0608_confluence_final_0414:Layout 1 5/12/08 10:02 AM Page 80 Because GPS units in hand, obsessed adventurers are roaming the world to claim a new set of firsts: 16,232 places where major lines of latitude and longitude intersect. It’ Sound geeky? Not when your sweet spot is at 17,000 feet on the side of a remote s Bolivian volcano. By McKenzie Funk There. photographs by Paolo Marchesi [Sortof.] of.] 80 Outside 0608_confluence_final_0414:Layout 1 5/12/08 10:02 AM Page 81 Michaels on Bolivia’s Jachcha Condoriri; opposite, Funk, Michaels, and driver Criso Ibieta on the country’s high salt flats 0608_confluence_final_0414:Layout 1 5/12/08 10:02 AM Page 82 to by pass the worst of the jungle, and scaling a Of all the arguments cliff, Princess Bride style, to reach the spot. A few months ago, Greg was featured on the home page of the DCP Web site for bagging Greg Michaels employs the last points in Europe: four in Bosnia that others had avoided because of land mines. He to make his life’s work seem less inane, the “We’d probably be on some tourist path if we carried maps from the Bosnia-Herzegovina best may be the one about the millennium. “I didn’t have this mission,” he says. “You might de-mining commission and somehow sur - would sort of debate with my NASA friends,” think I get a little carried away, and some peo - vived with all his appendages. he says. “I’d talk to them about confluence ple say that I am , but most of the world has According to the DCP—which was founded hunting and they’d be like, ‘Oh, yeah, what - been explored. This is a measured way to as - in 1996 by Alex Jarrett, a bored New Hamp - ever,’ and then later on I’d find out they sure that we visit all the in-between spaces— shirite looking for something to do with his thought it was a really stupid idea. I talk to that we see what’s there. Confluence hunting new GPS— there are some 16,232 “primary” Omy friend George and he’s like, ‘The conflu - is the last frontier.” (i.e., not in the middle of an ocean) conflu - ence point has no meaning, it’s just totally ar - ences on the planet: 14,029 on land, 2,203 in bitrary, it doesn’t relate to anything, why WHAT GREG MICHAELS DOES, to be precise, water but within sight of the shoreline, and 151 would you want to go after something like is make expeditions, GPS in hand, to the on what’s left of the polar ice caps. So far, that?’ But then I’m like, how about the mil - places on the earth’s surface where integer about a third of these, 5,324 points, have been lennium, you know? latitude and longitude lines intersect, like visited and documented, and 10,405 conflu - “George made a really big deal about the 44°N 144°E, on th e Japanese island of ence hunters in 177 countries on seven conti - new millennium,” Greg continues. “I think he Hokkaido, one of his many Asian prizes. He nents have snapped 71,929 pictures to prove went to Easter Island to celebrate it. But it’s an was the first to bag a confluence in Taiwan, they were there. Thanks to Greg, every con - arbitrary time. In a lot of ways it’s the same: the first to bag one in Vietnam, and the first to fluence in mainland Europe has now been Everyone can agree on the millennium as a bag what he calls “the center of the north - reached. Thanks to his compatriots, every marker of time. But a confluence is something eastern quadrasphere”—45°N 90°E, in west - confluence in every American state but Alaska everyone can agree on as a marker of place.” ern China. It was Greg who tried (and failed) has been reached. The DCP’s map of the lower Greg tells me this as we stand, lost, in a vil - to sweet-talk his way into North Korea to 48 has become a sea of red dots. lage in western Bolivia, surrounded by alpaca claim that country’s first confluence, posing There are easy confluences and there are droppings and bicycle tracks and adobe huts as a journalist and trying to hitch rides with hard confluences, and if you’re standing on with straw roofs and cactus-wood doors. Our Russian and Chinese boat captains. It was this planet, you’re never more than 49 miles location is 18°50.983 'S, 68°31.233 'W—cer- Gre g who decided to tainly nothing special, not for a man of Greg’s go after the world’s stature—and we’re just miles from the border ten highest conflu - Lake with Chile, which is marked by a reddish, per - ence points and Titicaca fectly conical volcano. Ahead, across the Alti - reached what may be La Paz BOLIVIA plano plateau, are the glaciated peaks of the very highest, at A L Sajama National Park, home to the highest 19,113 feet on a T I P confluence point in the Western Hemisphere. nameless Tibetan L A We think we can see the mountain we’ll have to peak, in May 2005. N climb to reach it, but we can’t be sure, and in That expedition in - O any case it’s 65 miles away. First we have a bog volved a week of Oruro to negotiate. hitchhiking, a 70- ˚SS Tomarapi Our driver, Criso Ibieta, and cook/navigator, hour bus ride, severe Maria Garcia Medina, clearly have never been altitude sickness, NEVADOADO Lakee SAJAMAAMA Poopó here. Since yesterday afternoon, they’ve been and cat-and-mouse 21,463 feet bickering about directions and relying heavily games with the Chi - Sucre on photographer Paolo Marchesi’s Bolivia map nese military. and on my new GPS, which now sits between Greg’s descrip tion them in an honored spot on the front seat of the of the Tibet ex peri - Land Cruiser. Soon there are two dirt tracks to ence on conflu - S N Uyuni choose from; we go with the one that heads ence.org, the official Uyuni straight toward Sajama, bouncing along for a Web site of the De - mile until it dead-ends at a river in a broad, gree Confluence 50 miles soggy meadow. Beyond the river are sand Project ( DCP), is sec - dunes, more volcanoes, and hundreds of al - ond only to his description of a 2004 victory from one. Some people simply get in their car pacas. We get out and walk up the banks, trying in Japan over skilled confluence hunter Fab - and visit those nearby; some visit the same and failing to find a place to cross. We stare at rice Blocteur, a French-Canadian whom he points again and again. But Greg does nei - the volcanoes. Greg stops to snap a photo. He’s raced mightily for the last of the confluences ther. Until last summer, when he made an at - sporting sunglasses, a soul patch, and a pair of on Japan’s main island, Honshu. The point’s tempt at the highest confluence in North those zip-off travel pants that convert into thick-jungle approach had previously beat en America, 26°N 144°W, at 13,418 feet in Alas - shorts—looking, as always, about a decade and back Blocteur. Greg won after finding a ka’s Wrangell –St. Elias National Park, he’d a half fitter and younger than his 39 years. wa terlogged dinghy, paddling it down a river never even bothered to try one in the States. 82 Outside Map by Joyce Pendola 0608_confluence_final_0414:Layout 1 5/12/08 10:02 AM Page 83 Michaels (right) on the road to Uyuni His 27 successful visits are thus a paltry few impassably steep. To gaze at it on Google Earth Altiplano as the crow flies—and if you zoom compared with those of 100- and 200-con - is to play God, flying back and forth above a back in you can see its name: Tomarapi. fluence legends Captain Peter, Gordon digitized, photorealistic mountainscape, spin - Tomarapi is tiny, but a Web search reveals Spence, Targ Parsons, and Joseph Kerski, but ning until you’ve seen it from every angle and that it is home to a new, Aymara Indian –run a confluence hunter cannot be measured by taken in every obstacle. There could be a snow - eco-lodge: room and board for less than $40 a stats alone. field or two to navigate on the hike in. There’s a night. The giant volcano lording over Tomarapi “Captain Peter kind of cheats,” Greg says possible couloir route and the confluence mountain of the Sicilian freighter captain Peter Mos - between the cliffs. If turns out to b e Nevado Sajama, at selberger, who has racked up 230 conflu - bad weather rolls in, While others 21,463 feet Bolivia’s highest peak, ences in 52 countries. “Well, not cheats, the scree slope may be gobble up dots, and the area surrounding it turns but he has a cargo ship, right, so he just the way to make a Michaels is out to be Bolivia’s oldest national goes and gets the ones offshore.” Brits quick escape. something park. Because national parks the Spence and Parsons, meanwhile, are ob - Zoom out and the world over tend to have transport for sessed with reaching every point in the UK approach becomes different: hire, logistics will be the easy part.