BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICODoors Off over Baja CaliforniaAlthough 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
