San Ignacio Lagoon, Baja California
We got this close! Well, …maybe even closer!
"I've never done that before in my whole life." "My life has changed forever." Seventy people had seventy different ways of expressing the excitement of the day. But up close and personal views of gray whale cows and calves were only a tiny fragment of all the scenes that will wrap together to create a memory that can be drawn upon time and again in the years to come. Words and pictures will tell the tale to family and friends at home but they are only snapshots in time. What movie will replay in each of our minds when thoughts wander away from the busy moments in our lives?
Like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the land of Baja California is fragmented. Each portion is unique and yet each interlocks in order to form a whole. The waters of the Gulf of California lap upon the black sand beaches north of Santa Rosalia. The town itself is foreign, a page from a history text from France. Its wooden homes and gingerbread trim are incongruous next to the cinder block and adobe style of villages nearby. Founded on copper, its mines lie quiet now, skeletons of buildings alone remaining. But where is the slag and the rubble from 375 miles of tunnels torn into the hills? The answer lies at the water's edge where the insides of mountains return freshly washed and piled on the shore.
The Sierra rises sharply on its eastern face to plateau where cacti grow in densely packed forests of bulky green forms and spines. They strut up the hillsides and across valleys far below until their progress is blocked. From the flanks of Las Tres Virgenes, rivers of fractured basalt flow, now solid, dark and uninviting to even the sturdiest shoe or the hardiest cactus plant. An artist's joke has painted white barked trees here, a scene in black and white. But they are real, sinuous and sensual in their form. Add another improbable plant, a tree with leaves in crowning spikes that dominate a sector with a datillo convention.
An oasis needs to be dropped down smack in the middle of the desert. It is found in the tiny pueblo of San Ignacio. More than two hundred and fifty years ago, friars, looking for souls, found fresh water corralled and pushed to the surface by conveniently placed lava flows. Their legacy remains not only in the impressive mission church but in the miles and miles of date and coconut palms, of mangos and of citrus trees with sweet smelling blossoms and delicious fruit
Working westward, the picture changes once again. Desert pavement claims bigger tracts between cardon and red-blooming palo adan. Dry arroyos are lined with mesquite showing promise of moisture deep down. Iodine bush signals a saline zone where properly adapted life can still survive. Next to it lie empty, endless salt flats where mirages dance turning sand to water where vehicles appear to float. As the western edge slowly subsides and the Pacific fingers in, warm waters of the lagoons invite gray whales to stop, to have their calves and nourish them. We dropped in too and they touched our lives in a myriad of ways.
We got this close! Well, …maybe even closer!
"I've never done that before in my whole life." "My life has changed forever." Seventy people had seventy different ways of expressing the excitement of the day. But up close and personal views of gray whale cows and calves were only a tiny fragment of all the scenes that will wrap together to create a memory that can be drawn upon time and again in the years to come. Words and pictures will tell the tale to family and friends at home but they are only snapshots in time. What movie will replay in each of our minds when thoughts wander away from the busy moments in our lives?
Like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the land of Baja California is fragmented. Each portion is unique and yet each interlocks in order to form a whole. The waters of the Gulf of California lap upon the black sand beaches north of Santa Rosalia. The town itself is foreign, a page from a history text from France. Its wooden homes and gingerbread trim are incongruous next to the cinder block and adobe style of villages nearby. Founded on copper, its mines lie quiet now, skeletons of buildings alone remaining. But where is the slag and the rubble from 375 miles of tunnels torn into the hills? The answer lies at the water's edge where the insides of mountains return freshly washed and piled on the shore.
The Sierra rises sharply on its eastern face to plateau where cacti grow in densely packed forests of bulky green forms and spines. They strut up the hillsides and across valleys far below until their progress is blocked. From the flanks of Las Tres Virgenes, rivers of fractured basalt flow, now solid, dark and uninviting to even the sturdiest shoe or the hardiest cactus plant. An artist's joke has painted white barked trees here, a scene in black and white. But they are real, sinuous and sensual in their form. Add another improbable plant, a tree with leaves in crowning spikes that dominate a sector with a datillo convention.
An oasis needs to be dropped down smack in the middle of the desert. It is found in the tiny pueblo of San Ignacio. More than two hundred and fifty years ago, friars, looking for souls, found fresh water corralled and pushed to the surface by conveniently placed lava flows. Their legacy remains not only in the impressive mission church but in the miles and miles of date and coconut palms, of mangos and of citrus trees with sweet smelling blossoms and delicious fruit
Working westward, the picture changes once again. Desert pavement claims bigger tracts between cardon and red-blooming palo adan. Dry arroyos are lined with mesquite showing promise of moisture deep down. Iodine bush signals a saline zone where properly adapted life can still survive. Next to it lie empty, endless salt flats where mirages dance turning sand to water where vehicles appear to float. As the western edge slowly subsides and the Pacific fingers in, warm waters of the lagoons invite gray whales to stop, to have their calves and nourish them. We dropped in too and they touched our lives in a myriad of ways.
