Nick Baggarly is a software engineer from California, an expert at thwarting computer viruses. He's also adept at driving through some of the remotest areas of the globe and persuading others to follow him, usually in expedition convoys of two or more vehicles.
Last year, for example, against the advice of the U.S. State Department, he and his team of eight other Bay Area professionals drove four Land Rovers through the northwest frontier of Pakistan. That's the mountainous, semilawless area where Osama bin Laden, the infamous al-Qaida terrorist, is thought to be hiding.
Baggarly, executive director of a private nonprofit organization known as Drive Around the World, was not stupid and looking for trouble, he said. But the only other route to China, through Nepal, was actively menaced by Maoist rebels and therefore even more unstable.
So northwest Pakistan it was. They did not stop.
Now Baggarly, two other men and a woman plan to drive across Alaska from Anchorage to the Arctic Ocean on the first part of the homestretch of an around-the-world trip begun in November 2003. They leave Tuesday morning in the four Land Rovers that already have covered 40,000 miles of the world's roadways in more than 30 countries since November 2003.
Baggarly, 36, has circled the Earth in Land Rovers before, for adventure and learning and to spread goodwill. This time his team is on a quest to raise $100,000 and more for research into Parkinson's disease, he said.
In late 1999, Baggarly returned home from driving around the globe to learn that his older sister, then 32, had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
At the same time, another member of his 1999 team learned that the man's father also had been diagnosed with the incurable movement disorder.
A long period of feeling powerless went by, Baggarly said, before his wife, Chanda, suggested they once again drive around the world, but this time do it for Parkinson's.
"This whole journey is a creative response to helplessness," he said Thursday by phone from California.
The funds are being raised for the Parkinson's Institute in Sunnyvale, Calif., a research and clinical facility from whose parking lot the four Rovers began their trek nearly 15 months ago.
That's also where the team plans to end up late next month after they drive to Deadhorse -- and through Prudhoe Bay's oil fields if they can get permission -- then turn around and drive down and through Canada and the Lower 48.
So far, said Baggarly, the nine travelers have raised more than $75,000 through pledges, donations and a raffle whose winner will take home a fifth Land Rover.
The expedition is funded through numerous corporate donations and sponsorship, plus the members' own money.
Before the trip, Baggarly and others persuaded Land Rover, the United Kingdom-based manufacturer, to give them five "certified pre-owned" Discoveries, a midrange model that sells for about $35,000 and up, according to the Anchorage Land Rover dealership.
Each used 2003 SUV, a V-8 with four-speed automatic transmission, had been part of a lease operation and had an odometer reading of about 10,000 miles, Baggarly said.
His organization also lined up companies like North Face, Optima, Lonely Planet and a host of others.
A Norwegian shipper, Wallenius Wilhelmsen, donated most of the transportation needed to carry the Land Rovers across the ocean whenever they reached the end of the road -- from the tip of South America to Australia, for example.
Each member of the team, Baggarly said, threw in $10,000 to pay for flights, ferries, meals, hotel rooms and other expenses.
The 1999 trek was a latitude expedition, a journey that started in Beijing, China, and took the team west across Asia, the Middle East and Europe, from whose Atlantic coast they shipped their two Land Rovers to New York and continued westward to finish in California.
One of the two Rovers was a 1962 Dormobile named "Alaska," Baggarly said, a vehicle that once had been owned by a scientist who did research in the Aleutians. The trip covered 16,000 road miles and 16 countries in 78 days.
The Longitude Expedition, the current journey, is a north-to-south excursion. The team has driven from California through Mexico, Central and South America to lower Argentina. They crossed Australia and drove through Indonesia and other South Asian countries, including India and Pakistan.
They crossed China and Russia and arrived in Magadan in Siberia just before Thanksgiving, according to Andrew Baggarly, Nick's brother.
Along the way, the team has conducted itself like an educational mission, visiting schools, talking science and geography, and answering children's questions about their journey via the Web and satellite phones. They've answered 8,000 such questions, Nick Baggarly said.
Since November, as team members relaxed in the States, their Rovers, Andrew Baggarly said, were shipped to South Korea. They were later shipped to Tacoma and finally up to Anchorage earlier last week.
On Thursday, the four identical Discoveries were comfortably closed in for the night at the Stepp Brothers Land Rover dealership in downtown Anchorage. Remarkably, the four white, heavily decaled vehicles showed not a bit of wear despite their odyssey.
"Tonight Show" host Jay Leno and actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson's, have endorsed the trek and put their signatures on one of the vehicles. Their names were taped over on Thursday, however, to protect them, said Kent Weight, a Land Rover technician.
The vehicles are ready to go, their roof racks neatly packed with jerrycans, tents and other gear. The team members plan to gather here by Monday. Instead of the original nine, only four will make this part of the final leg, partly because the team doesn't have enough money for all of them to be here, said Nick Baggarly.
The vehicles are a curiosity and draw crowds, he said. The team expects to meet many Alaskans and to hand out pledge brochures for Parkinson's to those who want to donate.
Among the more exciting parts of the journey so far, he said, were a quarter-hour spent with the Dalai Lama in India and a trip through the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan -- not once, but three times. Their visas for China were not in order and they had to return south on the highway, a twisting mountain road with steep drop-offs, to Islamabad to fix them, Baggarly said.
The trek has been a test of his and the other members' aplomb.
"The thing I have learned the most is how to deal with uncertainty and hopelessness," Baggarly said. "When there's a ton on your shoulders, a ton of uncertainty, and a lot of people are depending on you, are you a jackass or do you try to keep it together? ... You have to keep your cool."
Daily News reporter Peter Porco can be reached at pporco@adn.com or 257-4582.
