A national publication’s cover story about a Congressional trip to the South Pole is old news, said a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Brian Baird of Vancouver.

Saturday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal featured a Page 1 story about a January 2008 trip to Antarctica by 10 members of Congress. As chair of a House subcommittee on research and education, Baird led the trip.

Saturday’s story, written by Brody Mullins and T.W. Farnham, described it as among the priciest trips for U.S. lawmakers, at a reported cost to taxpayers of $103,000. That doesn’t include U.S. Air Force flight expenses, which would boost the total to more than $500,000, said the Journal, citing Defense Department figures.

Baird spokesman Garrett Russo said Saturday that he had no comment, and that Baird was not available. Russo did say that there was no new information in the story, and that the trip report has been posted prominently on the Third District Democrat’s Congressional Web site.

Baird’s site has a link — baird.house.gov/images/stories/antarctica—statement.pdf — to his seven-page report on the South Pole trip, as well as a photo gallery.

In the report, Baird said that he was asked to lead the trip after a more senior colleague had to drop out.

It’s a fairly regular stop for lawmakers, his report said: “Since 1959, there have been 34 official House/Senate trips to Antarctica under the auspices of the U.S. Antarctica Program,” which includes $320 million annually for logistics and research.

At one landing site, “the flight had to circle the base for a bit as a couple of penguins were shuffled off the landing strip,” he wrote.

The Journal story charted other stops, including diving opportunities at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

That also was in Baird’s 2008 report; he wrote of his interest in “research on the impacts of temperature change and (ocean) acidification on coral health.”

Baird called the experience “transformative” and wrote, “It is impossible to overstate the importance of this trip on my understanding of the issues facing our planet and what we must do about them.”