Expeditions

Our Director of Photography Ian Kellett recounts tales from his three-day stint on the Ocean Alliance’s research sailboat the Odyssey as it searches for whales in the Gulf of Mexico:

Aboard the RV Odyssey off the coast of Mobile, Alabama, eight miles from the epicenter of the Deepwater Horizon site, Ethan Roth, a fit self-assured 25-year old scientist from Scripps uses an acoustic ping to release a 250-pound, underwater audio recording device from the bottom.   His lab is hoping to collect valuable data about whale activity in the area of the oil spill.



It was uncanny how the dark rain

“…Let her go. Give this river back her soul. Let her waters be released. Let this mighty river flow…”

I’ve been off the river and lying here under the stars of Glen Canyon for almost an hour but TR Ritchie’s words are still echoing through my head punctuated now then by distant yelps of coyotes and the chirping of crickets. We were somewhere near our ninetieth mile on the river when TR pulled his guitar from a 
drybag and picked a song for the Colorado.
 


Maybe it was the sun. Maybe it was the two solid days of feeling the raw power of this river throwing us at her will.

Just one week into Expedition Blue Planet: North America and the bus is already turning into our home away from home. Twelve creative individuals from the far corners of the earth all meeting, many for the first time, and being thrown into a bus for 138 days - this is almost a reality TV show in itself, complete with Christoph, 24/7 with camera in arm, ready to capture every moment of this journey. Our mission: tell the stories of our water planet across North America.

We are traveling, working, even sleeping on the bus, and nearly 2,200 miles into our epic journey we are already living and

“From the time I was old enough to stand in a creek I was fascinated by running water, quite frankly,” says Jim Siscoe, manager of the Montezuma Valley Irrigation Company (MVIC) in Cortez, Colorado. MVIC owns about $1.5 billion dollars worth of water rights in the area that revolve around the McPhee Dam on the Dolores River, a tributary of the Colorado River.

While Siscoe is a scientist by training he is a rancher at heart; he and his wife, Loretta, have just begun an organic cattle operation that has 40 head of Black Angus cattle. 

One of the hottest topics in this area revolves around the

We asked our beloved hosts and guides in Mexico, Osvel Hinojosa-Huerta, Pronatura Noroeste's Director of the Water and Wetlands Program and his partner Yamilett Carillo Guerrero, the coordinator of Pronatura’s Sustainable Watershed’s initiative in Northwestern Mexico to write us a blog post about our exploits south of the border. Enjoy! And thanks Osvel and Yami for such an insightful and enriching visit throughout the Colorado River delta!!

This was certainly a life changing experience for us, and we hope it is for the Colorado River too.