account is one of everyday, 21st-century heroism. My Dark Companions and Their Strange Stories by Henry Stanley Reputedly the author of the line “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” Stanley’s account of his expedition from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika, in pursuit of the Victorian explorer, and his quest for the source of the Nile, were the first of his assignments in Central Africa.

UP CLOSE Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest by Michael Christopher Brown I visited some of the Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest, in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, late in 2015. In this image, men discuss where to hunt monkeys that afternoon. The group that I photographed, consisting of several families, had been forced to leave their forest as it became a national park. They were then banned from hunting and living off the land, so they moved closer to society. Pygmy populations that are geographically close to Congolese society are often servants to the local Bantu people, working and hunting for them in order to obtain modern goods. Though they are said to be the oldest inhabitants of Central Africa, they do not have Congolese identity cards and are often mocked and derided. There have even been UN reports of one rebel group eating pygmies in the early 2000s, though some say this has always occurred. Michael Christopher Brown is an American photographer, nominated to Magnum Photos in 2013

OCEAN EXPLORATION

Half a century after the bathyscape Trieste reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, Nekton continues to push the boundaries of deep ocean exploration. Words: Justin Marozzi, Illustration: Robert G. Fresson

Surviving extreme pressure

Unlike some animals, Homo sapiens have not evolved to survive exposure to the severe pressures encountered at depth. The record human dive on one breath is 214 metres over four-and-a-half minutes, a figure put to shame by Cuvier’s beaked whale, which has been recorded diving to an extraordinary 2,992 metres, holding its breath for more than two-and-a-quarter hours. Animals like us that live at sea level pressure of one atmosphere are highly sensitive to increases in pressure and suffer physiological problems, with neural and muscular functions especially prone to disturbance. Unlike whales, we do not have the ability to collapse our lungs to store oxygen and reduce the absorption of nitrogen. Submersibles are the technological shortcut and allow scientists and explorers to descend safely into the ocean to study this little understood environment. Since water

pressure increases steadily with depth, with each 10 metres adding another atmosphere of pressure on the vessel, by the time you reach the deepest places on earth – the Mariana Trench hits 10,994 metres (considerably lower than Mount Everest is high) – the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that the pressure would be equivalent to having 50 jumbo jets on your head. Nekton, an ambitious marine expedition in the Sargasso Sea that combines science and exploration to better understand the health of the deep ocean, has to deal with potentially fatal pressures on a daily basis. The team of technical divers descend to around 100 metres to conduct video surveys of the seabed and take samples of coral and sponge. With their complex equipment and rebreathing systems they can remain underwater for six hours, the great majority

of which is time spent ascending safely towards the surface, making a series of decompression stops to reduce the excess pressure of inert gases dissolved in the body. Failure to make these stops results in decompression sickness, commonly known as ‘the bends’ and, in extreme situations, death. Nekton’s two 3.5-tonne Triton submersibles Nemo and Nomad can descend up to three times deeper than the divers and carry a pilot and scientist in an acrylic bubble. At their maximum depth of 300 metres, the subs are withstanding 30 atmospheres. Inside the bubble, however, the pressure is maintained at the normal one atmosphere encountered at sea level. There are no popping ears as experienced when taking off and landing in an aircraft or even the slightest discomfort, bar the occasional worry that the acrylic bubble might burst, bringing lives to an instant

watery end with the massive shockwave as the sphere implodes. Kevin, the Canadian pilot of our Triton submersible who counts a dive of the Titanic (depth 3,800 metres) among his professional underwater missions, describes submarines more encouragingly as “the safest mode of transport you’ll ever use”. He explains how, if the control systems and thrusters go down and the electronics fail, the submersible passengers can still rest (relatively) easy. Crank a couple of switches and physics takes over – four vents open, air floods into the four main ballast tanks, the buoyancy is instantly increased and the sub returns safely to the surface. The one area where a compromise at depth would be fatal is the acrylic sphere – “If the sphere goes, we’re toast”, chuckles Kevin – so the acrylic is seven centimetres thick on Nomad and Nemo and a prodigious 16.5 centimetres in the Triton models that have a maximum depth of 1,000 metres. The use of a sphere as the shape best able to withstand high pressures while providing maximum visibility continues a tradition established by the pioneering American divers and explorers William Beebe and Otis Barton, who set a world record in 1934 by descending to 923 metres in a two-man steel Bathysphere to observe deep-sea fauna in their natural environment. We have long mastered the technology for submersibles required to withstand the most extreme pressures on Earth – the bathyscaphe Trieste reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 1960. The next challenge, apart from extending our limited understanding of the oceans, is to reduce their cost. Nomad and Nemo cost an eye-watering $2.2m. Financially speaking, that is a different order of pressure altogether. Justin Marozzi is an English journalist, historian, author and travel writer

FRONT

ARCHIVE

Avaunt remembers the pioneering wartime aviator Lettice Curtis who, in her role ferrying new planes from factories to airfields, became the first woman qualified to fly a four-engined bomber. Words: Rowland White

PEOPLE

Lettice Curtis In the summer of 1948, cinema audiences watched the shaky credits of a British Pathé newsreel announcing: “Spitfire Beats Jet”. A stirring brass soundtrack introduces the clipped tones of a narrator: “At Lympne Airport in Kent a record entry prepares for the annual international air rally. Competitors from all over Europe make this air racing’s big day and it’s a day of records all round. There’s a record crowd including handsome Douglas Fairbanks and his attractive wife. There are records also from the competitors. Flying a borrowed Spitfire, a Devonshire girl, 33-year-old Lettice Curtis, set up a new women’s international speed record. Competing against ace jet pilots like ‘Cat’s Eyes’ John Cunningham, Miss Curtis’s old Spitfire puts up a performance truly worthy of the plane that eight years ago won the Battle of Britain.” A week later, John Derry, one of the other competitors in the race, became the first Briton to break the sound barrier. Yet, irrespective of the quality of the opposition, that Devonshire girl herself was less effusive about her performance against some of the country’s leading test pilots, describing it simply as “unspectacular”. But then it took a lot to impress Lettice Curtis. She hated coming second. It was this fiercely competitive nature that had led to her becoming one of the most

outstanding British female pilots of World War II. An exceptional athlete at school and Oxford – where she represented the university in lacrosse, tennis and fencing (as team captain in the latter two) – Curtis graduated with a degree in mathematics before, in 1936, setting off to Canada, the United States and a tour of Latin America, returning to Europe as the only passenger aboard a German cargo ship. She was 22. It was then that, following a chance encounter with a pilot from her American adventure at a local airfield, she set her sights on becoming a commercial pilot. As a young woman in the 1930s it was almost inconceivable that Curtis would actually be able to find a job flying aeroplanes but, by 1938, she had earned her licence. When war broke out a year later, she was earning five pounds a week doing aerial survey work from the cockpit of a de Havilland Puss Moth biplane. In June 1940, Curtis received a letter from the Air Transport Auxiliary. Set up a few months earlier to transport men and materiel around the country, the civilian ATA soon found its primary role was ferrying brand new fighters and bombers to the frontline squadrons. An equal opportunities pioneer, the ATA welcomed pilots disqualified from military flying by age, fitness

or gender. They weren’t fussy; the only requirement was that a pilot could do the job. There were teenagers, veterans from the last war, the short-sighted, long-sighted and one-eyed, the limbless and pilots from 26 different countries. And, of course, there were women. Initially, the ATA’s female recruits were restricted to flying training and transport planes but as demand on the organisation grew, so too did pressure both to pay women the same as their male counterparts and put them in the cockpits of all 147 different planes flown by the ATA, from Spitfires and Hurricanes to Swordfish biplanes and Mosquito fighter-bombers. There was still doubt, though, as to whether women would have the physical strength to fly the RAF’s big four-engined heavy bombers – the Short Stirling, Handley Page Halifax and Avro Lancaster. When her boss recommended that she be put forward for four-engined training, Curtis relished the opportunity to be first, but she was acutely aware that she was in the spotlight. If she failed, she would be failing all 166 of her female colleagues. The pressure was only made greater when, during her training, newspapers photographed her being introduced to the US First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, as the first

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against Germany saw the need for replacement aircraft delivery to squadrons reach dreadful levels. Like the merchant navy, the civilian ATA’s contribution was crucial to the country’s survival. Throughout the war their pilots delivered over 308,000 aircraft to the RAF and Fleet Air Arm. At the ATA’s disbandment ceremony in November 1945, Lord Beaverbrook, the minister of aircraft production during the war, said: “Just as the

Battle of Britain is the accomplishment and achievement of the RAF, likewise it can be declared that the ATA sustained and supported them in the battle. They were soldiers fighting in the struggle just as completely as if they had been engaged on the battlefront.” Although no less proud of the organisation’s efforts, Lettice Curtis summed it up more succinctly: “How we did it without breaking our necks, I don’t know.”

Image: © Maidenhead Heritage Centre

Right: Although Curtis, like her ATA colleague pictured here, was initially banned from piloting heavy four-engined bombers, in 1942 she became the first woman qualified to fly them, delivering more than 400 by the end of the war.

female four-engine pilot. “Girl Flies Halifax” read the headlines, and she had not even flown the big bomber by herself yet. By the end of the war, she had ferried over 200 Halifaxes, as well as 100 Stirlings, Lancasters and Flying Fortresses. And Curtis opened the door for other female ATA pilots like Joan Hughes – dwarfed in the picture above by a giant Short Stirling – to fly the big four-engined heavies, as the bomber war

RADIOACTIVITY

Avaunt examines the protective kit being used by the workers in Fukushima as they continue their painstaking decontamination of the compromised nuclear power station. Words: George Upton

After the meltdown

L I F T T H E ORY

remains high, particularly in the reactor and turbine buildings. There, as they painstakingly remove radioactive material by clearing rubble, vacuuming dust and grinding down the surface of the walls, the workers depend upon their specialist protective clothing to keep them safe. In addition to the dosimeters that monitor daily and monthly exposure, the workers wear a full face mask, two layers of light, breathable, dust-resistant overalls designed for use at Fukushima and, in extreme situations, a lead or tungsten vest. At the end of the day, each worker receives a full body survey and any radioactive material discovered is washed off.

Our ability to respond to nuclear disasters has come a long way since Chernobyl – where the socalled ‘liquidators’ improvised protective clothing from lead sheets pulled from the walls of the compromised reactor – and the workers at Fukushima can operate in an extremely inhospitable environment without damaging their health thanks to developments in technology and the clothing they wear. Yet, despite being so well equipped, their task still demands courage and altruism, and the agonising and often lethal effects of radiation sickness experienced by many at Chernobyl demonstrate how vital this work is.

Image: © Jean Gaumy / Magnum Photos

Five years have passed since a devastating tsunami inundated the east coast of Japan and caused the meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power station. The worst nuclear accident for 25 years, 150,000 people have been evacuated, leaving ghost towns that are now only populated by the workers tasked with the slow, methodical decontamination of the area. It is a process that is expected to take at least another 30 years. Though remote-controlled robots are used extensively at the site and there are already some areas where workers can wear their standard overalls and dust masks, the risk of exposure to radioactive material

The theory goes that by jumping up just before the point of impact a person applies an opposite force that cushions their fall. But while the science is sound, it wouldn’t help in practice. A falling lift and its contents travel at the same speed and in the same direction so there’s very little a person trapped inside can do. However, jumping up at the critical moment would reduce the victim’s downward speed, but it would be by too small an amount to make any difference to the inevitable sticky end. The springs seen at the bottom of lift shafts work on the same principle though.

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Photography by William Bunce

The fall guys

When it comes to putting your life on the line, it pays to have the right equipment. Cams are brilliantly engineered devices that climbers can wedge into cracks on rock faces to use as anchor points. If they fall, the climberâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s weight creates tension on the rope and causes the cam to expand in the crack. These Dragon cams by DMM are lightweight and rated to a minimum passive strength of nine kilonewtons. Plus, though it may not be the first thing that passes through a plummeting climberâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mind, they are also beautifully designed. dmmclimbing.com

I N N OVAT IO N

FRONT

Avaunt takes a tour of Bowers & Wilkins’ factory and discovers half a century of innovation. Words: George Upton, Photography: David Ryle

Science of sound

When British loudspeaker company Bowers & Wilkins launched their new diamond dome tweeter – a speaker tasked specifically with high-frequency sounds – they took it to Abbey Road Studios to be auditioned. Made famous by The Beatles, who named one of their albums after the studio, Abbey Road would be one of the greatest tests for B&W’s new technology. When they played a sample track through the new speakers, however, the studio’s engineers found there was a strange rhythmic tapping that had never been heard before. Bowers & Wilkins took the speakers back and tested them rigorously, but could find nothing wrong; they would play other tracks perfectly. At a loss as to what the sound could be, they decided to research the recording and discovered that the sound came from the pianist’s cufflinks, clinking against the keys. It had always been there, but no loudspeaker had ever been able to pick it up before. Created by superheating and pressurising gasses, the diamond dome is formed by depositing a carbon frost over a silicon wafer and is the product of three-and-ahalf years of research. It’s indicative

of Bowers & Wilkins’ approach that although they already had one of the most highly regarded aluminium tweeters, praised by professional studio engineers and audiophiles alike, they continued to innovate, to push the limits of technology in the search for ever-more accurate sound. This drive has been at the heart of Bowers & Wilkins since it was founded in 1966 in the back of a Worthing-based electronics shop run by John Bowers and Roy Wilkins. The pair met in the Royal Corps of Signals during the war and, alongside renting out television sets and radios, Bowers turned his hand to designing and selling his own loudspeakers. Though over the subsequent decades the company would move to progressively larger premises – most recently refitting their current factory to run 24 hours a day in order to keep up with demand – it is still based in Worthing. Yet it is from this unassuming suburban town, 10 miles along the coast from Brighton, that Bowers & Wilkins developed into a global operation, respected and sought-after around the world. The science behind a speaker is relatively simple. An amplifier

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Previous: The Nautilus, the product of Bowers & Wilkins’ most ambitious research and development project, began by asking what a loudspeaker would look like it wasn’t housed in a rectangular cabinet. Left: B&W’s anechoic chamber where they test every drive unit across all frequencies. Below: A worker monitors B&W’s robotic painting system. The cabinets are then dried and polished by hand.

sends a fluctuating electronic current to an electromagnetic coil attached to a speaker cone, causing it to be attracted and repelled from a magnet fixed beneath the cone. As the cone moves in and out, it creates sound waves that then travel to our ears. Perfecting this process, however, is no easy task. Everything – from the resonance of the speaker cabinet, to the way the air flows within the speaker and the materials used in its construction – has a profound effect on the speaker’s performance. As Senior Product Manager Andy Kerr says, “The principles are always the same: loudspeakers are loudspeakers. It’s what you make them out of and how you make them that defines how you continue to improve.” Finessing the technology of the loudspeaker was Bowers’ aim from the start. With a keen interest in classical music, regularly going to concerts, Bowers was frustrated by the inability of existing technology to accurately reproduce the performances he attended. Setting to work in garages behind his shop,

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Bowers experimented by modifying other brands’ equipment, eventually coming to produce the P1: B&W’s first commercial speaker. The success of the P1 enabled Bowers to purchase calibration equipment and expand the business. While the P1 and the models that followed quickly became popular with critics – establishing B&W at the forefront of hi-fi technology – its major innovation would come in 1974. The company pioneered the use of woven fibre cones and, after extensive research, discovered that Kevlar – which had, up until that point, been used mostly in bullet-proof vests – offered the perfect combination of acoustic properties to produce sound with greatly reduced distortion. It was a discovery aided by, among other things, considerable investment in expensive scientific instruments, such as a laser interferometer, which allowed for a detailed analysis of the behaviour of different materials. The investment paid off; for decades to come, the iconic yellow Kevlar cones were ubiquitous in

recording studios around the world. In 1981, Bowers established a separate research centre in nearby Steyning – quickly dubbed the University of Sound – to continue their groundbreaking research. The centre equipped B&W’s specialist acoustic and electronic engineers with a wealth of modelling, testing and design tools. Bowers, however, passed away in 1987, and would never see the fruit of Steyning’s research: a loudspeaker that eliminated almost all cabinet distortion. Launched in 1993 after five years in the lab, the Nautilus was the result of the most extensive research and development programme in the company’s history. Breaking with the traditional straight sides and rectangular shape of almost all loudspeakers up until that point, the Nautilus’ distinctive spiral body and horns worked to remove any unwanted sound caused by the cabinet of the speaker, leaving only the pure, crisp, accurate music – just as Bowers had wanted. The Nautilus would have a considerable effect on Bowers & Wilkins,

THE PRINCIPLES ARE ALWAYS THE SAME: LOUDSPEAKERS ARE LOUDSPEAKERS. IT’S WHAT YOU MAKE THEM OUT OF AND HOW YOU MAKE THEM THAT DEFINES HOW YOU CONTINUE TO IMPROVE.

Right: Speaker cones awaiting assembly. Although B&W employs sophisticated scientific equipment to analyse and perfect the technology in their loudspeakers, the science behind a speaker is relatively simple.

and all loudspeakers the company have produced since echo – albeit in a modest way – its distinctive curves and tapering horns. Today they use the same technology and expertise across their wider family of speakers, from smaller hi-fi loudspeakers to bespoke cinema installations, as well as in-car systems, which they launched in 2007. And though their high-end loudspeakers remain at the core of everything they do, B&W have also recently transitioned to reflect the way that people enjoy music today – launching their iconic Zeppelin iPod speaker in 2007; their first range of headphones in 2010 and, in 2014, their first portable Bluetooth speaker. This year, as they celebrate their 50th anniversary, Bowers & Wilkins are launching the P9 – headphones engineered by the same team behind the 800 Series D3 loudspeaker, their latest flagship model which saw 868 changes from the previous D2. Both have received consistently high reviews, recommending them as some of the best audio equipment on the market today. Have B&W, having developed technology like the diamond dome, which only distorts at frequencies higher than the human ear can hear, now reached the limits of innovation? Kerr thinks not. “It’s much less trial and error now. We have computer simulation packages and laser measurement, and we’re only ever going to continue to improve. I’m sure we’ll look at what we’ve done now in five years’ time and see mistakes, that’s just the nature of the business. There will always be a better loudspeaker.”

I N N OVAT IO N

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MOUNTAINEERING

K2, known for a time as Mount Godwin-Austen, was first surveyed by one of Britain’s widest-ranging explorers who would undertake his mountaineering feats with little thought of acclimatisation. Words: Catherine Moorehead

Godwin-Austen

Gunto La

Baltoro Gl

4606m

Askole Munbluk PHASE 3

5600m

i Sh

Rondu

Masherbrum

(7821m)

Honboro Kangri

Marshakala

Dindasgo 4842m

Gonmathanmigo

10 miles

J A M M U

It is August, 1861. On a crag high above Karakoram’s vast Baltoro Glacier in modern-day Pakistan walks a hardy young English surveyor. He has travelled hundreds of kilometres to obtain the first-ever detailed view of the ‘killer’ mountain, K2. With his mahogany and brass theodolite he carefully measures its height and position, before settling to sketch and collect rock samples. Less than 10 years before, at the age of 17 and fresh from Sandhurst, Godwin-Austen had travelled to Burma to join his grandfather, General Godwin, who was winning the Second Anglo-Burmese war. The young man’s drawing talents were quickly recognised and he was despatched to Kashmir, on the outermost edges of the empire, to extend the Great Survey of India. On this wild frontier his scholarly and passionate character led to new adventures. Each year his expeditions drove him ever further into the depths of unexplored

K A S H M I R

Tuggo La (c5300m)

hyok

Khaplu

s du

20 km

5335m

PHASE 1

e all Th

Skardo

PHASE 2

R Hu s h e

to Srinagar

Central Asia. On a 6,250-metre peak in Ladakh he broke the world high-altitude summiting record, two years before the Matterhorn, one of the highest peaks in the Alps, was scaled. He was later described as “probably the greatest mountaineer of his day”. Aside from his adventures at altitude, Godwin-Austen briefly converted to Islam to further an affair, resulting in an illegitimate child with an Afghan landowner’s daughter. A hasty second marriage to an English socialite in Calcutta – unhappy, thanks to money difficulties – followed. Mostly Godwin-Austen was an absentee husband, travelling through mountainous Bhutan and the malarial jungles of northern Burma to map these hitherto unexplored lands. His typical stubbornness helped when his assistant was captured and eaten by the local Nagas – nothing would deter him from completing his survey. On returning to England in 1877

Godwin-Austen emerged as one of the great Victorian collectors: of geological specimens, birds and, above all, freshwater molluscs. His collection for the Natural History Museum has been described as “the basis of all modern science in the subject”. And his emotional adventures did not stop – aged 48, he embarked on his third and happiest marriage, to a woman 27 years his junior. Aside from his illegitimate son, Godwin-Austen guarded another secret. Dirk Bogarde, the film star and subsequent owner of Godwin-Austen’s house (where Scott of the Antarctic spent his last night in England), discovered in its grounds a stone beehive-sized Burmese temple: Godwin-Austen was the first-known Western convert to Buddhism. Collector, mountaineer, surveyor and romantic hero, Godwin-Austen rates as one of the greatest explorers of the 19th century.

NUMBERS

29 Length of time Godwin-Austen held the world summit altitude record ( years).

05 Number of ascents over 6000m Godwin-Austen made without oxygen.

1910 Year Godwin-Austen received the RGS Founder’s Medal.

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T R AV E L

Addis Ababa

Guillaume Bonn explains how modern developments in camera phone technology have allowed him to capture the Ethiopian capitalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s development in a way that few have ever managed before. Words & Photography: Guillaume Bonn

Images: Guillaume Bonn / Institute

The old is being removed, the new is coming up fast and there is not really any logical and practical thinking in the remodelling of the city. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what I was trying to capture here.

The first time I went to Addis Ababa was in 1989. I was living in Nairobi but had gone to the French school in the Ethiopian capital to sit my baccalaureate and found myself in this tiny town under the control of a hard-line communist regime. The Berlin Wall had just fallen but there I was, surrounded by red flags and statues of Marx and Lenin and, with almost everything prohibited by the government, there was absolutely nothing to do. Today everything has changed and Addis is in the midst of a construction boom – everywhere

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you look new skyscrapers are being built and offices, hotels and shopping centres are appearing almost overnight. The city is evolving at such a rate that people who have lived here all their lives are now getting lost on their way home. I shot these photographs between 2014 and 2016. I had just begun to experiment with using my iPhone, shooting everything I saw in the capital as I went about my day – going to restaurants, shopping, being stuck in traffic and getting lost in the ever-changing

city. Normally Ethiopians distrust people with cameras – in the communist era citizens were obliged to spy on one another, and for years every time I got my camera out people would become defensive. Using the iPhone, however, I could photograph Addis how I wanted. I was able to take pictures in a way that few had been able to before, without bothering people, and hopefully I’ve captured an essence of Addis today. guillaumebonn.com

EMERGENCY

Avaunt discovers how the hidden antenna on Breitling’s Emergency II can act as a personal locator beacon, and could make the difference between life or a very lonely death Words: Alex Doak, Photography: William Bunce

Just in time

1. Twisting off the caps on either side of the watch’s case releases the antenna and begins transmitting the emergency signal. 2. Removed from the wrist and attached to a fixed location, the watch broadcasts on the digital 406MHz wavelength for 0.44 seconds every 50 seconds, on the shorter antenna (A) and the analogue 121.5MHz wavelength for 0.75 seconds every 2.25 seconds, on the longer antenna (B), for 24 hours.

First launched in 1995, Breitling’s Emergency was the world’s smallest personal locator beacon (PLB) – a device that summons searchand-rescue helicopters to whatever remote mountainside, Pacific outcrop or post-midnight Zone 6 kerbside you’ve found yourself on, via the civilian distress signal and the Cospas-Sarsat network of satellites. Over 40,000 were sold, and 20 of them were instrumental in rescue situations – including that of British explorers Steve Brooks and Quentin Smith, who were forced to ditch off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula in 2003 after a failed attempt to become the first pilots to fly a helicopter to the North and South Poles. But, come 2009, Breitling faced a problem. Cospas-Sarsat had phased out satellite support for the 121.5MHz distress signal, in favour of the digital frequency 406MHz, which could carry more detailed information, such as the owner of said distress beacon (handy for the authorities, should anyone decide to activate it after a few pints to impress their mates). It took Breitling five years, but by 2013 the watchmaker had managed it: a watch in genuine wrist proportions containing a beacon (actually a metre-long

coil of wire unravelled from the lower strap attachment) that transmits on both frequencies. Breitling faced several hurdles realising the Emergency II, the biggest being battery life. A power source was required that would, obviously, be small enough to fit in a watch, but that had the capacity to transmit on two frequencies for 24 hours in temperatures down to minus 20 degrees Celsius, in compliance with Cospas-Sarsat’s criteria. The other challenge was to miniaturise a dual-frequency transmitter, where previously the smallest in circulation was the size of two cigarette packets. Breitling’s digital 406MHz signal goes out for 0.44 seconds every 50 seconds, while the old 121.5MHz signal lasts 0.75 seconds every 2.25 seconds. This dual frequency isn’t just to be thorough; it’s a strategy that not only helps to ensure that the emergency signal reaches the search and rescue teams, but also helps them to zero in on the target. The old analogue signal is still relied upon by many rescue teams for last-minute location fixes before visual contact is made. Should you be particularly unfortunate however, why not try navigating your way home the

old-school way? The satin-brushed bezel is engraved with the ordinal points, which really can be used as an ad hoc compass. As every Boy Scout knows, you simply point the hour hand at the sun, or align it with the shadow cast across the dial by an upright twig, then twizzle the bezel so ‘N’ sits halfway between the hour hand and the 12 o’clock mark. Providing your local time is set correctly, that’s your (rough) due north. Breitling don’t just make this extraordinary timepiece for people who are likely to find themselves marooned in the middle of nowhere – it has to be commercially viable after all. So what’s the reality of the Emergency II as your quotidian ticker? The battery and transmitter may well have been miniaturised, but it still clocks in at a hefty 51mm diameter – hence the choice of titanium for the case, meaning it weighs a surprisingly wearable 140 grams. It comes with a choice of three dials – black, yellow or orange – fitted either with a titanium bracelet or bang-on-trend rubber strap. So no, not best paired with a French cuff, but still rather natty with a chunky knit. And also perhaps a parachute.

406 MHz

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UP CLOSE Scientists by Nick Cobbing The glaciologists in this picture are kayaking down part of a meltwater ravine, towing a radar between them to scan the glacier below – one of the largest in Greenland. This section of the glacier is called a ‘floating tongue’, so called as it is thinner having flowed past the bedrock underneath. Though anchored by the sides of the fjord, it rests on the fjord water. This means kayaking its ravines is less risky than kayaking higher up on the ice sheet (which is not such a good idea). Scientists are explorers too, especially those that rely on remote fieldwork to bring back the data necessary to advance their research. Glaciologists and physical oceanographers use their knowledge of their subject to evaluate risk; here an awareness of the ‘hydrology’ of a glacier means they can enjoy the adventure of their research, but still come home safely. Nick Cobbing is a landscape photographer based in Stockholm

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E N DE AVOU R

Triumph have returned to Utah with an extraordinary machine – the 1,000-brake horsepower Triumph Infor Rocket Streamliner – and an equally extraordinary rider, Guy Martin. Avaunt went along for the ride. Photography: Thomas Prior

Speed on the salt flats

Roughly 30,000 years ago a giant lake, bigger than Switzerland or Denmark, covered a giant swathe of North America’s Great Basin region. Lake Bonneville lasted for 15,000 years, give or take, before drying up completely, and one of the only signs it ever existed is a vast salt pan in Tooele County, Utah. Too harsh an environment for plants or animals to survive, the Bonneville Salt Flats turned out to provide – in the summer months at least – the perfect pan-flat, dust-free runway for motorsport, and with nothing to bump into for nearly 40,000 acres, it became the spiritual home of straight-line landspeed record attempts from the early 20th century to the present

day. The salt flats hosted their first two-wheeled world record in 1965, with Texan motorcyclist Johnny Allen setting a top speed of 193.73mph on his Triumph Devil’s Arrow streamliner – a fully faired recumbent motorbike, which the rider sits in, rather than on, in a near-prone position for maximum aerodynamic benefit. Triumph continued to hold the absolute motorcycle land-speed world record until 1970, and the British manufacturer was quick to capitalise on the record’s iconic appeal, with the first T120 Bonneville model revealed at the Earl’s Court Bike Show and going on sale in 1959. From the 1970s until the present day, the record changed hands

several times between rival Japanese and American machines, and Triumph Motorcycles have finally returned to the same stretch of the Bonneville Salt Flats with the intention of restoring their standing in land-speed racing. Their latest machine, the Triumph Infor Rocket Streamliner, is nearly as long as a Routemaster bus but only three feet tall, and its two turbocharged, methanol-fuelled Triumph Rocket III engines can direct 1,000 brake horsepower through its rear tyre – more power than a contemporary Formula One car. Masterminded by aerodynamic engineer Matt Markstaller and high-performance engine builder Bob Carpenter, the team needed a suitably bold and fearless rider to take on the measured mile, and settled on the British Isle of Man TT racer and multiple speed record holder, Guy Martin. Strapped into the Streamliner’s carbon Kevlar monocoque shell – with his feet in front of him – by a seven-point harness, and steering with two joysticks rather than a single handlebar, Martin made a number of progressively faster runs in the team’s August practice session at the Bonneville Salt Flats, finally achieving a speed of 274.2mph (and in doing so set the record for the world’s fastest-ever Triumph motorcycle), before heavy rainfall in September forced an end to their attempt for this year. And while the outright record of 376.4mph eluded the challengers, Martin seemed reanimated by the effort and the adrenaline that riding a motorbike at nearly 300mph had entailed. “It felt like I’d got back to how it was when I first started racing. I’d lost that. I hadn’t had that feeling for 10 years now.” Triumph have vowed to return as soon as conditions allow.

Left: The Triumph Infor Rocket Streamliner, the product of 20,000 man-hours of design and production, sitting on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Despite its name the two cylinders at the rear of the bike are not jet exhausts but carefully packed parachutes that are essential to slow the bike at the end of each record attempt. Right: Guy Martin in the cramped cockpit of the Streamliner. Unlike on the superbikes he normally rides, Martin is unable to shift his body to balance the bike and instead has to make precise adjustments with the bike’s two joysticks.

Image: Photo12 / UIG via Getty Images

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E N DE AVOU R

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Previous: The Bonneville Salt Flats, known as the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;fastest place on Earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, has been used to set land-speed records for over a century. Below: The 11-mile course is set up and the mile markers and timing traps are checked for the final time.

Left: Dan Warner, current president of the Bonneville 200mph Club, who helped to organise the event.

Bottom: The bike being towed to the start line. It takes 1,200 man-hours to prepare the Streamliner for every 20 minutes that it runs.

TECHNOLOGY

The future of entertainment, in all its varieties, may lie in an unexplored universe only accessible through our minds. Henry Stuart discovers how virtual reality has the capacity to change the way we live. Illustration: Robert G. Fresson

Surviving virtual reality

Despite being feted by journalists, gamers and nerds across the globe as the breakthrough technology of the year, virtual reality is still very much in its infancy. With many developers such as Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard launching successfully in 2015 and 2016, we are seeing the emergence of a technology that could come to alter the course of human history. The next significant development for the medium will be PlayStation virtual reality. It was announced in October that Sony’s premium virtual reality accessory will retail for £350 and, if you already own a PlayStation, that is the only cost. Compared to the £750 HTC Vive or the £450 Oculus Rift, which requires the minimum of a £1500 gaming computer, Playstation’s offering is set to start the

true transmission of virtual reality, spreading from house to house like a virus. As John Carmack from Oculus (and founder of iconic games studio id Software) describes it, those who have tried virtual reality are “the converted”. The secret of the medium is in convincing your brain that you are somewhere else. When executed well, virtual reality is an experience of complete immersion, known as ‘presence’, and this is the ultimate goal of all virtual reality producers. The natural progression of this, of reaching a true presence that blurs imperceptibly the line between reality and fiction, will enable humans to truly transcend their natural boundaries. It will start innocuously at first with the release of groundbreaking multiplayer games, set in vast,

immersive alternative realities. Then you will be able to go backstage with your favourite musicians and join them live during a performance. Retail will develop, enabling you to shop in beautiful locations with your friends (who in the real world may be hundreds of miles away) and try Cartier jewellery on your 3D scanned avatar. Films, too, will evolve and you will watch the action from inside the scene, as a part of an interactive drama that you can shape. All this however is only laying the groundwork for a whole other world, a metaverse that we will escape to for entertainment, to meet people and live out our wildest dreams. By this point, technology will have developed so that you will not just see and hear this incredible, infinite universe, but feel and smell

it too, thanks to haptic feedback suits. Far from isolating its users, as it is perceived to do today, virtual reality will be a huge social enabler, just with new rules and new norms. And it will not be all fun and games. Virtual reality can be a practical tool as well and the applications are endless – visualisations for construction, medical training, education… Yet even then we will remain grounded in the real world and virtual reality will function solely as an extension to our own reality, as something we plug into. But it has the potential to go much further. Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens predicts the evolution of mankind through technology. No longer a matter of natural evolution, he foresees humanity transcending to another mental state where our intelligence will allow us to negate the restrictions of nature and build far beyond our natural capacity. Harari anticipates a network connecting all humans to each other and the Internet that can be accessed simply by thinking. With all human knowledge available instantly, virtual reality will become a hive mind and form an intelligence that will completely transform daily life. We will not experience this other consciousness – this higher level – with our senses, and our eyes and ears will become redundant to the immediate, direct linkage of the hive. No longer will we use virtual reality to enter an alternative universe but to transcend the real world and ourselves. We will all survive virtual reality but I don’t think the human race will. Eventually, virtual reality will be a part of what stops us being human. It will enable our descendants to connect and communicate in a way that we cannot truly conceive of now, as one virtual mind. Henry Stuart is the co-founder and CEO of Visualise, a virtual reality production studio

ashmei.com

UP CLOSE

Tour de France by Harry Gruyaert In 1982 Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert was commissioned by oil company Elf to cover the final week of that year’s Tour de France – when the riders of the most wellknown and demanding three-week cycling race are tested by a few gruelling stages in the Alps, before they roll, battered and bruised, into Paris. Here, held up by protesting farmers en route to Alpe d’Huez, the peloton took the opportunity to rest their legs. Uncharacteristically, race leader and five-time Tour winner, Bernard Hinault, who would often come to blows with the protestors who regularly targeted the contest, kept his fists to himself. Harry Gruyaert was nominated to Magnum Photos in 1981, becoming a full member in 1986

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MUSIC

Musician and composer Paul Frith describes how a chance encounter with a small canvas-topped boat inspired a symphony dedicated to one of the greatest open boat journeys ever made. Illustration: Robert G. Fresson

Adventures in music

I am staring, slack-jawed, at a boat sitting neatly in the cloisters of an old public school, my body anchored to the spot while a tide of revellers flow past me to the wedding that I have long forgotten. Berthed there, the boat is very much out of place and only a stuffed emperor penguin standing sentinel at her bow gives any clue as to the adventure it has experienced. The description nearby informs me that she, the James Caird, is the boat that carried Sir Ernest Shackleton on his heroic 1,300-kilometre voyage through icy seas and hurricane-force winds to obtain a rescue for the stranded crew of the Endurance – a journey that seems somewhat at odds with the hors d’oeuvres, champagne and lofty surroundings of Dulwich College. I vaguely recall having heard this story before, but it is not until this moment, standing in front of the small canvas-topped boat, that I can begin to comprehend the horrifying wonder of it, and it demands

a response. I begin to feel my way towards an answer – I need to pay homage to this incredible tale, I need to celebrate it and connect others with this inexpressible feeling I am having. So standing in the middle of a wedding in south-east London, I pronounce my decision to write a symphony to commemorate Shackleton and his men’s extraordinary tale of courage, fortitude and survival. I have never written a symphony before. Shit. Channelling Shackleton’s age of heroic exploration, what follows my grand declaration is a lot of mental backtracking to the reality of how I could actually put a symphony together. I am painfully aware that while I have had many jaunts and day trips in music, this is my first fully fledged sonic adventure, complete with endless hazards, pitfalls and the very real chance of failure. The challenges are manifold – compositionally, my mastery of the orchestra is not fully tested and indeed there are some instruments

I have never scored for before. Inspirationally, I am not convinced I have enough life experience to deign to tell the stories of such iconic men; practically, I have no orchestra or financial backer. Following a crossing of the Bay of Biscay with my father-in-law to get a glimpse of Shackleton’s experience (though we did not have to face 18-metre waves or chip ice off the side of the boat to keep it from keeling over), I set about filling in the gaps in my musical knowledge. I meet with Ruth Holden, harpist in Phantom of the Opera, an encounter that makes me acutely aware of my deficiencies with this instrument. Meanwhile the Wellcome Trust commission me to write a piece of music on Apsley Cherry-Garrard. While concerned that I might be becoming typecast as a composer for famous Antarctic explorers, I decide that the piece must include bassoon so I can gain some experience with this sonorous beast. Finally, I set to writing. I want the

music to take the listener on a journey from civilisation to the unexplored and back again. The first movement, ‘Proceed’, will cover sailing to Antarctica against a backdrop of the Great War; the second, ‘Endurance’, will see the men lose their ship to the crushing ice and survive months on the ice floes; the third, ‘The Voyage of the James Caird’, is the centrepiece of the symphony and the fourth, ‘The Whaling Station’, follows the final push over the unmapped island of South Georgia – a feat not attempted again until nearly 50 years later. The first two movements are written surprisingly quickly before, one movement too late for true irony, I am stuck in a figurative musical icefield. However, it is during this hiatus that things really begin to progress in other respects. I meet The Hon. Alexandra Shackleton – the indomitable granddaughter of the great man himself who, it turns out, lives around the corner from me. I am introduced to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, who take a real interest in the project. I find myself at a party with Winston Marshall of Mumford & Sons, who agrees to play the banjo in the second movement. Finally, Stop & Fix Publishing ask to release the symphony as a commemorative edition complete with photographic book to accompany the score. With all this impetus the icy wasteland of my imagination starts to thaw and I get to writing again. And so almost 100 years to the day after Shackleton reached the whaling station on South Georgia to raise the cry for help, and nearly three years on from when I first stood in front of the James Caird, once again I find myself standing open mouthed, this time with the granddaughter of Sir Ernest Shackleton by my side, as I listen to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra record my symphony. Paul Frith is a musician and composer based in London

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Photography by William Bunce

Pumped up

Lezyneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s instant inflation systems use compressed CO2 to inflate tyres at high speeds, removing the need for manual pumping. About the size of a tube of sweets, nozzles can be selected to fit Presta or Schrader valves, and refill cartridges are readily available. lezyne.com

HERITAGE

Avaunt discovers how Woolrich’s pioneering use of wool as the original outdoor technical fabric has been reflected in the American brand’s long history of functional and durable fashion. Words: David Hellqvist

Rich in history

high-tech business: using wool to make clothes was considered innovative. As Andrea Canè, Woolrich Europe’s creative director, says, “It was without doubt the best material available for the outdoors and protecting people from the elements.” Woolrich’s Chatham Run mill, which still stands today, was revolutionary for its time. “It performed the entire process of wool-making, from receiving the raw wool to blending the types of wool together, from carding the wool to weaving the cloth, and from dyeing to dry-finishing the fabric,” Canè explains. “At one time the Woolrich mill even had its own flock of sheep and the washing of the wool was done with the water from the Woolrich reservoir.”

Times have changed but the ethos behind Woolrich remains: “We try and combine the brand’s historical identity with a contemporary interpretation of iconic Americana. What makes us unique is the fact that we sell garments with a purpose. Everything is done for a reason,” he says. “Our sophisticated take on military, outdoor and utilitarian styles results in a collection of outerwear and sportswear that redefines American style with worldwide design influences,” says Canè. Here, redefining means bringing the clothes up to speed, in terms of technology as well as aesthetics. Still, there are a few Woolrich signatures that have hung around since day one: “The buffalo check, especially in the red and black shade, is one of Woolrich’s iconic patterns and it represents Americana outerwear all over the word.” Though today Woolrich produces a wide range of apparel and accessories – including footwear – and works with a variety of fabric, wool is still the material that symbolises the brand and its history. “Back then wool was the best fabric at keeping people warm when they needed it. Woollen clothes were the original breathable outdoor technical garment.” Over time technology has helped to develop new materials that have taken the role of wool but the value and quality of wool as a natural product has stood the test of time, and it’s still an essential part of the Woolrich wardrobe for AW16. “For this season we are launching a parka available in Loro Piana Storm System. This is our way of paying homage to wool and the woollen

TIMELINE

1830 Having emigrated from Liverpool, John Rich founds a woollen mill in Plum Run, Pennsylvania.

1880-5 Production of clothing for recreation and leisure begins.

1998 WP Lavori in Corso launches the Woolrich John Rich & Bros collection.

2016 Birth of Woolrich Europe and global retail network continues to expand.

Courtesy of Woolrich

America in the mid-19th century was an exciting place. Though it would soon be plunged into a bloody civil war, the country was also hard at work expanding its scientific status and developing its industrial reach. Innovation was everywhere, especially in the clothing industry, and people flocked from around the world to join the creative gold rush. In 1830 John Rich II left Liverpool for Pennsylvania; there he quickly founded Woolrich, a woolbased clothing company producing practical garments for the local workers. Rich was an entrepreneur and just 15 years later he set up one of only two completely self-sufficient woollen mills in the United States at the time. Woolrich was a

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Arctic parka that most people associate with Woolrich. “The original Arctic was introduced in 1972 for the workers on Alaskan pipelines. It’s designed specifically to keep the body warm in temperatures well below freezing.” To have been groundbreaking amongst the pioneers of the mid19th century is very different from what it takes to achieve a similar status today, where people buy clothes for another climate, literally and figuratively speaking. But, as Canè attests, Woolrich has grown up alongside its customers: “It has

helped us to define the way in which entire generations think about our brand. Woolrich is worn by people who love comfort, functionality and durability with a sophisticated, contemporary touch.” For Canè there’s no doubt about the challenges that lie ahead for Woolrich, and what it will take for the company to stand the test of time for another 186 years. “The real difference in the outdoor clothing industry today is the emphasis placed on design, as well as on presenting something technical and performance related in a stylish way.”

Right: The Woolrich factory has been in the same location since it moved to Chatham Run in Pennsylvania in 1845. The original building, having survived a fire in 1901, is still part of the factory complex today.

traditions of the company,” Canè says. I ask the Bologna-based designer whether there are a few specific pieces that define the brand: “Yes, the Gore-Tex Mountain jacket and the No Fur parka. The first one is part of our Teton collection and is made up of modern technical materials, and the latter really builds upon the quality, the technical performance and the traditions of Woolrich’s Arctic parka, which is the third garment I would highlight – though the No Fur version adds a more contemporary, urban dimension to it.” However, it’s the

PROFILE

Avaunt travels to England’s picturesque Lake District to meet shepherd and legendary fell runner Joss Naylor, and discovers what keeps him running at the age of 80. Words: George Upton, Photography: Laura Pannack

PEOPLE

Joss Naylor Everyone in the Lake District knows Joss Naylor. The 80-yearold shepherd and fell runner has become a living part of the folklore of this idyllic, untouched corner of north-west England. When I mention his name to fellow passengers on the train or in the rustic village pubs, most have met him, or at the very least know who he is, and all murmur approvingly when I say I’m there to meet him. But when I find his house, nestled in the shadow of Seatallan, a treeless mountain that swells benignly from fields of bleating sheep, there’s no one home. I have little choice but to go a mile down a gently undulating road, lined by well-kept drystone walls, to the nearest farm where, over the barking of perturbed sheepdogs, straining at their chains, I ask where I might find him. “Oh, if our Joss isn’t in, he’ll be out on the fells,” I’m told. I’m left to scan the crag for a tall, wiry pensioner nimbly jumping over the rocks and scree. Even if on my first attempt I don’t meet Naylor, in Wasdale – a quiet, almost inaccessible hamlet scattered in the foreboding gloom

around Wastwater, the deepest lake in England – I get a sense of his indelible presence. Indeed, it is here, in the shadow of Scafell Pike, that Naylor’s father taught him the ways of a sheepherder and where, at the age of 27, he would buy his own farm. But it is for his prowess on the fells, high above his grazing flock, that Naylor is known today. With races held over the ancient footpaths and coffin roads that wind across the hill tops, fell running has existed in the north of England for at least 150 years. It is a demanding and technical endurance sport, and Naylor – known locally as ‘Iron Joss’ for his ability to run through debilitating injury and some of the worst storms in living memory – is indisputably one of the greats. When we do speak, Naylor apologises. As it transpires, I had just missed him – he had been in the next field over, cleaning sheep. I tell him not to worry and that my trip was not wasted as I’d been able to cycle on the empty and challenging roads of the Lakes. Naylor is taken aback. “Oh I wouldn’t cycle here,” he tells me in a broad Cumbrian accent,

his voice as quick and light as he is across the fells. “The roads can be very bad. I’ve had a lot of crashes – I’ve come off at least nine times, but then these things happen, don’t they. I’ve just been a bit unfortunate.” “A bit unfortunate” is Naylor’s typically stoic attitude to what writer and fell running expert, Richard Askwith, describes as being “accident prone to an almost laughable degree”. However, the myth of Joss was founded not just on his unsurpassed successes on the fells, but also the mental fortitude he needed to run in the first place. “When I was younger I had a lot of problems with my back,” he tells me, “and eventually, when I was about 20, I was operated on. But about six or seven months later I jumped this wire fence and landed on a bit of slate that stuck out of the ground, right at the bottom of my back where I’d had my operation.” Naylor was in a straightjacket for six weeks and doctors advised against ever going back to work, let alone running. He didn’t listen and, in 1960, at

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Left: Doctors botched an operation to remove the cartilage in Naylor’s right knee when he was 18 and he is unable to straighten his leg, lending his running a peculiar, idiosyncratic style.

the age of 24, Naylor was invited to enter the Mountain Trial, a gruelling 18-mile fell race that includes nearly one-and-a-half miles of climbing. Though he had to contend with the disapproval of his parents (“In them days if you went for a run you were called a silly bugger”), and the fact he didn’t own any shorts or running shoes, Naylor accepted. “I wore my big work boots, cut the legs off my trousers and off I went,” he remembers. “By the third checkpoint I was well in the lead, but as I came over the top of the next hill, I got cramp in both legs because of the operations and my circulation not being quite right. But I still finished the race.” The next year Naylor ran it again, winning by half an hour. Though he was disqualified because he missed a checkpoint, it was, as he says, his “baptism into fell running”. Apart from the years when it was cancelled for bad weather, and the Foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001, Naylor has run every Mountain Trial since. This year was his 53rd. Naylor never took up running professionally but rather continued to tend his sheep, fitting what little training he could around his commitments on the farm. Yet he would go on to set an incredible series of records. From 1971 to 1975, he held the Lake District 24-hour fell

record, scaling 72 peaks in 23 hours and 11 minutes – which stood until 1988. Another, set in 1986 when he was 50, saw Naylor complete a series of 214 summits, known as the Wainwright Round, in seven days, one hour and 45 minutes. It stood until 2014. Naylor’s greatest record, however, is also the one that remains unbroken. The National Three Peaks Challenge is a race to the highest mountains of England, Scotland and Wales – Scafell Pike, Ben Nevis and Snowden – within 24 hours, including driving time. In 1971, Naylor did it in under 12 hours. Together with lorry driver Frank Davies, who drove him between the peaks in a rally-specification Ford Capri, Naylor set a record in driving rain that will probably never be beaten. “It was just one of those magic things,” he tells me. Naylor has never stopped running, and in 2006, aged 70, he climbed 70 Lakeland fell tops, covering over 50 miles, in less than 21 hours. But for many in the Lake District, Naylor is a hero not for his records and indefatigable spirit, but for his work championing the Lakes and raising money for local causes – most recently running in memory of his father for the Brathay Trust, which supports disadvantaged young people in the area.

I ask him how the Lakes have changed over his lifetime and Naylor becomes animated with a passion that belies his age: “Our valley was one of the nicest in the Lake District, probably in the country, but it started deteriorating in the 1950s. Since the National Trust became responsible for the Lakes, they’ve put in car parks and let the walls go down; the bracken is about twice the size and there are briars everywhere. It’s no longer the valley I grew up in.” But Naylor has tried to do what he can. “The first thing I did when I got to Wasdale was repair all the walls, and it looks so much better. It looks cared for. It’s how the Lake District should be.” In 1976, Naylor was awarded an MBE for services to fell running, but despite his success he was never tempted to leave the area. Instead, Naylor has become an integral part of Lakeland culture. The legacy of ‘Iron Joss’ is sure to live on long after he finally leaves the fells – not that he shows any signs of going just yet. I ask Naylor if he will ever stop running. “Oh, I don’t think I ever will,” he replies. “I’ve been lucky enough to spend all my life in the Lakes, and I’ve always had a pair of little legs that can climb and run. As long as I can I’ll carry on going out on the fells. It’s been my life.”

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28 Years for which Joss Naylor held the Wainwright Round record.

53 Number of Mountain Trials Naylor has run.

2926 Distance climbed to set the record for the Three Peaks Challenge (metres).

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AGRICULTURE

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Avaunt travels to the Outer Hebrides to visit the farms fuelling a global health phenomenon – seaweed. Words: David Hellqvist, Photography: Matt Stuart

Farming seaweed

On 16th August 1896, miners working in Klondike, north-west Canada, struck gold. In the coming years, thousands of hopeful prospectors would be drawn to the Yukon, close to the Alaskan border. To reach the mines, many would travel through the ports of Dyea and Skagway in south-east Alaska, from where they would follow either the Chilkoot or the White Pass trails to the Yukon River and sail down to the Klondike. Prospectors had to bring a year’s supply of food on the journey to avoid starvation. The Great Klondike Gold Rush might have made plenty of men rich, but it was no easy feat – many gave up and went home, or died trying. In such conditions, especially when the weather turned, it was crucial to have the right gear: protective and durable clothing that kept the elements out and lasted the duration of the ‘tour’. Railroad conductor C.C. Filson got his timing right when he decided to change his career: In 1897, he opened up ‘C.C. Filson’s Pioneer Alaska Clothing and Blanket Manufacturers’ in Seattle, supplying the prospectors with what they needed to succeed and survive. Today Filson, now with almost 120

years of experience, still seeks to provide those who have to brave the elements for work with durable and reliable clothing.Though the age of the gold prospector has long passed, and is long lamented, people are still taking on Mother Nature to harvest her treasures – as is the case with Martin Macleod and his colleagues from The Hebridean Seaweed Company. Avaunt travelled to Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, north-west Scotland, to discover the process behind harvesting seaweed and to find out what kind of workwear is needed to cope in the Hebridean climate. Can you explain what your company does and what your role is? We’re the largest processor of sea plants in the UK – we harvest approximately 4,000 tons of various different seaweeds every year. We started the company in 2005 and today I am the managing director. How long have you been doing this and is it a profession for which you can train? I have been working in the seaweed industry since I was 16, so 25 years. There’s no education per se – you learn the business as you go along.

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Previous spread: Martin, the owner of the Hebridean Seaweed Company, guides his colleague Calum towards a good patch of seaweed. Shirts and gilet by Filson.

Below: View of old fishing vessels in the Stornoway Harbour on the Isle of Lewis, the most northern and exposed part of Scotlandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Outer Hebrides.

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Right: Ian, a seaweed processor, who works at the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s factory where the harvested seaweed is dried and milled. Shirt and waistcoat by Filson.

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Top left: Ken ties up the harvester Blue Sky. Shirt and gilet by Filson. Bottom left: Calum takes his old harvester out for one last run before it is exchanged for a new model. Seaweed harvesters can cost up to £80,000 and are custom-designed with Martin’s input. Shirt by Filson. Right: Ken heads back to shore after a long day of work – the harvesters wake up with the tides and are out on the market by 6am, working through to 4pm. Shirt, gilet and beanie by Filson.

THERE HAS BEEN AN INDUSTRY HARVESTING AND GATHERING SEAWEED IN THE OUTER HEBRIDES SINCE THE 17TH CENTURY.

FRONT

Is the seaweed industry a big business for the Hebrides? The Hebridean Islands have large stocks of wild seaweeds so we take sustainability very seriously and ensure we carry out sustainable harvesting, for which we have won a number of international awards. It’s an important industry for us on the Isle of Lewis, as we create much-needed employment.

How long has it been an industry in this region and how far does interest in your products reach? There has been an industry harvesting and gathering seaweed in the Outer Hebrides since the 17th century. Today, we have worked to modernise the industry and the market is growing quickly; we are seeing demand outstrip supply. We sell our products all over the world, where they are used in everything from agriculture and horticulture to cosmetics. We have even supplied over 15 film sets with seaweed, from Pirates of the Caribbean to the latest Star Wars film!

Tell us about the harvesting process… Seaweed can be harvested by hand, which is very labour intensive, and it can be done by boat, as we do; although we also buy seaweed from manual harvesters and pay them according to the weight they cut. An average manual harvester can cut around three to four tons per day but our mechanical harvesters can cut around 15 tons per day, so it’s a lot more effective.

Styling by Dan May

What happens once you’ve collected the seaweed? We bring it to our processing facility where we dry it and process it into granular or powder products.

What do you wear at work… what’s your ‘uniform’? We have to wear warm and hardwearing clothing to cope with demands of the job. Normally fleeces and, dependent on the weather, also hats or beanies. In the winter we will wear survival suits to deal with the cold weather and we always make sure to wear our lifejackets. filson.com/london-store

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Space Time Continuum Kate Jackling

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Left: Cobra 25 pack by Montane. Right: Spartan Ultra GPS watch by Suunto

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MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER BROWN P H O T O G R A P H Y: JA M E S M C NAUG H T WORDS: GEORGE UPTON S T Y L I N G : D A N M AY

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In April 2011, American photographer Michael Christopher Brown was embedded with rebel soldiers in the Libyan city of Misrata when he was hit by a mortar round. The revolution against the 42-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi was Brown’s first experience of conflict and, in Misrata, only two months into the revolution, he would find himself caught up in some of the fiercest fighting of the war – the front line shifting constantly from street to street, riddled by sniper fire and shelled indiscriminately by pro-Gaddafi forces. As he was rushed to hospital, falling in and out of consciousness and bleeding heavily from his chest, shoulder and arm, Brown would experience first-hand the grim reality of war. He had lost almost half the blood in his body and needed two transfusions, but would survive; his friends and fellow photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, who were also caught in the blast, did not. It was one of the darkest hours for photojournalism. The Libyan conflict was a crucially formative experience for Brown. During the eight months that he spent in the country – following the rebels from city to city until eventually, reaching Sirte, he witnessed the capture and killing of Gaddafi – Brown began to develop a new approach to his work, eschewing a traditional journalistic objectivity in an attempt to come to terms with the conflict that he was witnessing. “For about 12 years I had been working on commissions and projects, but I never really knew why I was doing them,” he tells me. “It was only in Libya that I began to realise who I was as a photographer. Since then I’ve been recognising the role I have in the story, developing a vision that I found there.” It was this realisation – that he should not only document the war but his experience of it as well – that has formed an intimate and engaging portrait of the conflict, and marks Brown as one of the most innovative documentary photographers working today. I meet Brown in London. He’s in town for the annual general meeting of Magnum Photos – the illustrious photographic cooperative founded in 1947 by Henri-Cartier Bresson and Robert Capa, to which he was nominated in 2013. We sit by a quiet part of the Thames, looking across the river to the traffic on the embankment. He speaks slowly and carefully and without disfluencies, his voice only ever faltering, almost imperceptibly, at the mention of Hetherington and Hondros. I ask questions about Libya and how the reality of conflict differed from his expectations and, as he pauses to consider his answers, staring, brow slightly furrowed, into the murky indifferent water, I wonder how it is possible to sit here, still and calm, having experienced such visceral and bloody conflict. “I had these ideas about what it would be like before I went,” he says. “I had watched TV shows and read the news, and met people who had been, but then you get there and you witness such extremes of human experience. There’s always so much more happening around the scene. One moment it can be just like this,” he gestures at the traffic across the river. “Then a few blocks away there’s smoke and sounds, and you know that’s where the fighting is. That really played with my mind.”

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“ W H E N W E TA L K A B O U T L I T E R AT U R E , W H E T H E R W E ’ R E D I S C U S S I N G H E M I N G WAY O R J O Y C E , W E R A R E LY M E N T I O N H O W T H E Y W R I T E O R T H E E Q U I P M E N T T H E Y U S E . T H E Y ’ R E B O T H B R I L L I A N T I N T H E I R O W N WAY B U T I T ’ S T H E C O N T E N T T H AT ’ S

Left: MICHAEL wears jacket by Officine Generale and jumper by Berluti

I M P ORTA N T, A N D I T ’ S T H E S A M E W I T H PH O T O G R A PH Y.”

A week after he arrived in Libya, Brown broke his camera and instead started using his iPhone, processing his photographs through the Hipstamatic app. He was only able to capture one frame every 15 seconds, and it would often crash, deleting his work, but he quickly discovered his phone could be a considerable asset. With smartphones ubiquitous in a revolution organised through social media, Brown was no longer identifiable as a photographer, as an external observer, and could experience the action from within the crowd. “People don’t see the phone as a professional piece of equipment,” he explains. “It’s less threatening; they approach you in a different way.” The intimate access he gained as a result, standing shoulder to shoulder with the rebel fighters, gave him a unique perspective on the war, but it also raises questions over how documentary photographers should operate in conflict zones. I ask him whether it is possible to maintain an ethical distance; whether, when he is so involved with one side of the war, he can accurately record the events of the conflict. Brown is unequivocal: “For me the question is, ‘What is accurate?’ Photography can be very subjective, and as a photographer you’re constantly making decisions about what to include or not include in a frame. In Libya there were numerous times when you would see the body of a government soldier and the revolutionaries would be celebrating, showing me these peace signs with their hands. Sometimes I would try and crop them out of my frame – perhaps it was only happening because I was there – but at the same time I have a presence. Does that mean I should include it in my frame or pretend it’s not there?” It was through experiences like this that Brown realised the only way to accurately present the war would be to shoot it as he was experiencing it: the brutality of war, the charred bodies and child soldiers – as well as the mundane, laughing with his colleagues as they prepared to sleep, or the lion abandoned in the Tripoli zoo. It was a decision that would come to define his experience throughout the rest of the war and culminated in a book, Libyan Sugar, published in 2014. Much has been made of the book’s graphic, unflinching representation of the revolution, but it is equally notable for the juxtaposition Brown makes between the scenes that he saw unfold in front of him and the anxious emails and Skype conversations with his family back in Washington state. More than just a record of the Libyan conflict over eight months (though, as Brown points out, it could be used as such), Libyan Sugar is an intimate diary, forming a personal vignette that is far more engaging, and captures the events of the revolution with a greater honesty, than the ostensibly impartial images that illus-

trate news reports. Presented without captions, you discover the conflict as Brown did – trying to piece together images and experiences in an attempt to understand what was happening, only to realise that the closer you get to the confusing, disorientating war, the more difficult it is to comprehend. Brown was raised in the Skagit Valley, a small farming community close to the Canadian border and the Pacific Ocean. It was there, in the tranquillity of the rural north-west, that he would be introduced to photography by his father – an ear, nose and throat surgeon – who kept a small black-and-white darkroom. His father would leave Polaroids taken during surgery lying around the house and Brown cites his early exposure to these graphic images as an immunisation against the mutilation and bloodshed he would witness in Libya and other conflict zones. After obtaining a master’s degree in documentary photography in 2003, he worked on domestic projects, interning at the State Journal Register and National Geographic. But it was the inspiration he found in New York, living in an 11-storey warehouse building called the Kibbutz in Brooklyn, that sparked his interest in going to war. With intimate access to the work of conflict photographers Stanley Greene, Kadir van Lohuizen and David Alan Harvey, as well as Tim Hetherington, Brown developed the curiosity for conflict, so alien from his peaceful upbringing in Washington state, that would eventually lead to Libya. Brown defies easy classification. Despite producing his most celebrated work during the Libyan and Congolese conflicts, he is not a war photographer. Nor can he be described as a photojournalist, though, as he tells me, he takes care to record events, places and names accurately; in Libya, Brown found the neutral approach of a photojournalist hampered his ability to capture the complex, dynamic conflict he was experiencing. Rather he is simply a photographer, using the camera as a way to try to understand and make sense of the confusing and complex world that we live in. Later, as we’re walking back along the river, I ask him if he would ever return to Libya. As with all my questions he pauses and considers his answer, before saying with typical honesty and humility: “With these projects it’s hard to say I do it for the people, because I don’t. I do it for myself and if I go back it is because I am curious, I want to find out more. The news reports talk of saving the world and it’s a very humanistic idea, it’s a great pursuit, but it’s rare that you can do that. Instead it’s important to do something you love, because that passion shines through your work. There’s something useful in that; people will understand it.”

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Left: Ball Watch Company for BMW GMT. Right: Bell & Ross BR-X1 Hyperstellar

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P.110 Cartier Santos 100 Carbon Up until 1904, watches had only been worn on the wrist by ladies, as they usually lacked a pocket. But then came along Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont, whose daredevil antics in the skies above Paris prompted him to make a propitious request to the company fronting him, Louis Cartier: a watch he could read from his wrist, thus freeing his hands to properly wrestle with the controls. It started as a one-off, but word of mouth meant the orders flooded in. Its revolutionary-in-its-own-right square case design has endured ever since. This ultra-modern, steroidal version is coated with scratchproof diamond-like carbon, making it more suited to the Batplane than a monoplane. £6,100, cartier.co.uk

P.116 Ball Watch Company for BMW GMT True story: the expression ‘on the ball’ stems from a 19th-century Ohio jeweller by the name of Webster Clay Ball, who kept America’s burgeoning rail network on time (and, crucially, crash free) by kitting out conductors with his super-precise pocket chronometers. These days, Ball Watch Company’s Swiss-made wristwatches are a tribute to this illustrious past – except for this particular number, designed in collaboration with a very different form of high-speed transportation. The cool, clean lines and stippled dial could be straight from the dashboard of an M6. £3,480, ballwatch.com

P.112 Omega Globemaster Annual Calendar Though it borrows design cues from the Constellation watches of the ’50s – especially that gorgeously faceted ‘pie pan’ dial – the tradition stops there. The Globemaster is in fact a deceptive distillation of almost every innovation that’s been pioneered chez Omega since the mega-brand patented its revolutionary Co-Axial escapement in 1999. Within lies the first Swiss Federal Institute of Metrology-certified Master Chronometer movement, which functions properly when exposed to magnetic fields of 15,000 gauss. £16,325, omegawatches.com P.113 Breitling Avenger Bandit Fellow Swiss watchmaker IWC may have the licence to use the Top Gun brand on its pilot watches, but chances are that the best of the US navy aviators from the elite school in Miramar would actually wear a Breitling – the first choice of nearly every pro pilot out there (though Bremont aren’t far behind). This particular chronograph is a hefty 45mm diameter, but the choice of titanium metal case keeps things light, as well as particularly suited to the paintjob on an F/A-18 Hornet. £4,810, breitling.com P.114 Breguet Héritage Grande Date The modern incarnation of 18th-century Parisian watchmaker AbrahamLouis Breguet pays regular homage to the person most consider to be the forefather of modern horology. But while the man himself would never have created a pocket watch with this wristwatch’s curvilinear, or tonneau, case shape, it’s a voluptuously comfortable thing to wear. The classic calling card of Monsieur Breguet is present and correct in the form of the dial’s mesmeric jigsaw of hand-engraved guilloche patterns. £31,500, breguet.com

P.117 Bell & Ross BR-X1 Hyperstellar If Cartier pioneered the square pilot watch with its Santos, then Bell & Ross has taken the format stratospheric, ever since the BR 01 Instrument’s debut in 2005 – quite literally in the case of this year’s X1 sci-fi switch-up. It’s not just about the NASA colour scheme however: its lightweight square 45mm case is protected from impacts during missions by a peripheral protective shell of micro-blasted grade-five titanium and rubber, while the bezel’s protective insert is blue-anodised aluminium. The whole construct is at once utilitarian and cutting-edge – like the International Space Station in miniature. £14,400, bellross.com P.118 Bremont America’s Cup Regatta OTUSA Chronograph The plucky Brits at Bremont have made a sensible leap from pilot watches to sailing watches – especially as the current incarnation of the America’s Cup involves catamarans that rely on aerodynamics as much as aeroplanes do. This contemporary new take on the regatta watch, designed and built with the cup’s defenders Oracle Team USA, allows its skipper Jimmy Spithill to easily monitor the five-minute countdown while he and his competitors jostle for the start line. £4,995, bremont.com P.120 Nomos Glashütte Tetra Neomatik A perfectly square wristwatch in dress watch proportions would be impossible to pull off for most other watchmakers, but the Germanic genius of Nomos Glashütte is in its signature Bauhaus style (a style that lends perfectly to right angles and sharp facets) – honed to perfection by their East Berlin design studio, then realised entirely in-house at their factory in the Ore Mountains. Nomos are having fun with colour at the moment, but their original, crisp monochrome is for the geometric purists. £2,900, nomos-glashuette.com

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Above left: KRISTJAN wears jacket by Victorinox, trousers by Patagonia, boots by Timberland. Above right: KOLFINA wears top and gilet by Patagonia

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Above left: ELIN wears coat by Woolrich John Rich & Bros, trousers by Gant, boots by Red Wing

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Right: Fisherman wears coat by Canada Goose

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Left, shirt by Filson, waistcoat by Victorinox, beanie by PS by Paul Smith. Right, jacket by Filson, shirt and beanie modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own

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Above: KRISTJAN wears coat by Hackett, jumper by Bally, trousers by Moncler, boots by Red Wing

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161 Local Production: Gott Fólk Heimir Jónasson Models: Daniel, Elin, Kolfina, Kristjan @ Eskimo Models Photography Assistants: Alex Webb Jodie Herbage Thanks: Gréta Sigurðardóttir Hotel Egilsen hotelegilsen.is Hotel Búðir hotelbudir.is Iceland Responsible Fisheries

Above: KRISTJAN wears jumpers and trousers by Prada

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Change in the Va l ley Matilda Temperley

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Virgo Interferometer Davide Castelvecchi

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Newfound land Tobias Harvey

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A ntibiotic Resistance Brendan Borrell

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Mr Le Mans Rory FH Smith

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Exploring Mexico's Hidden Caves Klaus Thymann

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A laskan Bush Pi lots Ben Saunders

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cHANge IN THe VALLeY

PHOTOGRAPHE R MATILDA TE M P ER LEY R EF LEC TS O N THE I MPAC T OF MODER N I S ATIO N ON THE TRADITIONA L TR I BA L LI F ES TY LES I N THE O MO VA LLEY

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Approximately 40,000 semi-nomadic Suri live to the west of the Omo River in south-west Ethiopia and the stick fight, the donga, is an important part of their culture. The tournaments begin at the start of the rainy season and continue for three months. The winner of a fight will knock his opponent to the ground but, while injuries are common, to cause death is strictly forbidden. The Ethiopian authorities have unsuccessfully tried to prohibit the donga on the grounds of it being “too violent”. But, as one Suri man said to me in 2015, “The donga can’t stop because if we don’t fight, our fathers won’t give us any cattle to marry with and the girls won’t choose us.”

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“I have stopped fighting the donga because I went to school and got an education, but it’s in our culture so it doesn’t mean other people will stop. It is like a game for us. It’s like Wayne Rooney when he plays football, it’s the same here – the girls watch us and we become like heroes.” – Suri man, 2015

Though the donga is an integral part of life for the Suri, the tournaments are becoming less frequent. Today, to stop tourism encouraging the practice, the local police don’t allow the Suri to take foreigners to the donga.

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The Omo River rises in Ethiopia’s mountainous highlands before emptying, 760 kilometres later, in Kenya’s Lake Turkana. The crossroads of human migration for thousands of years, the Omo Valley has a marked diversity of inhabitants. At least 10 distinct ethnic groups occupy the borders between Kenya, South Sudan and Ethiopia and like most photographers I was drawn to the Omo Valley not by its landscape but by its people – the Hamar, the Suri, the Mursi and the Kara. Since my first visit to the valley in 2007 I have witnessed a change in both the landscape and the people, accelerated by the construction of the East African superhighway, the tourist dollar and, more than anything else, the agricultural development in the area. In the past few years, the urbanising, industrialising Ethiopian government and multinational corporations have cleared an estimated 1,350 square miles of land for commercial farms. While modernisation is inevitable across the world, in the Omo it appears to be at the expense

of the inhabitants. The government’s ‘villagisation’ programme, which moves people into ‘model villages’ in order to clear land for commercial farms, has been plagued with reports of human rights abuses. The fate of the Omo Valley was sealed in 2006 when, upstream of the valley’s arterial Omo River, the government began constructing the ‘Pride of Ethiopia’ – the highly ambitious and controversial Gibe III hydroelectric dam. As well as allowing for large-scale commercial farming through irrigated agriculture, Gibe III stands to make Ethiopia a major energy exporter. The dam has been described as a potential humanitarian disaster for the estimated 500,000 people who live along the river and its terminal in Lake Turkana. It is thought that the agriculture enabled by the dam is expected to considerably decrease the volume of the river and therefore Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world. The subsequent increase in lake salinity and the decrease in the nutrient-rich annual

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floods are predicted to cause food shortages, increasing the risk of armed inter-ethnic conflict over grazing land. The government’s stance in the face of criticism over Gibe III’s social and environmental impact is to accuse its detractors of “patronising the national interests of Ethiopia and romanticising traditional valley lifestyles”. In the north of the country I am often told that “some sacrifices have to be made for development,” especially in a country with exponential population growth where food insecurity is part of everyday life. Trade-offs in a developing nation are inevitable, but in removing the right to self-determination for the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the dam, the Ethiopian government is abusing a basic human right. The warring inhabitants of the Omo Valley, with very little formal education and no cohesive voice, are pitted against a repressive government devoid of political pluralism, with a single-minded drive for industry.

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Below: When I first went out to the Omo Valley, I decided to photograph the people in front of a backdrop to ensure the image focused on them rather than their environment. It was a nicer experience, more inclusive, as the community would get involved in the process and I was able to photograph them on their terms.

Right: Barsune, Barsue, Bargon, Bargoga, Bardossa, Barcutel, Tutugo, Barcutel and Bardesho. Although the Suri are not yet subject to as many tourists as the neighbouring Mursi, it is poignant that the local guides describe those in the most-visited villages as “looking like the Mursi”, in finery that is as exotic to them as it is to us.

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A Mursi woman with scars on her skin. These are created by making an incision with a thorn and then filling the wound with ash. Worn as a sign of beauty, there are some patterns that are more fashionable than others and the design often depends on the tradition of the family.

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A Mursi woman wearing ear plugs but not lip plates. She is part of the first generation of Mursi that wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t wear lip plates because of changing times and educational drives by various groups that tell the girls itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a bad cultural practice.

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Previous spread: A symbol of wealth, cows are central to Suri life. They provide sustenance, clothing and meat, as well as being a link with the spirit world through sacrifice. In the government’s settlement programme, there is concern that in the new villages there is not sufficient land allowance for the Suri’s cattle. Here, a cow’s jugular is pierced with an arrow and blood for drinking is collected in a calabash. The wound on the cow’s neck is closed with wet mud. Left: Suri women normally make their lip plates from clay decorated with ochre and charcoal but here wood has been used. When I asked this woman why she chose an unusual material and shape, she simply said that it was because her mother had done the same.

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In many of the cultures of the Omo Valley, a girl’s lower lip is pierced around the time of puberty. The hole is initially held open by a small stick, then a wooden plug, and over time progressively larger plates are inserted in order to stretch it, as seen in this image of Achuba, a Mursi woman whom I first photographed in 2009 [page 165], and again in 2013. Lip plating is an expression of beauty and adulthood but the government has been discouraging the practice.

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The Mursi have become accustomed to tourists descending on their villages every day. AtÂ first light convoys of tourists roll into the villages that are closest to the small town of Jinka. For a moment all is quiet asÂ the women disappear into their homes. A few minutes later they return, their heads adorned with saucepans, belts and baskets. Now, rather than painting themselves in a traditional manner, they are more likely to elaborate their paintwork in an attempt to earn money for pictures.

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The Mursi do not always wear their lip plates – they are easily taken out and put back in. If a Mursi woman’s husband dies she will not wear a lip plate and, unless she is young and without children, it is unlikely she will wear one again.

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Previous spread: Hamar women gather at the end of the harvest for a bull jump, a festival that marks a Hamar boy’s transition into manhood. Before the jump, recent initiates (the maz) whip the women of the bull jumper’s family with long canes, causing fresh welts that are proudly displayed as declarations of love and loyalty. At dusk the initiate (the ukuli) must run naked over a line of cattle four times while the maz hold them in position. Only after he has achieved this is he considered eligible for marriage. Left: “We did not dress like this in the past, we had cow skins like you see in the village. But the government is coming here and they are giving us clothes so this is changing.” – Suri woman, 2015

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“The tourists tell us what colours to paint. Someone said paint half your face white and yellow, someone asked the men to paint their whole bodies, some said paint small patterns.” – Suri boy, 2015

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Previous spread: Lanjou, Goguri, Naterre and Nakaman from Regina, the Suri’s most accessible village and therefore the most affected by tourism. “Five years ago, I thought we could be responsible, now it’s obvious that people like the Mursi

would be happier without tourists. I hate bringing people here now.” – Ethiopian guide, 2015

Left: It’s often said that the larger the girl’s lip plate the higher the price the groom’s family must pay, but this is untrue as many marriages have been prearranged and the bride’s price agreed before the lip plating process starts. It is up to the girl to decide the size of her lip plate.

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Below: With traditional grazing grounds being confiscated to make way for commercial farms, traditional livelihoods are under threat. A generation of Suri risk finding themselves with no skills to offer the new market place.

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Suri policemen Barcomoro and Leo with Nachulka. In recent years there has been an increase in the number of Suri in local police forces around Kibish, but there has also been a rise in alcoholism. As one woman said to me, “What else is there to spend money on? If we’re not in the fields we come here and drink.”

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Omo: Change in the Valley is available from matildatemperley.com

The small town of Kibish, the capital of the Suri district, where new roads to the area are being built, opening trading routes to both the Ethiopian highlanders andÂ foreign investors. The movement of the nomadic Suri into new permanent settlements has been plagued with controversy and reports of human rights abuses.

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V I I FE TE

RGO NT ER— ROME— R

EX PL OR I NG THE SCIE NCE BE HIND T H E SEA RCH FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVE S

WOR D S : DAV I DE CA S TELV EC C HI

PHO TO GR A PH Y: EN R IC O S AC C H E T T I

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Previous spread: Worker wearing dust-proof overalls to protect against contaminating Virgo’s highly sensitive equipment.

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Left: The mirrors of Virgo are isolated from seismic vibrations from the ground through the superattenuator, a sophisticated system of cascaded filters capable of cancelling off noise in the frequency range where the detector operates.

In space, no one can hear you scream – or so read the tagline to Alien, the 1979 science-fiction classic. The producers’ reasoning, besides a great bit of marketing, was that sound waves need some type of medium in which to travel, and the vacuum of space doesn’t fit the bill. Or does it? In fact, as Albert Einstein said 100 years ago, space and time have a stretchy, supple nature. You can wiggle them simply by waving your hands. If your arms were large enough, and you could move them fast enough, the disturbances you would create could even be audible. In practice, picking up these so-called gravitational waves is an almost hopeless task. Even the ripples produced by a cosmic explosion of epic proportions would be extremely difficult to detect by the time they reached Earth. Yet proving they exist would help to confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the universal law of gravity that shaped the cosmos and explain how we all got here. Fortunately, physicists love a hopeless task. It may have taken them a century but earlier this year scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) announced that they had “heard” something far out in the universe. They had recorded a collision between two black holes, which merged to be as large as 62 suns combined, marking the first direct detection of gravitational waves. It was a major test for Einstein’s theory, and the most sensational evidence to date that black holes – which no one has ever actually seen – exist. Although the nature of gravitational waves is rather different to that of acoustic ones, they do readily translate into sound. The black hole

event, which LIGO recorded in September 2015, sounded like a bird’s chirp. It had been resonating across the universe for a long time, perhaps billions of years, but we were only able to catch its last gasp, a mere fifth of a second, and then it was gone. But the discovery opened a whole new field of exploration, giving scientists another way to observe space. Later this year, LIGO’s two huge, five-milelong detectors in the United States will resume listening, flanked this time by a European counterpart, the Italy-based Virgo. For centuries, we have observed the visual side of the sky. Now the time has come to add a soundtrack to the movie of the universe. The challenge of detecting gravitational waves can be summed up in one number: 10-21. Ten to the negative 21. One part in 10 to the 21. One sextillionth. That was the size of the disturbance in space that LIGO and Virgo were designed to detect. To put that in context: scientists measure the distance between the Earth and the Moon to plus or minus two centimetres, an accuracy of 10-11. To find gravitational waves you have to be 100 billion times more accurate. It’s equivalent to measuring the change of a hair’s width in the distance from the Sun to the nearest star. “When an engineer hears 10-21, they say, ‘You are out of your mind’,” said Rai Weiss, the 83-year-old who is considered the principal inventor of LIGO, in a talk the day after the announcement in February. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor was speaking in the same building where, in 1994, he and his colleagues secured

support from the National Science Foundation, a US funding agency, for an undertaking that many thought was impossible and which many scientists opposed. At around the same time in Europe, a group of French and Italian physicists were making a similar case to their own governments for a project called Virgo. (LIGO ended up costing $620 million, Virgo around €200 million.) The theme of insanity pops up again and again when you talk to the protagonists of this story. Adalberto Giazotto, a co-founder of Virgo, said that building the massive detectors was a “folly”. And Barry Barish, who served as the laboratory’s director for more than a decade from 1994 and is the person most credited for making it happen, said: “This could only be done because the word ‘crazy’ applies to it.” Virgo’s single machine in the countryside outside Pisa, and LIGO’s twin detectors, one in Washington state and one in Louisiana, differ in a number of technical details, but they are all based on the same principle. They both split a laser beam in two, and then shoot the two halves down huge steel pipes arranged at right angles to each other, forming an ‘L’. The two arms are each as long as a large airport runway (2.5 miles for LIGO, nearly two miles for Virgo) and all the air has been sucked out of them. At the opposite ends, the beams bounce off mirrors, and – we’ll skip some of the more technical details – when they come back they are compared to each other. The slightest mismatch could mean that either the mirrors or the laser device are shaking. But if you keep everything absolutely still and see mismatches anyway, it must be space itself – that is, the distance between

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the laser and the mirrors – that has changed. Einstein’s theory predicted this would happen during the passage of a gravitational wave. The reason for the ‘L’? Comparing the two beams reveals much tinier distortions than monitoring a single one as gravitational waves tend to shrink one arm while stretching the other. Keeping the mirrors still means keeping them really still. Things that can throw the detectors off-kilter include nearby traffic, ringing telephones, aeroplanes taking off or waves crashing on beaches hundreds of miles away. But perhaps the most insidious form of noise is that produced by the contraption itself, by the laser’s energy, for example, making the mirrors vibrate “like violin strings”, in the words of Virgo director Fulvio Ricci. To get the detectors to perform as required can take months or even years of fine-tuning, he added, and “you have to work with a knife between your teeth”. Both LIGO and Virgo ran for several years in the 2000s, mostly to develop their techniques; they knew they probably weren’t sensitive enough to make detections. Then, early this decade, they both shut down for lengthy overhauls aimed at improving their sensitivity by lowering that troublesome unwanted noise. On 15th September 2015, LIGO had not officially restarted but both detectors were on, running preliminary tests. That was when the chirp arrived, in the middle of the night. The Americans had got one over on Virgo, whose upgrade was only completed this year. The two teams, however, form a single collaboration and news of the discovery was jointly published. Tiny as the waves were, the event that generated them certainly was not. At its peak, the collision of the black holes radiated out as much energy in gravitational waves as all the stars in all the galaxies in the entire observable universe, 50 times over. Even after travelling at the speed of light for more than a billion years to get to Earth, they still inundated our planet with an amount of energy comparable to the brightness of a full moon.

One of the suspended benches supporting Virgo’s under-vacuum photodetectors.

So why weren’t the waves easy to detect? The reason even such strong waves are so hard to capture, said LIGO physicist Laura Cadonati, is that the fabric of space-time is “an extremely stiff medium”: bending it by an appreciable amount – that tiny one part in a sextillion – takes a staggering amount of energy, and even then it barely displaces LIGO’s beams. According to Weiss, LIGO’s discovery of gravitational waves marked “a wonderful closure to a tortured history”. Einstein first proposed his general theory of relativity in November 1915. It said that space and time can bend, a bit like the surface of a mattress if you place a bowling ball, representing a celestial body, in the middle of it. Massive objects exert a gravitational attraction because they warp that fabric, and smaller objects orbit them in a similar way to how marbles rolled on to the mattress would race towards the heavier ball. The following year, Einstein realised that according to his own equations, accelerating masses – anything from waving hands to colliding black holes – should produce space-time ripples, that is, gravitational waves. His 1916 paper on the subject contained a crucial – and rare – mistake, but he then published a corrected version in 1918. But because of subtleties in the theory many physicists doubted that the waves were real, and in 1936 Einstein reversed himself, saying that perhaps the sceptics were right. By then, however, Einstein’s general relativity had fallen into a dark corner of science. For several decades, most researchers regarded the whole space-time-bending thing as a mathematical curiosity, with virtually no practical implications and little experimental evidence to support it. It was only in the late 1950s that mainstream physicists again began to show interest. Over the following decades, the story of gravitational waves went through several triumphs as well as setbacks. In the 1960s, Joe Weber, a former US navy commander and an ingenious inventor, was the first person to make a serious

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attempt at detecting them. He built solid aluminium cylinders that he thought would resonate at the passage of the waves and covered them with sensors, and in 1969 he announced that he was picking up gravitational waves on a regular basis. Weber’s work created a ruckus in the science world and many others raced to build their own detectors. But many researchers pointed out that Weber-like devices could not be sensitive enough to make a detection, unless all calculations of the waves’ expected strengths were way off. And it soon became clear that Weber had been deluding himself by cherry-picking his data. “He was a great

technologist, but a terrible scientist,” said Barish. “Still, if we hadn’t had Joe Weber,” said Harry Collins, a British science sociologist with an intimate knowledge of LIGO, “we would have no gravitational-wave detection nowadays. You need people to do impossible things.” The Weber controversy had not been fully resolved when, in 1974, two American radio astronomers made a genuine breakthrough: they found two neutron stars – compact remnants of exploded stars – that were slowly spiralling into each other. The implication was that the two orbs were losing energy by radiating it as gravitational waves, exactly as Einstein’s theory

predicted they should do. Although the astronomers had not actually detected the waves directly, most scientists saw it as convincing evidence of their existence. The pair, Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor, received a Nobel Prize in 1993. Meanwhile, US theoretician Kip Thorne, another co-founder of LIGO and a co-producer of the film Interstellar (noted for its realistic depictions of black holes), realised that the next task was to have a better mathematical grasp of what the waves might look like. This was essential if detectors were to have any hope of finding them and extracting useful information. After making progress with pen-and-paper

Two cameras observing a mirror at the end of one of Virgo’s 2.5-mile-long arms.

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techniques, researchers in the 1990s began to make detailed computer simulations of the last moments before two black holes collide. But the calculations got out of control and the programs kept crashing. “It was a pretty depressing time in the field,” said Frans Pretorius, a physicist now at Princeton University. “No one wanted to believe it, but perhaps there was something fundamentally ill-posed about Einstein’s equations that we couldn’t solve.” The relief came in 2005 when Pretorius, working alone, honed his calculations and succeeded in performing the first full computer simulation of a black-hole merger.

A so-called ‘Virgo payload’: the mirror (protected by a pink layer, to be removed at a later stage) is embedded into a structure, aimed to control its position with great accuracy. This structure will finally be suspended from a superattenuator to achieve the necessary isolation from ground vibrations.

But the fiascos were not over on the experimental side. In 2014, cosmologists with the BICEP2 experiment, a US-built telescope at the South Pole, announced that they had recorded indirect evidence of gravitational waves. They said that radiation left over from the big bang – which they had captured in exquisite, unprecedented detail – carried an imprint of gravitational waves produced at the very beginning of the universe. The discovery would have opened a new window on the first moments of creation. Within months, however, the team had to withdraw their claim as it became clear that a much more mundane source, interstellar dust, could

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mimic the signature of gravitational waves in BICEP2’s cosmic map. But there have been no such retractions at LIGO and Virgo. “I still pinch myself,” says Barish of the collaboration’s remarkable discovery. The two machines will now go on gathering more evidence of gravitational waves, validating each other’s findings and paving the way for more planned detectors in India and Japan. Together these huge experiments will help to produce an ever richer picture of this Einsteinian space oddity, adding to our fundamental understanding of the universe around us – and, perhaps, coining another killer tag line for a space movie.

NewfOU CHANNE LLING THE VICTORIAN S P I R I T OF EX P LOR ATIO N, PHO TO GR A PHER TOBI A S HA RV EY CAPTURE S THE RUGGE D LANDS CA P ES OF THE CA NA DI A N I S LA N D OF N EW F OU N DLA N D , ACCOMPANIE D BY LYRICAL DE SCRIPTIO NS F RO M JO S EPH BEETE J U KES ’ EXC URS IO N S I N AN D AB OUT NEWF OUN DL AN D, P U BLI SHED I N 1 8 4 2

NDLAND PHO TO GR A PHY: TOBI A S HA RV EY

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It was a singular thing to see this great lump of ice thus navigating on a voyage of its own, and not less interesting to speculate on its origin and history. It had probably been once much larger, and was now consummating its own destruction by journeying to the warmer regionsÂ of the south.

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It was impossible to get to St Johnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s without sailing down to Portugal Cove or round Cape St Francis, either way making a two daysâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; journey of it at least. I mention these facts as showing the difficulties of overland travelling in Newfoundland, even where roads are partially complete.

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If the reader will picture to himself a multitude of small fishing boats, varying in size; aÂ broken rocky shore, with a stunted wood and little patches of cleared and cultivated garden ground; one or two large-sized wooden houses, painted white, belonging to the merchants and a number of

unpainted wooden cottages scattered here and there at all possible angles with each other, perched upon rocks and hidden in nooks, belonging to the fishermen: if, I say, he can associate all these things in his fancy, he will have before him a tolerably correct notion of a Newfoundland settlement.

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The thick-bedded dark sandstones and conglomerates stand bold and bare in round-topped hills and precipices, 300 or 400 feet in height, with occasional fissures traversing their jagged cliffs, and the boiling waves of the Atlantic curling roundÂ their feet in white eddies, orÂ leaping against their sides with huge spouts of foam and spray.

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As I stood on the edge of the cliff, I was struck with the singular and picturesque beauty of the scene. TheÂ area is remarkable for the wildness of its rock and cliff scenery: nothing like a beach is to be found anywhere on this coast, the descent to the sea being always difficult and generally impracticable.

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The scattered wooden huts were empty and deserted, and the fish flakes and stages out of repair, as the people only reside there during the summer season.

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Right: At the mouth of the harbour on which stands a lighthouse, perched on the brink of a precipice, consisting of a square wooden house with a square dovecote-looking top for a lantern. It is, however, an effective and useful light.

A N T I B— I O T I c HOW EX PL OR AT IO N COULD HE LP C O NF RO N T T HE G R EAT E ST CHALLE NGE EV E R FACED BY HU M A NITY

WOR D S : BREN DA N B OR R ELL

A DDI TIO NA L WOR D S : P ROF ES S OR C HR I S D OWS O N

PHO T O G R A PH Y: DA N I E L S T I E R

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After four days trekking through the jungles of Borneo, the young army doctor sat on the wooden floor and was, at long last, face-to-face with the chief of the headhunters. The doctor, Charles Davis, his assistant and Michael Awang, a government health inspector, had been forced to take up their journey on foot when they reached the end of a small road and, later, finding themselves at a dark, languorous river, they continued in a motorised canoe until the stilted homes of Miruru village came into view. It was February 1968 – almost a decade since the health inspector had last visited the area as part of a yaws-eradication programme. Nineteen people had received a penicillin injection – the only record of antibiotic use in the village’s history. “Did your father ever tell you about the time that Michael came here and gave some injections?” Davis asked the headman. He nodded. “Those drugs don’t work anymore,” Davis said, “and I want to find out why.” He explained to the headman that certain bacteria in the guts of his people may somehow be preventing the antibiotics from working, even though they had never taken antibiotics themselves. Davis offered a bounty of tobacco to every adult, and sweets to every child, who participated in his study. All he needed in exchange was their faeces. When the headman explained the proposal to the village, the people laughed. “We’ll be happy to exchange anything the crazy white man wants,” they said. Back in the laboratory of the US Army Medical Research Unit in Kuala Lumpur, Davis isolated bacterial colonies from the samples he had collected and tested them against modern antibiotics, such as tetracycline and streptomycin. There he confirmed his greatest fears – two

Previous page: Petri dishes have been used for more than 100 years to culture and isolate different species of bacteria. They are still the bedrock of microbiology and antibiotic susceptibility testing, providing a pure source of individual bacterial strains that can be used to study the molecular mechanisms of antibiotic resistance.

dozen people in the village harboured bacteria that were resistant to multiple antibiotics, and these so-called superbugs were able to rapidly transfer their resistance to normal bacteria. The miracle drug of the 20th century, that had saved millions of lives since World War II, was becoming ever more ineffective. It has been 48 years since Davis’s Borneo expedition and we are no closer to confronting the superbug crisis, and the threat is growing as antibiotics are misused in both healthcare and livestock farming. According to a recent report commissioned by the UK government, 700,000 people around the world die each year from superbugs, ranging from tuberculosis to MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). By 2050, 10 million lives will be at risk from infectious diseases. Earlier this year, scientists reported that resistance to colistin – considered the last line of defence against the world’s deadliest bacteria – had emerged in Chinese pig farms and could now be found in the United States, Europe and Canada. To make matters worse, the newest antibiotics against the most dangerous class of killer bacteria were released in the early 1980s, and pharmaceutical companies have, by and large, exited the antibiotics business. It could well be one of the greatest challenges that humanity has ever faced. Without new drugs even the most minor infections have the potential to become fatal, sending all of humanity back to a pre-antibiotic age. A once-treatable disease like gonorrhoea could become a guaranteed life sentence of pain and discomfort, and could even lead to death. With the threat posed by catching an untreatable infection, knee and hip replacement surgeries could be a thing of the past, and even a routine trip to the dentist could

Right: Over recent decades, molecular microbiology has unravelled the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance. Advanced chromatography techniques such as this have enabled scientists to understand the function of the various elements that compose a bacterium.

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become fraught with danger. “Everybody could see that it could become a major problem,” says Davis, who is now 82, “but I don’t think anyone at the time anticipated the severity.” The antibiotic era began with Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin at St Mary’s Hospital in London in 1928. Fleming had witnessed first-hand the terrible effects of infectious disease while serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps in World War I, watching helplessly as wounded men died of sepsis – a reaction of the immune system to infection, damaging tissues and organs – and he became interested in developing a better treatment to replace the often ineffective antiseptics used at the time. Fleming had been growing colonies of staphylococcus – a type of bacterium that is ubiquitous on human skin and can easily infect wounds – in Petri dishes, when he noticed an unexpected development. On one dish, which had been left open by mistake while Fleming was on holiday, there was a spot of green mould that was inhibiting the growth of the bacteria. Following some experimentation Fleming discovered that an extract from the mould, Penicillium notatum, was able to kill a wide variety of bacteria. A decade later, a team of scientists based at Oxford University managed to isolate the active ingredient of Fleming’s mould. “New Non-Toxic Drug Said to Be the Most Powerful Germ Killer Ever”, read the New York Times on October 20th, 1940. Two years later a Connecticut woman named Anne Miller was on her deathbed with an untreatable streptococcal infection when she became the first person to receive an experimental penicillin injection. A day later she had made a miraculous recovery. Recognising its potential, the Allied governments quickly scaled up the production of penicillin as part of the war

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effort, and it was instrumental in saving the lives of those who might otherwise have died from infected wounds. Although they were discovered relatively recently, antibiotics have existed in nature for billions of years – the evolutionary consequence of the microscopic battle that was raging long before humans existed. We are simply hijacking the weaponry of the microbial world. Some compounds, like penicillin, break down bacterial cell walls. Others, like tetracycline, which was isolated from a soil bacterium, prevent some bacteria from building critical proteins. In the four decades after penicillin was first mass-produced, pharmaceutical companies developed and sold approximately 120 antibiotics isolated from fungi, bacteria and other microbes. Fleming, however, had concerns, and he voiced them during his Nobel Prize Lecture of

1945. “I would like to sound one note of warning,” he said. “It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body.” Few heeded Fleming’s words. Doctors handed out antibiotics to treat everything from earaches to sinus infections – even though many of these were caused by viruses, not bacteria. When patients stopped taking the antibiotics before the infection was fully cleared, the hardy bacteria that survived could bounce back and spread their resistance to other bacteria. Moreover, the abuse of antibiotics was not limited to humans, as livestock owners realised the virtues of adding antibiotics to animal feed, preventing infections while also helping their animals put on weight quickly. Farmers were soon running an

evolutionary experiment on an unprecedented scale. They weren’t just breeding animals; they were breeding superbugs. Time and time again, the bacteria were beating the drugs. Penicillin was released in 1938; resistance appeared in 1945. Streptomycin was released in 1946; resistance appeared that same year. Tetracyclines were released in 1952; resistance had appeared two years earlier. The pharmaceutical industry, rather than keeping pace with its bacterial targets, has largely abandoned the field in favour of producing more profitable drugs for cancers. In the early 1980s, the US Food and Drug Administration was approving three new antibiotics per year. Today, that number is one every two years. In 2015, President Obama urged Congress to support a measure to spend $1.2 million addressing antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but it was never funded.

The early 20th century saw significant developments in X-ray crystallography, which now enables us to determine the fine atomic architecture of the protein targets of antibiotics, how antibiotics interact with these proteins and how better antibiotics may be designed.

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David Brown, a veteran pharmaceutical executive, has had first-hand experience of the plague of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Last year, Brown’s father had been struggling with heart problems and needed surgery to insert a coronary stent. Before being admitted to hospital, he tested positive for MRSA, a bacterium that is present on the skin of one out of three people, which can pose a serious threat to those undergoing surgery or with compromised immune systems. He was prescribed amoxicillin in an attempt to treat the infection, and he went into surgery over Christmas. Brown’s father would never fully recover. He had either been infected with a new strain of MRSA or it had never cleared in the first place. His doctors tried to treat the infection with a cocktail of three antibiotics but the bacteria now had the upper hand, spreading through his body,

The synthesis of complex chemicals enables pharmaceutical companies and academics to hunt for new starting points that may become antibiotics of the future.

infecting his heart and lungs and damaging his kidneys. “I spent two weeks going through the entirety of the medical literature on the subject to find a way to treat him,” says Brown. As chair of the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee for the charity Antibiotic Research UK, he was well equipped for the task, but he found nothing that could help. His father died in March. One stopgap that Brown has championed is what he calls ‘antibiotic resistance breakers’ which work by understanding exactly how bacteria defeat a given antibiotic. To beat penicillin-type antibiotics, for instance, some bacteria secrete an enzyme called penicillinase, that breaks apart a ring in their structure. In the 1970s, British scientists discovered a compound – clavulanic acid – that inactivates penicillinase. By combining amoxicillin with clavulanic acid, doctors were able to treat previously resistant bacteria.

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Unfortunately, this strategy is like plugging a sinking ship with a cork. To date, there are more than 1,000 known enzymes that can break apart penicillin-type antibiotics and only a subset of them can be stopped with clavulanic acid. And that’s just for one antibiotic. In many cases, we don’t know enough about how bacteria are outwitting antibiotics to come up with strategies to return blows. Antibiotic Research UK hopes, however, that a programme testing 1,600 existing drugs in combination with five classes of antibiotics against four superbugs will begin to shed some light on the matter. Meanwhile, other scientists have begun to resurrect an old, neglected line of research. Before Alexander Fleming discovered that mould could halt bacterial growth, microbiologists had also discovered mysterious holes – or plaques – in the nutrient-rich gels on their Petri

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dishes. These plaques were areas where the bacteria had been destroyed by bacteriophages, a type of virus that infects bacteria. Since 1923, doctors at the Eliava Phage Therapy Center in Tbilisi, Georgia, have been successfully treating recalcitrant skin infections with customised phage cocktails. Research on phage therapy was largely abandoned in the West in favour of antibiotic therapies, but some scientists now believe they may play a useful role in preventing resistant infections from spreading. In 2015, for instance, Brad Berges, a microbiologist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, published a study showing that a cocktail of phages could be used to disinfect lab coats and table tops with MRSA bacteria on them. Living phages also have a fundamental advantage over chemical disinfectants: “Phages can evolve to overcome resistance,” Berges explains. Experts believe that a long-term solution to the antibiotic crisis might begin with a more judicious use of antibiotics in both humans and livestock. Some countries have begun placing restrictions on the use of animal antibiotics as a growth enhancer and, in the UK, they can only be dispensed with a veterinary prescription. To reduce the misuse of antibiotics in humans, the first step will involve creating faster, cheaper and more accurate diagnostic tests to identify exactly which organism is causing a patient’s illness and so target the disease more accurately. Another, crucial area of research will be in revitalising the dormant field of antibiotic discovery, long abandoned by the pharmaceutical industry, which has already led microbiologists to some unlikely, unexplored places around the world. For Hazel Burton, who is based at the University of Akron in Ohio, this search for new antibiotics has seen her undertake numerous expeditions to New Mexico’s 220-kilometre-long Lechuguilla Cave. There, Barton and her collaborators have found signs of antibiotic resistance in organisms collected in parts of the cave that have never been reached by humans before, and her team has discovered three new antibiotic structures that they plan to name lechacycline,

Previous spread, left: Scaling up the production of these new complex chemicals is important to move research from academia to industry and a wider global effort.

in honour of the cave. “It’s an arms race in that environment,” she says. One challenge with these discoveries is that an estimated 99 per cent of all bacteria won’t grow on Petri dishes using standard methods – a situation described as the ‘great plate count anomaly’. But researchers are finally finding ways of encouraging them to grow in the lab. Last year, a team described creating the iChip, a device that recreates the bacteria’s natural environment. Unlike a Petri dish, the iChip sandwiches individual cells between an artificial membrane while allowing nutrients to pass unimpeded from, say, a soil sample. Using the technique with specimens from a meadow in Maine, researchers discovered a new antibiotic that has so far shown no signs of eliciting resistance. It does not, however, work against the most dangerous bacteria which are protected by a second cell membrane. William Fenical, a microbiologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, thinks that we haven’t even fully tapped the potential of bacteria we already know about. The groundbreaking anti-parasite drug avermectin was isolated from the soil bacteria Streptomyces avermitilis in 1978, but genome sequencing has revealed it has more than 30 genes that could potentially produce antibiotics. “In nature, we don’t know much about what activates those genes,” he says. “We have a model of viewing bacteria in isolation — as pure cultures on Petri dishes — but the reality is messier.” They are constantly interacting with other bacteria in nature and in our bodies, which helps explain why a strain of bacteria may be more virulent in one person than another. He’s designing experiments to better understand how bacteria respond in different environments. “We need to activate all those genes to find out what’s being produced,” Fenical says. While most modern research to discover new antibiotics has examined soil bacteria, Fenical has focused on the other 70 per cent of the world’s surface: “We have to begin looking in the ocean because it’s genetically unique.” He has developed new methods to culture marine bacteria using a low-nutrient medium designed

Previous spread, right: For this research to be effective it requires multidisciplinary teams of scientists, each contributing their particular skill and understanding.

to mimic conditions in the ocean. Over the last 20 years, Fenical has established a collection of 18,000 strains of bacteria from the coast of California, the Caribbean, Guam and Palau. Already these bacteria have yielded more than half a dozen structurally unknown antibiotics. This winter, the search continues with scientists heading to one of the deepest parts of the ocean. On December 8th, the JOIDES Resolution, a research drilling vessel operated by the International Ocean Discovery Program, will set sail for the South Chamorro Seamount, a massive mud volcano, the summit of which lies 3,000 metres below the ocean’s surface. Burbling methane and sulphur, this volcano hosts a bizarre biological community made up of tube worms, mussels, clams and, of course, bacteria and fungi. Brandi Reese, a microbial ecologist at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi, will be studying the mud samples, from boreholes drilled into the volcano, that the expedition brings back. Reese wants to know how these unusual microbes live and interact with one another, and what type of chemicals – so-called secondary metabolites – they may produce as defences. “My hope is that as we explore these different genomes and secondary metabolites, we may be able to tap into them as a new resource,” she says. The scope of the challenge posed by antibiotic resistance to humanity is such that there is a call for a pact modelled after international climate change agreements. On 21st September 2016, the United Nations in New York held a high-level meeting to begin a process of global cooperation. “It is not that it may happen in the future,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon warned. “It is a very present reality.” That day, all 193 UN member states signed a declaration agreeing to support an action plan to promote the responsible use of antibiotics and the development of new antibiotics, rapid diagnostic tests and surveillance measures for growing resistance. We will never now be rid of the dangers of superbugs but, as we face the threat of antibiotic resistance together, there is hope that we will be able to coexist with it, rather than being at the mercy of diseases we had once thought eradicated.

Right: There is no single solution to solving the current antibiotic crisis – it will need a cocktail of scientists, academics, industry and society as a whole to come together as never before.

M R . L E M A — N s RORY FH SM I TH S I TS D OW N WITH ONE OF THE MO S T SUCCE SSFUL R AC I NG DR I V ER S OF ALL TIME, TO M K R I S TENS EN, TO DISCOVE R THE MA N BEHI N D THE MYTH OF MR LE MA NS

WOR D S : RORY F H S MI TH

I LLUS TR ATIO N: TAV I S C OBU R N

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Tom Kristensen – or ‘Mr Le Mans’ as he’s affectionately known – has won the 24 Hours of Le Mans no less than nine times. Six of his victories were consecutive, from 2000 to 2005, and nearly all were from behind the wheel of an Audi, with the exception of 2003, when he was tasked with bringing home the silverware for sister team, Bentley. Now approaching his fifties, the freshfaced Dane has spent 37 years in motorsport. He is said to be the greatest Le Mans driver in the history of the race. But Kristensen’s career, before the heady days of Le Mans, was not out of the ordinary. There’s nothing to suggest he’s a half-human, half-motor racing cyborg. Like his peers, Kristensen started out in the world of karting, winning several titles in 1984 at the age of 17. Shortly after, he raced touring cars and Formula Three in Japan, before becoming a Formula One test driver for Tyrrell during their final season in 1998. But his entry into the world of endurance car racing came at Le Mans in 1997 with the Joest Racing team, after stepping in as a late entry to fill the seat of injured Davy Jones. His win that year marked the start of Kristensen’s endurance car career, setting in motion a streak of victories with Audi – after a brief stint with BMW – until his retirement in 2014. Now, as the undisputed master of Le Mans, Kristensen passes down his wisdom through his work as an Audi ambassador. With a reputation like his, it would be easy to be headstrong, or even arrogant, but that’s not what got Kristensen to where he is today. Arrogance can be fatal in the world of motorsport, he tells me; instead it was with his modest charm that he accepted the role of Rolex Testimonee in 2010, awarded to reflect his efficiency, precision and consistency when out on the track. As we sit together above the pit lane, staring down at anxious drivers making their final adjustments, he’s calm and collected, but focused. Despite retiring over two years ago, Kristensen is still eager to compete: “Once you race at Le Mans, you’ll always come back.” For those who haven’t braved Le Mans before, what conditions can a driver expect to experience during the race? You prepare the whole year for this. The drivers are really more like athletes – in this race you’re pulling more than four g-force when braking, and 3.5 through the corners. In the cockpit of the [Le Mans Prototype 1] cars, it’s 15 degrees over ambient temperature – so if it’s 25 degrees today, it’s 40 degrees inside the car. There’s not a lot of airflow or visibility, which means there’s a lot of adrenaline and physical and mental stress. You lose one-and-a-half litres of water per stint in the car, so obviously you need electrolytes for hydration and protein to keep the brain concentrated. It’s a full body and mind experience, that’s why you need to prepare yourself and do the training. In the car you’re fighting against a

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cocktail of carbon monoxide, tyre smoke and brake dust. At Le Mans you’re always fighting – you’re fighting through the traffic in the fastest and most efficient way. We can hear the drivers warming their tyres and making final adjustments now. Take me through your physical and mental preparation. Three minutes before the race the engineers leave the car and it’s incredibly tense. You think, ‘Wow, okay, we’ve now got 24 hours to go,’ and everything has to go to plan. You have to be comfortable, because only then can you drive the car on the limit. Once you’re out of the pit lane and on to the Dunlop Chicane, you have to hit everything on target. If the tyres are hot, the brakes are reasonable – you need to build the temperature immediately otherwise you’re digging yourself a performance hole. But on the other hand, you can easily do too much and suddenly you’re off the track. Once you’re in the race and focused, what’s the best moment? The best moment, but also the most challenging, is driving at night. That’s the magic of Le Mans – you can get into your zone and really be at one with the car. On the other hand, it can also be raining very heavily and be very unpredictable, especially when you’re fighting with the other cars. But when you’re driving and see the sunlight peaking in on the night, that’s a lovely time; it’s very calm on the track. I didn’t expect anyone to say Le Mans was calm? Well, I’m not saying it’s totally calm. I mean, you’re still lifting 8–10 kilograms when steering and you’re experiencing all that g-force, so it’s physically very hard, and all the time the endurance element is getting to you. When there’s still nine hours left, you can really feel it in your body! You can be at the wheel for a maximum of four hours in one stint at Le Mans. How do you keep focused and keep the pace during that time? You just keep going. It’s one whole year to get to this and it’s one race. In the build-up, in the arrival, when you walk in the pit, in your garage and around your own car, you feel the magnitude – the history and the importance of it all

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– so this makes you concentrate more. Your adrenaline level never seems to go down. Even talking about it now I feel very excited and I’m not even driving. How do you define your strategy in a 24-hour race and what are you focused on in the car? The strategy changes the whole time and it’s often affected by the weather. When you’re doing 340kph [210mph] down the straights, you need to know when it’s going to rain – just a couple of drops and you could be gone. The hybrid cars are the most complex racing cars in the world. They’re different to drive, in both the driving style and how you can optimise the car along the way. And of course it’s very much electronic today, when before it was a little more analogue. You’re a nine-time champion and the most successful Le Mans driver in history. What’s your secret? I was blessed to have great teammates when I started with Joest Racing in 1997. I was signed a few days before the event but they gave me a lot of confidence and never told me what to do. They really took me on board as a younger driver. It always starts with a passion and a determination for what you want to do and, as a young driver, you don’t want to make any mistakes. That’s a good foundation to start on. You start to add a few other elements and then, when you hear “schnellest rennrunde” [fastest lap] over the radio, there’s no better feeling. I’m blessed to have heard that in my very first race and I’m sure that was the foundation for what came after. Because of the way I was treated when I started, it was very important to me to treat the younger drivers I came across the same way – not to create any extra pressure but to make sure they felt good. We come to the circuit together and we leave together; that’s very important. What about the man outside of the car? I’ve always run a lot and played football, and I’m playing more and more golf. If I really want a competition, I just ask my son to go for a game. I still do a lot of driving with Audi but not racing – more historic driving. What’s your number one top tip for succeeding at Le Mans? In short: be alert. But passion is also a great start.

EXPLORINg cAVEs OF 226

PHO TO G R APH ER KL AUS T HY MANN RE CALLS DIVING THE PE RILOUS U N DERWATER CAVE S YS T EMS OF M EX ICO ’ S Y UCATÁN PE NINSULA

THE

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Previous spread, left: Klaus Thymann in the cenote with his camera, in its large underwater housing, and two powerful strobe flashes. Previous spread, right: Divers use a frog kick and shorter fins in order to not disturb the fine sediment on the cave floor or damage the fragile stalactites.

Right: Shot of Alessandro Reato that later revealed a new passage just above where Reato was floating. It was named the ‘Klaus Passage’ in honour of Thymann’s discovery.

At the end of last year my friend Luis Leon got in touch to say that he had discovered a new cenote, a sinkhole that leads to an underwater cave system, near his home on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. I met Luis in 2014 during an ambitious shoot we did in a cenote; I liked the methodical way he worked and we got along well. He agreed that he would let me know if something interesting came up. This new system, Mul Tun, had never been explored before and, because we had invested a lot of time, energy and money into the project, we kept it to ourselves. Apart from the Mayan porters who helped carry our equipment, it was just me, Luis and an Italian diver, Alessandro Reato, who trekked an hour and a half through the jungle to the hidden entrance of the cenote. There we checked our equipment, crawled down a slope into a shallow pool, swam through a small gap and the whole system opened up. Without any natural light we can only see as far as the beams of our torches and, as well as documenting the expedition, my photography can actually help us explore the cave. I have two powerful underwater flashes attached to the camera’s waterproof housing that illuminate the entire space. After the dive we can examine a

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caves

section in much greater detail and even find new routes: a picture I took of Alessandro revealed a passage that we had missed, now known as the Klaus Passage, that could link this system to Dos Ojos, the largest cave system in the area. The Yucatán Peninsula has one of the highest concentrations of cenotes in the world, and many have become tourist attractions and a huge asset to the Mayan community who own the land. Other cenotes, like ours, are less accessible and incredibly technically demanding. The caves are between three and seven metres wide and as we swim we have to be careful not to knock into the stalactites that have taken centuries to form, or to disturb the fine sediment on the cave floor. There’s very little current, or flow, in the caves and if you ‘silt up’, you’re swimming blind and it can take a day to clear. We also often come to smaller gaps and have to unclip our air tanks, which are mounted on our sides rather than on our backs for better manoeuvrability, and push them through in front of us. You need a particular sensibility to be a cave diver. Perhaps surprisingly, it favours those who are methodical and predictable, and who will always follow protocol rather than take risks. You must never lose sight of the line, for example,

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Below: The entrance to the Mul TunÂ system was very hard to find â&#x20AC;&#x201C; from the hidden opening of the cenote the ground sloped down steeply to an apparently shallow pool, but it was here that the whole system opened up.

Right: The divers mount their twoÂ air tanks on their sides, rather than their backs, for greater manoeuvrability in the water. Each tank is independent and can be unclipped and pushed ahead of the diver if they need to pass through small gaps.

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which you lay out as you go further into the cave, and that ensures that you don’t get lost and can find your way out if your visibility is compromised. Clear, direct communication – whether it’s with hand signals or the various markers that we attach to the line – is also crucial. On a psychological level, you have to be comfortable operating in severely confined spaces where often you can’t see an exit. If something goes wrong, you need to know that you can be rational rather than act on instinct and keep calm under pressure. Panicking or losing concentration can be fatal; the day before I landed in Mexico, a Spanish diver had become separated from his group and was found dead, trapped in

a crack deep inside the cave. He had panicked, left the line and swum the wrong way. Naturally there’s a particular intensity when cave diving that you don’t get when diving in open water, and an adrenaline rush when you go into somewhere that hasn’t been explored before, but if you’re comfortable with the people you are diving with it can be a surprisingly serene and relaxing experience. After a while you begin to flow in sync with one another and you can really take in your surroundings. It is an incredible feeling to squeeze through a small passage to find a cave open up before you, and I am always struck by their beauty – the stalactites and sulphur clouds, the water so clear and so still that the fine dust on

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the ceiling disturbed by the bubbles from your regulator drifts down like snowflakes. Contemporary expeditions still involve achieving incredible feats and surviving extreme environments but they almost always follow in the footsteps of others. Today there are few places in the world that haven’t been explored and despite the idea of cave diving sounding like a nightmare for many, I am surprised that more don’t do it. Floating through spaces that have not been seen for thousands of years, finding the remains of ancient campfires from before the caves flooded, is a magical and humbling experience, and one that reminds me how little and insignificant we are.

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AL As KA N BU sH AVAU N T DI S C OV ER S THE ES S EN TI A L ROLE OF A I RC R A F T I N EV ERY DAY A LA S KA N LI F E

PI LO Ts WORD S: BE N S AU N DER S

PHO TO GR A PH Y: F R É DÉR IC L AG R A NG E S T YL I NG : DA N MAY P RODUCT IO N: E MM A V IN E R C O S TA

S P E CI A L T H A N K S : TAL K EE T NA A IR TA XIS PA RA JU MP E R S ALI LEE

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Previous spread: Range through the clouds from Talkeetna.

Below: View of the Alaska Range through the clouds from Talkeetna.

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The largest unexplored region in the United States is the district north of Cooks Inlet, Alaska. The Kuskokwim and Nushaguk flowing into Behring Sea, the Tanana into the Yukon, the Sushitna into Cooks Inlet, and the Copper River into the Gulf of Alaska drain this “terra incognita.” They are all large, muddy rivers, draining great glaciers, and are at flood height throughout the short summer season. The difficulty of making headway against such swift streams, the clouds of gnats and mosquitoes, the reputed fierceness of the interior Indians (the Apaches of the North) have all served to keep out both the explorer and that most venturesome of all investigators, the prospector. So begins William Dickey’s account of his venture into inner Alaska in 1896. Lured by the prospect of gold, Dickey spent the summer navigating the channels of the extensive delta of those Arctic rivers and his narrative is driven by sightings of the “great mountain”, Denali. Ploughing on through quicksand, descending boiling rapids and witnessing two earthquakes, Dickey was awed by the Alaskan wilderness: “The high volcanoes still active, the great tides, the huge mountains covered with glaciers, impressed us that here man must indeed battle with nature.” ALASKAN BUSH FLYING

In 1922, Joe Crosson, a native Alaskan bush pilot, became the first to land an aircraft on the Muldrow Glacier, on Denali’s east flank, and in doing so played a seminal role in opening up Alaska’s tempestuous wilderness to contemporary adventurers and mountaineers. At a time when climbers were seeking new routes by which to conquer the highest mountain on the North American continent, bush flying seemed to provide the answer and in the near century since, it has become integral to the Alaskan way of life – supporting the remotest parts of this outlying American state. Delivering supplies and ferrying passengers, pilots now routinely ply routes above the sweeping Alaskan tundra, glaciers and ranges that would be impassable on the ground. Talkeetna, situated some 115 miles north of Anchorage on the southern edge of the Denali

National Park, is home to Talkeetna Air Taxi. The firm was established in the early days of Alaskan aviation in 1947 and now runs 10 bush aircraft, including ski-equipped de Havilland Otters and Beavers. Drawn by the air taxi’s stories of everyday aeronautical adventure, Avaunt travelled to Alaska to fly with Talkeetna-based pilot Leighan Falley. A DAY WITH TALKEETNA AIR TAXI

“Our little family rises shortly after 6am and the race begins to get everyone out of the house on time. Both my husband, who is a National Park mountaineering ranger, and I have to be at work by 7:45am. After shuttling our fouryear-old to day care, we part ways to attend our respective morning meetings. His is with all the Ranger station staff who are responsible for the management of the southern district of Denali National Park, a staggering 2.3 million acres. The only access to it is via aircraft, mostly out of Talkeetna. My pilot meeting begins promptly at 7:45am and lasts for 15 minutes before we race off to prepare – or ‘pre-flight’ – our aircraft in time for the usual 8:30am departure. We discuss glacier landing area conditions, aircraft maintenance concerns, the expected weather for the day and mountain-flying operations. This is also a forum for any issues arising from the previous day (such as an aeroplane getting stuck in the snow). After the meeting adjourns, we methodically inspect our assigned aircraft. Usually each pilot is given a specific aeroplane for the duration of his or her working week, making this process a little easier. We generally fly three to five flights a day. In the months of April, May and June, the majority of these will be to transport mountaineers to and from locations in the Alaska Range. At this time of year, there is still a lot of snow on the glaciers and we will land in a wide variety of areas, and our de Havilland Beavers can transport four climbers and their equipment. During July, August and September, we switch to scenic flight mode. The Alaska Range is a stunning place and we cater to visitors from around the world. I have had a number of passengers burst

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into tears at seeing these unique mountains and glaciers at first hand for the first time. When the weather is good, the days can be long, with the last flight landing as late as 9pm, and by the time we taxi in, both the aeroplane and I are spent. I fuel the plane and make her ready for the next morning and enjoy a return to quiet after a day of thundering across the landscape. If I ever find the routine tedious, sometimes I will jump in our own little plane and go for a quick flight before going home to my husband and daughter. Usually though, I return quickly from work to my peaceful little house in the forest. We spend the evening gardening, catching up on each other’s lives, cooking food, planning the weekend’s (aeroplane-based) adventure and enjoying our idyllic Alaskan existence. It is a blessing to both have such engaging professions and yet be able raise our daughter in the quaint Alaskan community of Talkeetna.” THE GUARDIAN OF THE NORTH

For more than 70 years the ‘parajumpers’ of the 210th Rescue Squadron of the Alaskan Air Guard have provided search and rescue support to the civilians and military personnel that live and work in this vast wilderness. The state they oversee spans 21 degrees of latitude and 43 degrees of longitude, it encompasses 39 mountain ranges and has 33,904 miles of shoreline. Undertaking an average of one rescue mission per week, and flying in all conditions and in every season, the parajumpers’ role demands selflessness and bravery; their motto: “These things we do, that others may live.” The Parajumpers brand is a project deriving from the cooperation between Ape and Massimo Rossetti, an experienced outerwear designer and an importer of American labels for the Italian market. A meeting with a serving member of the 210th Rescue Squadron in a bar in Anchorage provided the inspiration for Rossetti’s latest creation, resulting in an innovative, technical outerwear range designed to be functional above all else. Parajumpers’ new Polar Equipment collection is their most advanced to date, developed for those who need protection and warmth in the coldest and most remote areas, and is worn here by the men and women that must indeed battle with nature.

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Left: A lone mountain-top lake as weÂ fly south from Talkeetna towards Lake George.

Below: On our first day we took a short plane ride towards the Alaska Range. This glacier is one of the firstÂ we saw as we entered the mountain range.

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Left: Leighan standing on her Beaver plane, Talkeetna Airport. Jacket by Parajumpers.

Below left: The inside of an Otter plane, Talkeetna Airport.

Below right: Renowned local pilot and instructor Don Lee, shot at his flying school, Alaska Floats and Skis.

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Below left: During one of the only clear weather windows we had, we flew to the Denali base camp and passed this glacier on the way.

Below right: Leighan in the pilot seat of her de Havilland Beaver, conducting pre-flight checks, Talkeetna Airport. Jacket by Parajumpers.

Right: Leighan Falley shovelling snow from underneath her aircraft. It had snowed heavily the previous night and day, adding an extra four feet of fresh powder, making it difficult for the smaller Beaver plane to take off. Leighan had

warned us there was a 30 per cent chance we might not be able to fly; however, thanks to the shovelling, all went well. Denali base camp, Alaska Range. Polar Equipment jacket by Parajumpers.

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Below: Leighan Falley flying her Beaver above a glacier.

Right: Our wing flying above and centring the Alaska Range.

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Leighan Falley pilots a ski-equipped de Havilland Beaver above an Alaska Range glacier.

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Leighan Falley walking towards seaplanes at the Alaska Floats and Skis lake.

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Leighan piloting her own plane with her daughter, Sky, in the back seat. That day they flew to one of their favourite camp sites, a 45-minute ride from Talkeetna, to go berry hunting. Sky, who is 4, feels more comfortable flying with her mum than riding in a car. Jacket by Parajumpers.

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Below: The rugged landscape south ofÂ Talkeetna as we fly towards LakeÂ George.

Right: Details of a de Havilland Otter, shot at Talkeetna Airport.

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Below: Michael Gold on his seaplane after a soft landing on Lake George. Standing by ColonyÂ Glacier, we could hear theÂ loud tremor of the ice breaking and falling into the water. Jacket by Parajumpers.

Right: A lone silhouette amongst the immensity of the Alaska Range glacier, Leighan Falley flying her Beaver on a heavily clouded day.

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hermes.com

Berluti

berluti.com

Bowers & Wilkins

bowers-wilkins.co.uk

LEKI

leki.com

Breguet

breguet.com

Lezyne

lezyne.com

Breitling

breitling.com

Bremont

bremont.com

Calvin Klein Collection

calvinklein.com

Canada Goose

canadagoose.com

Cartier

cartier.co.uk

Christopher Raeburn

christopherraeburn.co.uk

C.P. Company

cpcompany.co.uk

DaleBoot

daleboot.com

DMM

dmmclimbing.com

Dunhill

dunhill.com

253

M-Q

R-Z

Margaret Howell

margarethowell.co.uk

Red Wing Shoes

redwingshoes.com

Moncler

moncler.com

Richard James

richardjames.co.uk

Montane

montane.co.uk

Rolex

rolex.com

Mountain Equipment

mountain-equipment.co.uk

Musto

musto.com

SCOTT

scott-sports.com

Stone Island

stoneisland.co.uk

Nike

nike.com

Stutterheim

stutterheim.com

Nomos Glashütte

nomos-glashuette.com

Suunto

suunto.com

Nigel Cabourn

cabourn.com Timberland

timberland.co.uk

USJMAGLEV

usjmaglev.com

Vans

vans.co.uk

Victorinox

victorinox.com

Oakley

oakley.com

Officine Générale

officinegenerale.com

Omega

omegawatches.com

Parajumpers

parajumpers.it

Patagonia

patagonia.com

Paul & Shark

paulshark.it

Polo Ralph Lauren

ralphlauren.co.uk

Prada

prada.com

PS by Paul Smith

paulsmith.co.uk

Woolrich John Rich & Bros woolrich.com

254

LAST PAGE COMIC

MAX WEARS OUR GUERNSEY JUMPER, INFORMED B Y O U R H E R I TA G E A N D M A D E O F F I N E W O O L .

LO N D O N – B E R L I N – TO K YO – S U N S P E L . C O M