London, 1981, 1st edition. 191 pp, ill. Earle went to Patagonia in 1963 with Shipton (LAND OF TEMPEST) and returned in 1979. One of the scarcer Patagonia books. DJ, Fine.
Patagonia has been well chronicled of late, but the one man whose classic explorations first opened up this remote wild region to the imagination was Eric Shipton, who celebrated the area in his book, Land of Tempest. John Earle was fortunate enough to accompany Shipton on an expedition in 1963 which forged a route to and all round the long seen, but never before approached, Mount Burney, and later achieved the first ascents of Monte Bove and Monte Frances in the Darwin Range of Tierra del Fuego. In the temperate jungle below these unmapped peaks Shipton reckoned he and his small party were more out on a limb than in most parts of the Himalayas.
Eric Shipton was also John Earle's entree to the Bridges family at Harberton and Viamonte, the grandsons of the almost legendary Thomas and Mary Bridges, pioneer settlers of Tierra del Fuego. And from there he went on to spend some curious, sad weeks with the fast disappearing Alacaluf Indians. Memories of 1963 form the very varied meat of the first part of John Earle's book, observed with the sharp eye for colour and detail of a professional freelance film-maker. He also offers an uniquely affectionate picture of what it was like to go on an expedition with that original light traveller, Eric Shipton, who wondered engagingly whether anyone had thought to bring a tint as the plane took off from London airport. And he broods on the social hazards of expedition life, which seem especially relevant when he comes on the second part of his narrative and an account of another expedition sixteen years on in 1979.
This time John Earle had been commissioned to go to Tierra del Fuego to make a TV film of the Bridges family and with them revisits and tells the story of the places celebrated in Lucas Bridges' famous family history, Uttermost Part of the Earth. The filming was followed by an exploration of the glacier systems of Tierra del Fuego's Darwin Range in the company of three keen young rock climbers, lain Peters, Dave Harber and Don Sargeant. As ever the ferocious and unpredictable weather and the intractable terrain thwarted some of their climbing hopes, but the unnamed peaks they achieved and christened, and the lakes and glaciers they explored formed an actual physical link with the author's earlier travels with Eric Shipton and round off a book which is both a celebration of wild places and of some remarkable men who made them their own.
JOHN EARLE has climbed extensively in Britain and the Alps, as well as in the Himalayas, South America and Baffin Island. He runs the Dartmoor Expedition Centre for Outdoor Pursuits at Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Devon, and is also a professional freelance television film-maker, specialising in outdoor and adventure activity programmes, including `Expedition Sahara' and 'Arctic Summer' and for some years he was presenter of the children's television programme, `Tom Tom'.
