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BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO


Doors Off over Baja California

Although we landed safely in San Diego a week ago, I still have not come down for the adventure of flying the length Baja California during the first photo expedition of the Baja Aerial Archive Project with LightHawk, WiLDCOAST, and iLCP.

This was not your normal flightseeing kind of operation, but a true adventure full of stunning scenery, uncertainty, military checkpoints and procedures, and, fortunately, an awful lot of good luck.

In LightHawk’s battle-tested Cessna 206, a workhorse for hauling people and gear, we flew more than 40 hours, and almost all the time with cargo doors off.

And we didn’t fly in straight lines either, covering over 3500 nautical miles, or 3.5 times the length of the Baja Peninsula.

We flew almost the entire length of the mountainous coastline along the Sea of Cortez, the entire length of Magdalnea Bay, the entire length of the Sierra de la Giganta, and along the west side of Isla Ángel de la Guarda, and circled over 500,000 nesting seabirds on Isla Rasa and breaching whales in Loerto Bay.

In addition, we flew important missions with four different conservation partners, including (1) the Cabo Pulmo group organized by Martin Goebel over the proposed Cabo Cortez marina along the East Cape, (2) Elena Moreno of Ague Vale Mas Que Oro over proposed gold strip-mine sites adjacent to the Sierra de la Giganta Biosphere Reserve, (3) WiLDCOAST and TELEVISA over Magdalena Bay, and (4) Horacio Cabrera with Eco-Alianza in Loreto over a proposed copper strip-mine locaiton in the Loreto watershed.

Fundraising for the project continues and new Founding Partners are welcome.
To help with a donation, please contact [email protected]
or call (619) 309-5445. Be sure to mention you'd like to support the Baja Aerial Archive Project.


© Ralph Lee Hopkins

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