"Death didn't stop this world traveler"

   ....Ralph's ashes continued..

There were three other people in the cabin, but Lopes and her companion had a window to themselves. When the wheel stopped as they reached the very top, 212 feet above ground, she reached for her purse and seized the moment.

"I scattered the ashes out of the window, only a few . . . And I could see a few grains lofting out, and the sunlight reflecting on them," Lopes said.

"When you lose someone who's close to you, it's a journey. It was, I think, good for all of us who were close to him, to feel like we had some kind of mission. It helped me."

Lopes has scattered bits of White's remains on three continents, at sites that include the ruins of the Temple of Thor in Iceland and the Fairview Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where 121 Titanic victims are buried.

But as her log of White's posthumous travels makes clear -- it's titled "Where has Ralph been?" -- others have carried White's remains even farther, deeper and higher. The waters of Lake Baikal in Russia. A lighthouse in Norway. A suspension bridge in British Columbia. Blue Nile Falls in Ethiopia.

In September 2009, Rory Golden carried a pinch of White's ashes on a harrowing climb of Mont Blanc in the French Alps -- "for no other reason than that it was there, it would take effort and they bore the same surname."

After struggling through nausea, hypothermia and freezing winds to reach the 15,781-foot summit, Golden wrote in an e-mail, he pulled off his insulated gloves to retrieve the ashes, let them fly and shouted, "Fair winds and following seas, my friend!"

The climb was "the toughest thing I've ever done, both physically and mentally," said Golden, 55. "Ralph helped me get there and back safely."

White's son, Randy Pixley of Atlanta, hasn't scattered any ashes yet. White's daughter, Few, has made deposits in China, Singapore and Japan, halfway up Mt. Fuji.

"I was pregnant with his granddaughter, so I could only take him up above the snow line," she said.

When her daughter, Kaia Blair, gets to be 18, Few said, she'll get her chance to take her grandfather someplace interesting. In fact, she said, "I hope her grandfather's ashes will inspire her to become the explorer that he was."

More than two dozen traveling companions have escorted White's remains to various destinations so far, usually releasing "maybe a tenth of a teaspoon" of ashes, Lopes said.

It is possible that laws have been overlooked in the course of these travels. Rather than deal with red tape around the world, Lopes says, White's friends and family members have scattered his ashes informally or furtively (a few grains of ashes were tucked in a crack inside the Sistine Chapel).

On the other hand, some journeys have involved no scattering at all. In May 2009, a friend put about one gram of White's remains on a spacecraft operated in New Mexico by the firm Celestis, which, for a fee, offers "post-cremation memorial flights."

White's flight was to be a suborbital itinerary, but the launch went awry and the vessel drifted back to Earth, contents intact, chute deployed. White had done 2,997 parachute jumps, Lopes said, "so we figured, well, that's one more."

There is still one more place left on Earth where Lopes believes White would really want his remains to be -- the Titanic wreck, 12,000 feet down in the Atlantic.

Lopes has people working on that. But in the meantime, White's friends and family intend to keep him in motion. If all goes according to plan, they say, some ashes may soon find their way aboard a nuclear submarine.

"I haven't weighed contents to see how much of Ralph has gone already, but there's enough for another 50 or 100 scatterings," Lopes said.

"Some people might think it's a grim task, but to me it isn't. Maybe it's because I'm a volcanologist. I'm used to dealing with ashes."