On a beautiful sunny and windless day in March, 2015 I boarded a small airplane piloted by longtime WILDCOAST supporter Phil Benham with a tight crew of Baja wilderness enthusiasts bound for San Ignacio Lagoon, a gray whale lagoon, to pick up Kris Tompkins who together with her husband Doug, the founder of North Face, has helped preserve two million acres of pristine Patagonian wilderness in Chile and Argentina. The purpose of the trip was to show Kris WILDCOAST’s successful work in preserving a large swath of Baja wilderness and world-class wildlife habitat.
After landing at the dirt airstrip in San Ignacio Lagoon, I was elated to see my longtime friends the Aguilar family who were waiting to say hello. My wife and I had lived with the Aguilars more than 20 years earlier as doctoral students studying gray whale conservation and while I was doing research for my book, Saving the Gray Whale. After saying goodbye to the Aguilars, I greeted Kris and we boarded the Cessna and we took off back north across the vast expanse of Baja’s immense Pacific coastal wilderness.
Right after we took off we headed north across San Ignacio Lagoon and across the Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve, a six million-acre federal protected area, Mexico’s largest, that includes San Ignacio and Scammon’s Lagoon. There our conservation efforts over the past 15 years have resulted in the protection of 450,000-acres around the lagoon, in addition to 150 miles of shoreline and mangrove protection. I explained to Kris about how our staff are now working on the ground with Mexican National Park service staff, ranchers, and fishermen who live in the reserve to update the management plan. The goal is to preserve the incredible beauty and diversity of the reserve in a way that helps local people continue their sustainable livelihoods. The fishing coops we work with inside Vizcaino, have been harvesting lobster and abalone sustainably for more than 50 years and are some of our most effective conservation partners.
As we headed north across the salt flats and inlets of Scammon’s Lagoon, we could see the large tract of land set aside for Peninsular Pronghorn, a species that almost because extinct, but are now flourishing in the desert and are a key reason to improve wildlife protection in the Reserve. Suddenly to the north, after we passed over Scammon’s, we could see Los Cirios, a beautiful and wild coastal region of Baja, famous for its giant cardon cactus, endless coastal wetlands, mountain lions that roam desert beaches where we have spent the last ten years preserving more than 40 miles of the pristine shoreline. As we neared our Los Cirios Pacific Reserve, where we own more than 35,000-acres of coastline, Phil brought the plane closer to the coast and we had a bird’s eye view of our WILDCOAST Reserve.
Kris was enthralled by the sheer magnitude of what we achieved and I let her know how inspired our team at WILDCOAST was by the efforts by her and Doug in Patagonia. And as we neared the desolate sandstone cliffs of Punta Canoas, we caught sight of a pod of gray whales just offshore the northernmost border of our preserve. The water was crystal clear and we could see them in all their majesty, swimming northward, on their journey to the Bering and Chuchki Seas.
It was a fitting end to an amazing flight over a desert, coastal and ocean wilderness that sustains gray whales, mountain lions, sea turtles and the hardscrabble people who call it home. I have thought a lot about that trip today, because this morning I learned that Doug Tompkins, Kris’s husband, was killed in a tragic kayaking accident in Chile. Just a week after we had achieved another wilderness and conservation milestone this week—the permanent protection of 50 miles of mangrove shoreline and sea turtle feeding area in Magdalena Bay in Southern Baja.
Not only was I saddened by the personal loss that Kris and their friends, family and conservation colleagues and partners around the world has suffered, but I realized that Doug had played a major role in inspiring our team at WILDCOAST to achieve a dream of wilderness preservation as big as Baja itself. As a grad student back at the University of Texas at Austin back in the early 1990s, I had first learned of the work of Doug and Kris to preserve Patagonia and was so inspired by their efforts that I faxed them a congratulatory letter and let them know that my wife Emily and I were preparing for our own sojourn to the Baja wilderness. Doug faxed me back a very supportive hand written letter and wished me well.
I still have that letter, and I always think of how nice it was for Doug to take the time to write a grad student me all the way from his wilderness cabin in Patagonia, and how that letter and support has meant so much to me all these years.
So I thank you for all your support for making our conservation and wilderness dreams come true and ask you one more time to help us to continue our journey to achieve the impossible and continue to preserve the world’s most beautiful places where you can still find gray whale, sea turtles, whale sharks, and mountain lions roaming wild beaches.
WILDCOAST, our conservation dreams, thanks to your support, have come true, and continue to be realized.
So please help us to conserve our coastal treasures and keep them wild. Please donate today
Fay Crevoshay
Communications and Policy Director
Directora de Comunicaciones y Políticas Públicas
Support your coast and ocean.
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