In looking for Antarctica images to use in my onboard photography lectures, I poked around on Flickr and elsewhere, and I also thought about friends who’ve been to the Antarctic and who might give me permission to use some of their photos. One such friend is Kim Yuhas, a Penn State grad who’s now an attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission and who went to Antarctica in November 2015. Her Facebook album from the trip is loaded with terrific images. In addition to using a bunch of her photos to illustrate points in my PowerPoint onboard, I also thought I’d share some with you here.
What’s especially cool for me is that Kim was an intern at The Penn Stater at the time I was getting ready to host the Alumni Association’s 2002 Antarctic trip—and, though I didn’t know it at the time, my trip planted a seed with her.
I learned this when I complimented her on her Facebook photo album back in 2015. She responded: “I have been meaning to tell you that it was YOUR trip that piqued my fascination with the continent. I remember thinking, Wow, you can go there?! I’ve always wanted to say THANK YOU for the inspiration! It was a longtime obsession and dream come true to finally be able to make it happen.”
The other day I asked Kim to tell me how the trip finally came about. It turns out that, after graduating from Penn State, she had gone to law school at the University of Pennsylvania and ended up working as an attorney in private practice in New York City for a few years. “Then I got a job at the SEC,” she says, “and had a chance to take three months off in between jobs—and I decided I was finally going to take the trip. I went alone, because it’s something I wanted to do just for myself.”
She went with a company called One Ocean Expeditions on a small research vessel, the Akademik Ioffe. Hers was a very adventurous trip, with participants able to not just wander around among the penguins but also hike, kayak, and even ski. By contrast, the upcoming Penn State trip with Gohagan is more of a luxury cruise, using a five-star ship called Le Boréal, and I’m pretty sure you won’t see us doing any kayaking in the icy waters down there!
Anyway, Kim’s photos from the experience are lovely, and they only whet my appetite even more for our trip, which starts next week. Below is a sampling of her images in slide-show format.
Lovely photos. She doesn’t look cold at all!