A typical expedition might involve two or three 4WD vehicles, enough food and water to keep a small group active and healthy for a couple of weeks, maybe an ATV or two, and other heavy gear such as large metal detectors and digging tools. On one hand I am thrilled by the opportunity to experience aspects of the natural world that city dwellers rarely, if ever, get to see. On the other hand, I am always somewhat concerned by the impact our convoy might have on delicate ecosystems.

Taking the high ground

Recently, we have been exploring a zone that would have been quick and easy to scout on ATVs, but we decided to work on foot instead. What might have taken only an afternoon on a motorized all-terrain vehicle took days to explore the old fashioned way: boots in the dirt. During the past few weks we have run across numerous beautiful (and protected) horned toads. cacti with new, brightly-colored buds; intriguing millipedes with their hundreds of tiny, perfectly aligned legs; rare flowers; hummingbirds, and many other small living things that would be crushed in an instant by the fat tires on a quad.

When things go wrong: Our vehicle stranded in the Atacama Desert

When driving off-road in trucks, we try to stay on existing trails as often as possible, and I frequently make an instantaneous detour to avoid flattening a plant or pummeling a flying insect. Campsites are typically set up in a natural clearing and my team is always meticulous about packing out all of our trash, except for the very few things that are naturally biodegradable and will, in fact, provide food for our temporary neighbors—apple cores and orange peels for example.

When it gets tricky: While filming a documentary for Discovery Channel we needed to tow a large metal detector through high wildflowers in Kansas. Birds sleep in the underbrush during the day, so we drove very slowly to give them plenty of time to get out of the way.

If we need a campfire we either bring wood with us, or gather dead branches from the ground. Using a small portable gasoline stove prevents us from having to burn any natural materials at the site. When we are excavating, we avoid damaging plants as much as possible, and always fill in our holes. Team members who smoke collect cigarette butts in an empty bottle, and we even make a point of picking up other people’s trash (if there is any out there in the wilds). We try to leave a site just a little cleaner than we found it.

Tiny footprints in the sand: During an expedition to Siberia we came across diminutive white birds who nested on the ground. They lived on an island in the middle of a frigid river with no likely predators. The little birds attacked us, fiercely, when we got too close to their nests, and we gave them a wide berth, not wanting to step on eggs or get pecked!

Some things are unavoidable: We burn gasoline in the trucks, and we need batteries and electricity to power our equipment. Food and water are consumed. Weeds are run over by vehicles. But we do our best to be considerate visitors. I make my living by working with the natural world, so it is my duty and pleasure to respect its integrity.

A few months earlier the eminent adventurer, science writer, and astronomer, Professor Roy Gallant invited me to join him on the first-ever international expedition to the Popigai Crater at the northern edge of Siberia, on the Tamyr Peninsula. This vast meteorite crater, approximately 100 km in diameter was formed about 35 million years ago by the cataclysmic impact of a large chunk of a stony asteroid. During World War II and on into the 1960s, the Russians mined great quantities of industrial grade diamonds from the crater, and those diamonds were formed by the heat and pressure of the meteorite impact.

A Russian Mi-8 helicopter lands our team inside the Arctic Circle

Planning the expedition was a logistical nightmare and would take Roy and his staff three years. Even though mining had ceased at the crater, it was still a top secret area and before we could travel there we had to be “invited” by the KGB. That was the easy part. There are no roads, trails or airstrips up there, hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle, so we were to be airlifted by ex-military helicopters. Airlifted right into the crater itself. And that’s where the trouble started. Although we held all the proper paperwork, and had paid all the proper gratuities, it seems we somehow neglected to grease the palm of one local province director. He was quite irritated by that and started leaning on the helicopter outfit to make trouble for us. Everyone on the eighteen-person team—nine Russians and nine Americans—realized that once we were dropped off at the edge of the world, the helicopter team might not come back to get us. There would be no hiking out from that spot but we voted unanimously to go anyway.

Soaring above the Arctic tundra on the way to the Popigai meteorite crater, Siberia

Before departing from the tiny, forsaken outpost of Khatanga, our team was treated to a fine lunch of red caviar and reindeer burgers, washed down with numerous glasses of exquisite Russian vodka, at the most northerly bar in the world. The team member seated next to me didn’t drink alcohol and—despite my insistent whispering in his ear: “It’s a big insult to our hosts if you don’t drink the vodka—he refused. My father’s parents were White Russians, so I felt it my honorable duty to drink his vodka as well, discretely swapping my empty glass for his, repeatedly. So, by the time we lifted off in the loud and rickety Mi-8 chopper, I was more than a little tipsy.

Our bright orange aircraft had no regular seats, just a long wooden bench on one side of the cabin. The bench was full, so I flopped down on our pile of luggage and equipment. The first officer quickly appeared and told me I couldn’t sit there. “But there’s nowhere else to sit,” I protested.

“Pliz leesten,” he insisted. “Begs are on top ov cargo door, you see? Sometimz in flight cargo door open by accident end all begs go fshhhoot, to ground. End you too.” So I got up without further complaint and eventually talked my way into standing at the rear of the flight deck.

Casting shadows on Siberia as we fly over endless pine forests

The Popigai Crater is so large that you cannot really tell you are inside it. There is a sense of being below ground level, and there are mountains of debris many miles away, but any understanding of the scale of the impact feature is difficult to grasp consciously. We spent nine days inside the crater, camping on two separate islands perched in the middle of the chilly Rassokha River that runs through it. We hiked, and we and traveled by raft. Our Russian comrades used just the one chainsaw to build a mess tent, seats, benches, a radio mast, and a cargo raft from the surrounding pine trees.

Home is where the canvas is: the warm and welcoming mess tent fashioned by our Russian comrades from Siberian pine trees

We weren’t looking for meteorites. The original impactor was rich in iron, and eroded away during the long millennia since the crater-forming event. But the meteorite’s signature was everywhere, in the form of impactites—terrestrial rocks that have been shocked, melted or otherwise altered by the effects of meteorite bombardment.

Katya, our translator and chief of staff found a marvelous fossil mammoth tooth during one of our raft trips

We also found mosquitos by the thousands. During the brief Arctic summer the sun never sets, the top few inches of tundra thaw out, and terrifying hordes of large Siberian insects appear to prey on reindeer and, in 1999, us. Despite the hardships, or perhaps because of them, it was an extraordinary adventure. I got to cross the Arctic Circle for the first time in my life, hike through the screaming wilderness with eminent Russian geologists, see the midnight sun, and spend more than a week inside one of the largest impact sites on earth. We even found some tiny diamonds, frozen forever inside melted rock.

View of the Painted Rocks from my campsite. The exposure reveals hundreds of feet of meteorite impactite that was once the floor of the crater. This photograph was taken exactly at midnight; the sun never set for the duration of our expedition.

I fell in love with Russia and will return one day, and here is the memory that sticks with me most vividly: On one of our last nights, after an arduous 14-hour voyage on river rafts, I stood with a group of Russian scientists on an unknown sandy island at 4 am, drinking vodka out of tin cups. With the assistance of our long-suffering translator, Katya, we began exchanging jokes, communicating properly, at last, through the universal language of humor. Several of those men were important researchers during the Cold War era and were denied the luxury of international travel. They had never met an American in real life, and the discovery that surprised and astonished them the most was that we—we Americans—had a sense of humor. What was the Politburo telling them about us?

We laughed long into what should have been the night (the sun never sets in July in Siberia), clinking tin cups together in the wind and understanding, at long last, that we Russians and Americans were not so very different after all.

So, at a fairly early age I devised a list of what I considered to be the geological wonders of the world and I intended on seeing every one of them. I have done quite well so far: the famous Vesuvius volcano in Italy, Oregon’s Crater Lake, The Grand Canyon, Chile’s Atacama Desert, the fjords and glaciers of Norway, Meteor Crater in Arizona, the Burren in County Clare in the Republic of Ireland, and the steaming geysers of Iceland. But one vitally important name on that list eluded my every effort: the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland.

An abandoned tug boat settles slowly into the River Liffey, Dublin

Back in the 1970s and ’80s my eccentric but adventurous family typically added a couple of stops at noteworthy scientific sites to any holiday itinerary, in order to placate me. Before he retired, my father was an important figure in international trade and development and he did a lot of work in Ireland. My mother, younger brother Andrew, and I, often tagged along on his business trips, but we always went to the south—The Republic of Ireland. The civil war in Ireland, or “The Troubles” as the Irish called it, was in full swing in the 1970s, with explosives going off on trains and homemade petrol bombs being thrown, almost daily it seemed, at British armored cars in Belfast. Despite my most serious protestations along the lines of “It can’t be that dangerous,” we never did venture into the north.

My father now lives in Dublin, and a couple of years ago I made the long trip from Tucson to see him. After several days of pubs, dinners, conversation, and family obligations, I grew restless. Following a little gentle coercion, Dad agreed we should rent a car, just the two of us, and set off to see Belfast and the wild northern coast.

We stayed at a gorgeous old hotel in the small town of Bushmills in County Antrim which, very handily, is the home of the Bushmill’s whisky distillery, a fact that would later add a little spice to the trip. We arrived late in the day after a long drive, and Dad announced that he would enjoy a short nap. We were only a few miles from the Giant’s Causeway, but the shuttle bus that took visitors down to see it would have ceased operations by that hour. Dad encouraged me to motor over there anyway, and see if I could find my own way down the site.

The visitors’ car park was nearly empty, the gift shop closed, but Ireland’s northerly latitude means long, long summer days. So, I locked the car and started out on foot. It was a pretty good haul and somewhat damp and chilly for a resident of the Sonoran Desert. I saw a couple of windblown sightseeing stragglers, walking slowly and forlornly back to their cars. Eventually, I came up over a rise and there was the Causeway ahead of me—blissfully deserted.

Where the stone meets the sea: The Giant's Causeway continues its march against time into the cold North Atlantic

The Causeway, contradictory to colorful local lore, was not fabricated by giants or legendary warriors during some distant mythical period. It is the result of ancient volcanic activity that created tens of thousands of vertical, mostly hexagonal, basalt columns. This astonishing assemblage of geometric pedestals, of varying heights and sizes, arcs into a restless grey and green sea and looks at times like a monstrous pipe organ.

I clambered over every inch of that geological wonderland and filled two digital cameras with photographs. I was breaking in an expensive new Nikon and many times I had to shield it from spray as cold waves broke around me. And I imagined I could make out the distant voice of my late mother calling: “Geoffrey, don’t get close to the edge, it’s dangerous!” Something I heard a million times as a kid.

Rapid cooling of molten lava about 60 million years ago caused fractures and fragmentation, resulting in the formation of thousands of vertical geometric columns at the Giant's Causeway

As the sun retreated sullenly into the Atlantic, I tore myself away and proceeded back to the hotel. Bubbling over with amazement and excitement I expounded, at considerable length, about the Causeway to my amused father who had visited it some years earlier. Accomplished and open minded though my father is, they were still pretty much a pile of black rocks to him.

In the morning I was all fired up to go back and see them again in daylight. After breakfast we returned to the site, which had taken on an entirely different, and very disturbing, aspect. The car par was choked with tour buses, and dazed tourists shambled everywhere, sucking down mushy ice cream cones and squawking about the weather. It was appalling. I rapidly purchased a couple of postcards and said to my father: “I can’t deal with this nightmare, let’s get out of here.” He smiled and said: “Yes I thought it would be like this during the day. Aren’t you glad you made the trip last night?”

Seawater on basalt under a grey sky

Being resourceful and adaptable chaps, we cut our losses and headed over to the Bushmill’s distillery for some good cheer. I sipped a glass of vintage Irish whisky and happily added one long sought-after check mark to my childhood list.

Photographs by the author. All rights reserved. Copyright strictly enforced. © Geoffrey Notkin