Into Thick Air

When: May 8, 2008 at 8 PM
Where: 5045 E Speedway at Rosemont

If you’re looking for high-altitude tales of frostbit bravery and perilous icefalls, keep looking. Tonight, local botanist and writer Jim Malusa tells us what happens when a man goes down instead of up.

With plenty of sunscreen and a cold beer swaddled in his sleeping bag, Malusa bicycled alone to the lowest point on each continent, a six-year series of “anti-expeditions” to the “anti-summits.” (A devoted Tucsonan with a horror of snow and ice, he was happy to discover that Antarctica has no exposed terrain below sea level.

Malusa’s first trip took him to Lake Eyre in the arid heart of Australia. Next he followed Moses’ route from the valley of the Nile to the Jordanian shore of the Dead Sea, and then raced against winter through Russian farmlands, from Moscow to the Caspian Sea. Later journeys found him pedaling across the Andes to Salina Grande in Argentine Patagonia, and around tiny Djibouti to Lac Assal in the Horn of Africa. He polished off the “pits” by riding from his Tucson home to Death Valley.

Malusa will read from his new book, Into Thick Air, and show slides of what he found on the road to the world’s great depressions.