Originally Posted by
Drew Wiley
Bingo! David Rockerfeller became the poster child for it. But just thirty years ago, when my nephew was living with me and getting his Geography degree at UCB, he was awarded a grant from an early GPS satellite venture to do the first full north/south traverse of New Guinea on the untamed Indonesian half via a maze of rivers. But one of his Geo classmates was son of a governor there, and strongly warned him not to do it due to the fact that cannibalism was not a mere rumor. Just a few months before an overweight German tourist got behind the trekking party and became smorgasbord. So he turned down the offer, but later accepted an invitation to a wholly unexplored section of the Chinese Karakoram by the GPS firm. All that GPS technology failed miserably, and two sherpas flown in from Nepal got lost on the glaciers. Remarkably, they were both found alive and not in a crevasse, even though snow-blinded. Nor were they allowed to take any film pictures. By contract, any images had to be live-transmitted via satellite for publicity purposes. Lots didn't get through, and the ones that did were horribly fuzzy. Sad,because what was lost included some first ascents of very high remote peaks. Somebody did sneak a film Nikon in a jacket but got sued afterwards. Bob, have you seen the big coffee table book of the Karakoram done by Shirahata using a 4x5 Technika? Quite a project!
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