Weapon of Mass Destruction Disappears

An artist’s latest work – a bottle of melted
Antarctic ice – may have been stolen and drunk by a thirsty thief.

Artist Wayne Hill filled a two-litre clear plastic bottle with melted ice
to highlight global warming.

But the artwork, valued at $70,000 went missing while on display at a
literary festival, reports the Scotsman.

Entitled "Weapon of Mass Destruction," it vanished halfway
through the Ways with Words festival at Dartington Hall, Devon.

Mr Hill said: "It looked like an ordinary bottle of water, but it
was on a plinth, labeled, described and in the program of the whole
festival.

" It was very, very clear what it was – a work of art."

The work uses water taken from the threatened west Antarctic ice sheet,
which is currently melting at the rate of 250 cubic kilometers a year,
he said.

Mr Hill added: "Nobody has any idea what has happened to it. It
was there and then it was gone."

Glacial water is supposedly the purest,
most natural on the planet, having frozen sometime before human beings
discovered petrochemicals,
plastics and even slash and burn agriculture, but it shouldn’t cost $70,000
a bottle!

Iin
fact, we found some on sale on the ‘net, and although we are waiting
for an email reply to our request for prices (not given on
the web site, always a red flag) and while we are sure their glacial water
is expensive, we would be willing to bet it’s nowhere near 70 grand.
Sounds like
an insurance
scam
to
us…

But it also reminds us of the Plaza de Armas in the picturesque
Andean town of Carhuaz, where we holed up at various points in our career,
high and low, and where our son is now running an Adventure Tourism Hotel
called Villa Maria.

The town is tucked into a deep and verdant valley between
two towering branches of the Peruvian Andes – the White Range and the Black
Range. Nestled in the bottom of the valley, alongside the river that cut
it through the majestic mountains, the climate is temperate and the air is
clean and clear. Because the tree line, and just above that the snow line,
can be reached in about 6 hours of hard hiking, the area is popular with
climbers from day trippers in sneakers  just trying to see some snow
to full expeditions determined to reach the tops of some of the most challenging
mountains in the world.

The Dowbrigade has never been much of one for crampon
and base camp climbing, although we have been up to the glacier a few times.
What we do think is extremely cool is that early every morning before dawn
a pair of local teenagers, inheritors of the legendary Chasquis who
carried messages for the Incas, literally run up to the glacier, where they
use ice
axes to chip off about 22 lbs of ice each, wrap them in plastic and then
tightly woven wool blankets, and run them back down to the Plaza de Armas,
in an elapsed time of less than 4 hours.  All day long a colorful
cart of painted wood full of clear glass bottles of cremes, syrups and
sauces uses this glacial ice to serve pure Peruvian snow cones, shaved
on the spot from a chunk of glacial ice that’s been frozen since mastodons
were wandering around nearby.

A Carhuaz raspadilla, as they are called, costs
15 cents. We want one now (it is 94 in Watertown as we write, though a
line of thunderstorms promises releif). Unfortunately we will have to wait
a few months, until the end of the fall semester. The glacial snow cones
alone make the trip worthwhile. Since we’re
feeling
nostalgic, here’s a picture of the Dowbrigade and his son in the Carhuaz
Plaza de Armas

article from Ananova

Alaska
Glacial Water web site

Villa Maria
Eco-Hostal in Carhuaz, Peru

from Ananova