Honorary Chair
Sir Edmund Hillary 1919-2008
President
Daniel A. Bennett
Honorary President
Don Walsh, Ph.D.
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Honorary Chair Sir Edmund Hillary 1919-2008 |
President Daniel A. Bennett |
Honorary President Don Walsh, Ph.D. |
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PROJECTS
INTERVIEW with Arthur Mortvedt MN'84
Mortvedt joined The Explorers Club in 1984 and is a Member National (MN).
CLAY: Do you remember when you first heard of The Explorers Club? MORTVEDT: As far as I recall, I first heard of The Explorers Club on a mountainside in the Antarctic up behind Henryk Arkstowski Polish Research Base. I was doing some assisting in the field with Vera Kormakova, who now lives in Switzerland, I think. CLAY: So you, obviously, were already doing a lot of exploring before you ever became a member, before you even heard of it! What made you choose to join the Club? MORTVEDT: Camaraderie and the shared spirit of exploration. It's an incredible environment. I really enjoy it every time I come here. CLAY: Can you tell me a little more about that? MORTVEDT: Clearly, it's a small world, and often said. When I return home to Alaska, I’ll meet with Dixie Danscercoer and his wife Julie from Belgium. I met Dixie and Julie in Antarctica a few years ago, when Dixie and Alain Hubert were skiing across the continent. And I mentioned this to Marek Kaminski, whom I saw here last night, and Marek said, "Oh, yes, Dixie and I have done some things in Siberia." Marek and Alain also know each other. And so it's a very finely woven web of wonderful people throughout the world. Very stimulating. CLAY: Was there a pivotal moment that led you on the path to exploration? MORTVEDT: I don't think it was a pivotal moment. My father was an explorer in his own way. My father was a man with limited formal education and he was a farmer, a fisherman, a hunter, a trapper, a salesman—many different things—exploring the world through books and whatever experiences that he could acquire, while, at the same time, raising four children on a small farm in North Dakota. And so I think it was my father that gave me the impetus to be curious and explore. CLAY: Over the course of your career in exploration, has there been one expedition that stood out, that you would say was your defining expedition? MORTVEDT: Well, to the best of my ability, I try to maintain life as an expedition, continually. Therefore, I don't have to be living in a period of boredom while planning the next exciting expedition. CLAY: And what are some of the results you have seen come out of your expeditions? MORTVEDT: One of my primary interests around the world has been the existence and variability of traditional cultures. Around the world, these traditional cultures are in grave danger of homogenization by the Western world or from whatever pressures and forces are on them. What I endeavor to do is to document these cultures in my own way, the best I can—and I'm not an anthropologist, I don't claim to be—but to document the lives of these people in photographs and notes and experiences. And encourage the longevity of these very interesting cultures around the world that have required multiple centuries to develop. It's going to be a great tragedy to see these cultures disappear. And some are disappearing very quickly. CLAY: How do the local people respond to you? Do you find mutual understanding? MORTVEDT: Yes, people understand. And not necessarily through any communication in their own language, either. There's the common language of decency and courtesy. It works anywhere. For example, on two different expeditions to Kaokoland in Northern Nimibia with the Ovahimba people, I don't speak Himba, or very little, but one afternoon, for example, I found myself in the middle of Himba that were grinding corn inside of a mud-and-stick hut, on a stone that probably had been used for grinding corn for centuries. I couldn't speak with anyone, but just through sign language and just patience, I think I conveyed that I was very interested and intrigued with their culture. And I didn't flip out a camera immediately and be intrusive. I was, with time, able to take some interesting photographs with these people. And the only thing that was different about that circumstance over a similar circumstance maybe 100 years ago or 200 years ago, was a cast iron pot in the middle, into which they were putting the ground corn to cook up for the men of the tribe who were sitting just outside this stick and mud hut. So, yes, it was just a very intriguing experience for me. CLAY: And it must give you a whole different sense of the scale of time. And, in fact, would you say that also is what allows you to do that kind of research? MORTVEDT: Yes, yes. A perspective on a broader time scale I think would be necessary. And maybe I've been fortunate to develop such a time scale over the years. Being 30 years in the Arctic with Inupiat Eskimo people, in their fish camps and seining white fish and hunting caribou. Or even doing my own thing of seining fish and hunting caribou, moose, and bears, and watching natural processes in their own time. And just the weather factor of the Arctic and the Antarctic. I sat for 15 days in the Antarctic waiting for an airplane to come and fetch me. And I sat for days and weeks in the Arctic for an airplane. So with time blocks such as that, one develops perhaps a broader perspective of time. CLAY: One explorer well known for incorporating indigenous ways into his own exploration techniques was, of course, Stefanson. Have you found that approach to be an important part of your career, and do you see that in other explorers as a growing trend? MORTVEDT: No, I don't see that as a growing trend. I think I see it as a trend that should be growing. And I try, to the best of my ability, to do things in harmony with the conditions of the Arctic, and utilize the resources of the Arctic, or at least have the knowledge to utilize such resources. Normally, in my airplane, flying in the bush, I have ample white man's food, as they might say locally, in the aircraft. But if all the white man's food goes away, I hope to be able to utilize some basic tools in the aircraft or on my person to be able to survive for some time in the Arctic. CLAY: To what extent would you say it's been kind of a philosophical choice to do that? And to what extent has it just been a practical necessity, because it just works well for survival? MORTVEDT: Let me say that it's about 90 percent practicality and 10 percent philosophy. And I think that has been the case in all the development of technology, too. People 100 years ago used as much practical technology as they had access to. And do so nowadays. You see among the local people the high-performance outboard motor engines and the rifles. There's a more predominant focus on practicality, I think. But that's not to say that from a topical aspect it's not important. Whenever I, or people that are with me, are at a campsite in the Arctic, once we pack up and leave, you would have to look very closely to find any evidence that we were there. So we try to be very respectful of the land. And that brings to mind a very special campsite with a particular Eskimo friend of mine whose name, in English, was Charlie Sheldon; his Inupiat Eskimo name was Akpelik. And we were standing around the campfire on a moonlit night at the confluence of the Kobuk and the Pah rivers. And he looked at me and looked up in the sky, and he said, "You know, that's my moon and these are my stars and this is my country." It made a major impact on me relative to the way that I knew I should treat the land; they want to treat the land with ultimate respect. And after 30 years, I have a very deep feeling and respect for the Arctic and its environment. And for the environment in general. CLAY: What are some of your goals for future expeditions, for exploration work that you feel needs to be done? MORTVEDT: Well, in the immediate future, in the next two weeks, I'll be going to Svalbard in the high Arctic, between northern Greenland and Franz Josef Land. And there's a particular man there who, in my vernacular, I call an "eiderdown plucker". He's an interesting character. The government regulations in Svalbard, nowadays, don't allow so much actual hunting there. But he utilizes the resource of the land, the eiderdown. So I'm going there to take some photographs and to be with this person for a while and just experience the way of life there in Svalbard. But one of my priorities, high on the list, as soon as I can get to it, is to document the lives and philosophy and contributions of unsung heroes. Throughout my home locale, in the Upper Great Plains in the Midwest, there are people that have made so many contributions to the goodness of life and to our society that don't have any notoriety or any format to tell their story. And so this October I plan to begin a project to conduct interviews on camera and get some stories and philosophies of these decent, contributive common folk. And all of our lives are changing so rapidly with the IT age. And before these people all disappear—certainly goodness and kindness will never disappear—before these particular individuals disappear, I want to begin this project. And it's a high priority for me because some of the people that I wish I would have spoken to and interviewed already have disappeared. And, you know, people talk about indigenous cultures endangered all around the world. Well, within our own culture there are subcultures that are endangered. And, to the best of my ability, I want to document some of these. CLAY: Is there an explorer who especially has inspired you in your career? MORTVEDT: Well, back to my father, of course, as we discussed earlier. And relative to the Arctic, Stefanson, indeed. And relative to the Antarctic, Amundsen. CLAY: We talked a little already about Stefanson. What especially inspired you about Amundsen? MORTVEDT: A very practical individual, once again. It's not a very pleasant and desirable thing to be killing and eating dogs that have been faithful, to get to the South Pole. But, in the practical sense, it was necessary to accomplish other objectives. Yeah, he was a spot-on man. And so was Shackleton, also, a very solid individual. CLAY: What do you see as the future of exploration in general? MORTVEDT: Bottom line is that I am confident that exploration will be a major part of our psyche for the forever. And we have technology that's developed to provide so many more options. So I'm really pleased to see The Explorers Club as a center for this activity.
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