Environment : Treks to Arctic, Pole Prompt Canada to Consider Limits : Some people go for science, some for thrills. Some of them cause damage. Could regulations be protective yet fair?

Peter Clarkson’s heart sank when he saw the March issue of National Geographic. What doubtlessly struck southern subscribers as yet another full-color love letter to the Canadian arctic read to him like a death threat against a part of the planet he serves as a wildlife biologist.

The offending article told of a team of Norwegian cross-country skiers who had recently raced a rival British group to the North Pole and won. The Norwegians said they had been charged by a polar bear along the way and had regretfully shot the magnificent animal. To make matters worse, when they reached the Pole, they celebrated their victory with a feast of fried polar bear meat.

Clarkson is a so-called “bear-people conflict specialist” for the Northwest Territories government, a man in the front lines of the effort to spare the closely monitored polar bear from outdoorsmen’s whims and bullets. He has devoted years to the study of red-pepper sprays, plastic bullets, camp-perimeter detection systems and other devices to help people survive encounters with hungry bears without killing them.

“Each year, several bears die in the name of polar and arctic exploration,” he complains. “Some explorers almost look at it as part of their adventure that they’re going to have to kill a polar bear. Rather than learning how to prevent (shootings), they’ll take along a firearm.”

But maybe not for much longer.

The Canadian government is looking into ways of forestalling depredations against northern nature by arctic adventurers. It is a delicate goal; the officials say they want to slap controls on what they see as mere thrill-seekers and troublemakers, without hampering legitimate scientific researchers or well-behaved vacationers.

“When we deal with explorers, we have different classes,” says Andy Theriault of the Canadian government’s Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. “There are good people and bad people, and people who just don’t know. We don’t want to jeopardize anything the well-learned, well-read, safety-minded individual might do. It’s the people who don’t know, and don’t realize they don’t know, that we’re trying to reach.”

But however big-hearted and open-minded the government may be in its campaign, it has already roused the tempers of those who work and play in, and profit from, the high arctic.

“There are certain crazy (adventurers,)” says Richard Weber, a seasoned explorer who has been to the North Pole three times and conducted scientific research en route. “There were some people who wanted to ride horses to the North Pole--those are the kinds of things (the officials) want to avoid. (But) for the rest of us who pursue expeditions, I feel we are getting sort of a bum rap.”

“It’s stupid, what they’re trying to do,” agrees Bezal Jesudason, an arctic-expedition outfitter working out of Resolute Bay, population 180, the staging ground for most North Pole treks. “When bureaucrats have nothing to do, they sit down and make rules for other people. I have no use for them.”

Each year, as the Earth tilts on its axis and the sun briefly sets to work on the frigid northernmost latitudes, scientists, explorers and Indiana Jones types begin to arrive from around the world to try their skill and luck against nature at her most brutal. Some adventurers shoot for the North Pole; others settle for the more southerly magnetic pole, while still others try to kayak the fabled Northwest Passage. Scientists venture forth to sample the glacial ice or the sediment of northern lakes. Anthropologists try to retrace the travel routes of ancient shamans.

Scientific or silly, all such trips are fantastically expensive.

“Just to take a person (by light plane) from Resolute Bay to the starting point (for a North Pole attempt) on the northern end of Ellesmere Island costs $10,000,” said Jesudason, an immigrant engineer from India, who explains that all airplane fuel must be flown in from the south and cached beforehand. “And if you get sick or forget your matches or something, it will cost you another $10,000 to bring the equipment up the very next day. So you’re looking at $20,000 to $30,000 just for a failed attempt. I don’t believe there’s any expeditions that have successfully reached the North Pole for less than $100,000.”

The deeper an explorer’s pocket, of course, the likelier he is to win his arctic gamble. That means a would-be explorer must line up big-dollar backers before he boards a plane for Canada.

And to attract such backers, some adventurers assert that they are going in the name of science or the environment--the thinning polar ozone layer and the greenhouse effect being popular current hooks--when in fact sheer adventure is foremost on their minds.

“They get quite devious,” says Jesudason.

Others come up with novel transportation methods, in hopes that if they propose to be the first, say, to reach the Pole by pogo stick, a pogo stick manufacturer will step forward to sponsor the trip.

Thus, in 1987, Shinji Kazama, of Japan, became the first person ever to ride to the North Pole on a motorcycle. (The Japanese have lately surpassed the Americans in their fascination with North Pole attempts; in 1989, Japanese actress Masako Izumi reached the Pole by snowmobile, trailed by an entourage of cameramen and reporters so large that locals began referring to Resolute Bay as “Little Tokyo.”)

Australian millionaire Dick Smith made it to the top of the world in a specially equipped helicopter, while two Frenchmen reached the Pole by ultra-light aircraft, “after a few million dollars,” says Jesudason. Another Frenchman has announced his intention to wind surf the distance.

A group of Swiss traveled to the magnetic pole by mountain bike. There have been hot-air balloon flyovers. A Toronto travel agency flies big-spending golfers to the North Pole by light plane once a year, to drink champagne and play one hole in each of the five national sectors--Greenland, Norway, the Soviet Union, the United States and Canada.

Some of the stunts may sound about as meritorious as Evel Knievel’s motorcycle feats, but Jesudason says there is no shortage of sponsors for polar trips. He notes that he once joked with a journalist that he himself fancied a trip to the Pole atop an elephant; no sooner was his remark in print than a wealthy Frenchman called up, offering to help bankroll the outing.

It is this misguided enthusiasm that has so distressed the Canadian government.

“The businesses that sponsor (the stunts) are even more ignorant than the people who are doing them,” says Clarkson, the bear-protection man.

The arctic is huge, after all--far too vast and thinly populated for game wardens or other law enforcement officials to begin to supervise. And it teems with dangers for the uninitiated. Polar ice is hundreds of feet thick in some places, a few inches in others, and all of it is shifting on the ocean currents all the time. When the different patches collide, they form vertical cliffs--called pressure ridges--20 feet or more straight up.

“It’s just like a maze,” says Jesudason. “It could take all day (for trekkers) just to move 200 yards.”

On top of that, there are plenty of curious, fearless polar bears to contend with, and temperatures that can plunge to minus-60 degrees Fahrenheit. Even at those paralyzing lows, the ocean currents may be so swift in places that the water doesn’t freeze, leaving a Pole-bound traveler stranded on an ice floe without notice.

All this means accidents, injuries, dead wildlife and other misadventures, and the officials charged with guarding against such things often hear about them only after irreparable damage has been done.

That’s what happened when the Norwegian team shot the polar bear, Clarkson says. The men were packing pistols--handguns are illegal in Canada--but the government’s arctic gatekeepers did not know about either the weapons or their use until months after the team had departed, when they read the National Geographic piece. By then, it was too late to do anything but write the magazine a letter of complaint. Clarkson heard back from an editor, who said that the doomed bear had been “far beyond its normal range.”

“Well, if the bear was ‘far beyond its normal range,’ the Norwegians were far beyond theirs,” Clarkson figures.

The territorial government’s David Purchase, meanwhile, says he got to questioning the merits of some “scientific” missions earlier this year when he read a newspaper account of some British explorers who wanted to be the first to ski to the northern magnetic pole. Purchase remembered the men; they had been in the Canadian arctic before and had killed yet another polar bear, he says. This time, they reportedly hoped to contribute to the understanding of northern aboriginal cultures by finding 4,000-year-old igloos as they skied toward their destination.

“As you can see, everything here is melting now,” says Purchase, whose office in Iqaluit is sitting next to a torrent of spring runoff on a recent June day. “Up on Ellesmere Island, it can get up to 80, 85 degrees in the summer. (Any 4,000-year-old igloos) would melt.”

The Canadian arctic does possess some authentic archeological sites--places left with stone shelters, whalebone poles for caribou-skin tents, graves, harpoon tips and other tools. And these have the Canadian government worried as well.

“Many of these sites are very sensitive to damage,” says Doug Stenton, an archeologist at Arctic College in Iqaluit. Since the arctic is essentially a desert, with scant precipitation, he says, it’s not at all unheard-of to find 1,000-year-old artifacts in plain sight on the tundra, without a speck of ground cover.

“You might find a piece of an ivory harpoon head, or more likely, stone tools,” says Stenton. “They’re very easy to pocket. I once heard of an individual--I don’t know where he was from--who showed up with a green garbage bag (containing) artifacts that he had picked up around southern Baffin Island. He was trying to sell them, blissfully ignorant of the regulations. It’s the kind of thing that just sends a chill up your spine.”

So far, Canadian officials have done little more than debate what protective controls might be put into place. One idea is to require arctic adventurers to post a bond against their possible rescue--at tremendous cost--off the arctic ice.

“Why should the Canadian government foot the bill?” asks Theriault.

Others want to publish a sophisticated how-to packet for distribution to Canadian embassies worldwide, for visa officials to use in dealing with visa applicants who plan on arctic walkabouts.

But even that idea provokes controversy.

“You have to be very careful when you are providing information,” says Theriault. “Once you have provided information, you have invited somebody.”

Which is just what Jesudason wants to do.

“The taxpayers should be welcoming these guys,” he argues. “North Pole expeditions have generated maybe $50 million for the Canadian economy over the last 20 years. If they want to go by llamas, that’s fine with me.”

Not, he adds, that he hasn’t seen his share of strange and unnerving explorers. There was the German adventurer who came to Resolute Bay claiming that he was acclimatized because he had spent a few nights sleeping in a walk-in freezer back in Hamburg. There was the English police constable who arrived, having scheduled a quick hike to the Pole by dividing the number of miles to get there by the number of miles he walked a day on his beat back home in Derbyshire.

“There was a Japanese guy who came here in 1978 with an ice boat,” says Jesudason, describing an ice-crossing contraption with sail and runners instead of a hull. Such a wind-propelled vehicle might make for smooth sailing on the flat surface of a frozen southern lake, but Jesudason knew it wouldn’t go far on the broken, shifting polar ice.

“We tell them that it won’t work, but some are very stubborn,” he says. No matter: Jesudason is willing to consult with them all. “I was probably the most ignorant person on Earth before I came here,” he said, “so I can relate to these ignorant people.”