Note: This post deviates from the somber series of Blog posts I’ve recently published to highlight a whale-watching trip my wife Ann and I recently took to Baja California.
After a sequence of sobering and depressing Blog posts discussing the fate of distant cousins and great-aunts during the Nazi period, a topic to which I’ll soon enough return, I’ve decided to shift directions and talk about a vastly more uplifting experience, a recent six-day whale-watching trip my wife and I took to Baja California. It was an enchanting adventure, a journey I hope all readers may one day take, if for no other reason than to better understand the role of humans in the kaleidoscope and hierarchy of living things. Obviously, this has to do with my father’s family only insofar as I’m my father’s son.
In jest, I’ve recently started referring to my family history Blog as “my mistress” for the intense concentration and devotion it demands to regularly research and write posts. In retrospect, I’m ashamed to admit I was bemoaning the six days I would be away from my computer at the very moment a spate of ideas for future Blog posts cascaded upon me. I never imagined I would return from this awesome whale-watching event invigorated and more focused. For this reason, I’ve decided to share a little of this journey with readers, fully acknowledging this story has nothing to do with the reason readers have subscribed to my Blog, that’s to say, family history. Nonetheless, I hope readers will enjoy this brief interlude.
My wife and I arranged our whale-watching outing to Baja California through the Birch Aquarium in La Jolla, California, which partners with Andiamo Travel and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego. The southernmost point of our excursion ended approximately 600 miles south of San Diego in the small town of San Ignacio in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur. In the nearby coastal Pacific San Ignacio Lagoon, and Guerrero Negro Lagoon (Scammon’s Lagoon) to the north, it is possible to see and approach the gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) that travel round-trip almost 12,000 miles from the cold waters of the Arctic Ocean to give birth to their young and mate; the whale-watching season lasts from early January through April.
Over the course of our trip, our group of approximately 36 people went on three whale-watching outings, in all instances resulting in us being able to touch these magnificent creatures. This is remarkable given the fact the grey whale was hunted repeatedly almost to extinction in the 1800’s and 1900’s; Scammon’s Lagoon, known locally today as “Laguna Ojo de Liebre,” eye of the jackrabbit, is in fact named after Charles Melville Scammon (1825-1911) who was the first to hunt the grey whale in this lagoon. Even though the grey whale may live 70 years or more, it is unlikely surviving whales have any “memory” of deadly encounters with humans. I find it interesting that these mammals, which are known to have fought back against whalers, are today so docile and approachable.
Our 1200-mile round-trip voyage to San Ignacio and Guerrero Negro naturally involved many hours of bus travel which I personally found as enjoyable as our whale excursions.
Regular readers will know I began my professional career as a field archaeologist, working in the California Desert in an area that stretched from the Mexico-California border to north of Death Valley National Monument. The roughly 10-million-acre California Desert, which encompasses portions of the Mojave, Great Basin, and Sonoran deserts, is an area I spent much time walking around doing archaeological inventory. I came to love walking through the desert while simultaneously realizing the enormous impacts it has suffered due to over-development and proximity to major urban areas in the southwestern United States. Thus, it came as a very pleasant surprise to learn that almost two-thirds of peninsular Baja California is preserved within Natural Protected Areas plus Ramsar Convention (i.e., wetland site of international importance) and UNESCO sites. I spent many hours simply gazing out the bus window at the seemingly pristine landscapes we were driving through. Baja California includes much larger portions of the lush Sonoran Desert (Desierto Central de Baja California), as well as the Vizcaino Desert. While the ecosystem appears generally intact with far less development, I’m under no illusion it is any less endangered than the California Desert.
So, with this brief background, I devote the remainder of this Blog post to a pictorial essay of some of the awesome sights my wife and I, along with our fellow travelers, enjoyed on our 1200-mile trip through Baja California.
