Essay by David Frey
Recreation – May 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
DESERT RATS must be feeling the tug of Opportunity on their own Spirit these days, as they watch images beamed back from Martian rovers crawling over the Red Planet.
Panoramic photos of red sand and rock stretching to an unexplored horizon can mean only one thing for adventurers on this been-there-done-that planet. Road trip!
You think George Bush is the only one thinking it’s time to pack our bags and head to Mars? Let’s face it: In these days of adventure travel and extreme sports, this old blue planet is looking a little blasé.
Just look at the numbers. The Bureau of Land Management estimates 2 million people converge on the dusty canyon country around Moab, Utah, every year in recreational vehicles, SUVs and mountain bikes. In western Colorado, the White River National Forest has declared itself the most popular forest in the country. Home to ski resorts like Aspen and Vail, it tallies almost 10 million visitors a year. That’s more than travel to favorite national parks like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone.
Farther off the beaten path, things are beginning to look pretty well-trodden, too. Mount Everest saw a record number of climbers set out to conquer it last year, 50 years after the first successful climb. Last year also brought its first live satellite-broadcast ascent, with play-by-play commentary like a golf tournament. Once-remote Antarctica is a port for cruise ships now. Billionaires can even thumb a ride into space nowadays.
Where’s an adventurous guy or gal who wants to get away from it all supposed to go? Mars, of course. So pack your bags fast. After being the closest it’s been in 60,000 years, the Red Planet is only drifting farther away.
Mars has all the cool canyon country of Arizona, but without the golf developments. Big mountains? Killer slickrock? Ghoulish hoodoos? Mars has it, and more. Looking for a ski vacation? Think Mars. At least one scientist who has studied Mars for decades, William K. Hartmann, says there’s reason to believe that carbon-dioxide snow falls on the polar ice caps in the Martian winter. Now that’s first tracks through some serious freshies.
To prepare for my trip, I’ve picked up a copy of Hartmann’s “A Traveler’s Guide to Mars.” (I swear, it really exists.) For the adventure traveler, it turns out, opportunities abound.
“A visitor on Mars is greeted by vistas of rocks and hills, sand dunes and lava flows — strangely attractive in their awesome desolation,” Hartmann writes. I am SO there.
How about a trek on Olympus Mons, three times higher than Everest, as wide as Missouri and the largest volcano in the solar system? For a trip into canyon country, there’s Valles Marineris, so big it dwarfs the Grand Canyon. Maybe a trip to Cydonia, home to the so-called Face of Mars, that eerie feature staring out of the Martian landscape. Hartmann calls it a Monument Valley sort of place, with lots of cool mesas and rock formations. And get this: no RVs.
FOR EXTREME SPORTS FANATICS, Mars is the new frontier. On a hot day, it gets up to negative 15 Fahrenheit. The atmosphere — almost pure carbon dioxide — is so thin, it makes Everest seem like a hyperbaric chamber. Bring your Camelback, though. Even if you could find a potful of water, Hartmann says, it would evaporate away in a cold boil.
For a long time, it looked like the closest we’d ever get to a manned Mars expedition was watching devotees of the Mars Society, a group of Marsophiles who don spacesuits and bounce around Utah once a year, hoping one day they can do the real thing. Yet President Bush’s plan to send astronauts to our red neighbor has given the adventure-minded among us real cause for concern.
For the intrepid explorer, the key is to beat those astronauts to the punch. If the past century in the West has taught us all one thing, it’s this: if there’s a place worth exploring, it’s a place worth fencing, drilling, digging, damming, over-grazing, subdividing and condominiumizing. For the entrepreneurial developer, images from the Martian rovers look like real estate brochures for the next wave of buildable acreage suitable for golf courses, luxury timeshares and strip malls.
Hoist those backpacks, adventurers. It’s time to head for Mars before Starbucks does.
David Frey is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (www.hcn.org). He writes in Carbondale, Colorado.
