Alien Encounters
Making an interspecies connection in a remote desert lagoon
For our first trip of 2024, my partner Leslie and I journeyed to another planet and engaged with an alien intelligence.
Yes, I know that sounds delusional, or at the very least suggests the involvement of psychedelic pharmaceuticals during our February journey. But although the first half of my lead sentence is only figuratively true — we did not actually leave planet Earth, just the familiar terrestrial portion of it — the second half is literally so, albeit not in the way popular culture typically frames the concept of an alien encounter. It was nevertheless a mind-altering adventure, and we found it just 600 miles as the frigatebird flies from our home base in Ventura County.
This is the 32nd installment of Next Chapter Notes since I launched this travel journal in May 2022, and the first that does not revolve around a road trip in our campervan, Next Chapter. Our travel mode this time was primarily by aircraft and watercraft, yet the adventure this journal entry recounts fit comfortably into the retirement challenge we have embraced: To seek out remarkable natural landscapes wherever they may be found, and learn about their people, flora and fauna, geology, and history.
This journey also provided an occasion to celebrate an unlikely triumph by the forces of ecological conservation over those of resource exploitation — a victory years in the making that saved a priceless global treasure from industrial catastrophe.
Land of giants
Laguna San Ignacio is located on the Baja California peninsula roughly midway between the U.S border and Cabo San Lucas, a resort town on the peninsula’s southern tip. A large tidal lagoon on the Pacific coast, surrounded by a vast scrubby floodplain with mangrove fringes, San Ignacio is the beating heart of the El Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve. Designated in 1993 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the reserve encompasses nearly 10,000 square miles of Sonoran desert, mountains and coastal/marine ecosystems, and stretches across the peninsula from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of California. It is home to hundreds of species of plants and animals, many of them found nowhere else.
At Laguna San Ignacio, however, one species is the undisputed star of the show: the Pacific gray whale. It’s not the largest of the great whales, but at up to 60 feet in length and 50 tons in weight, it’s a big animal. And it undertakes what is believed to be the longest annual migration of any mammal — a round-trip trek of up to 12,000 miles, between summer feeding grounds in the Bering, Beaufort and Chukchi seas of the arctic, and Laguna San Ignacio and two other sheltered bays in Baja California (Bahia Magdalena, to the south of San Ignacio, and Laguna Ojo del Libre, to the north).
The whales head south from the arctic in December and arrive in Baja between January and March. That’s where mating occurs, and where the pregnant mothers give birth. Beginning in April, after the calves have grown big enough to make the trip — putting on weight at the rate of 3 pounds an hour, thanks to the incredibly nutrient-dense milk their mothers provide — the whales leave on the long swim back to the arctic. This is the prime time to see them off the California coast with one of countless whale-watching operators scattered among seaside towns from San Diego to Arcata.
The chance to see whales is what drew us to Laguna San Ignacio. But the experience there is very different from that of guests on a commercial excursion in the Santa Barbara Channel, which typically involves dozens of passengers on a 65-foot boat. In Baja California Sur, the cruise vessel is a 27-foot panga driven by an outboard motor, and you and five or six other guests are seated only a couple feet above the water. When you meet whales this way, it is a far more intimate experience — sometimes extraordinarily intimate.
A rugged landscape
For our cetacean adventure, we flew first from LAX to the airport in San Jose del Cabo (SJD), a two-hour flight in a Boeing 737 that carried us 850 miles (and thankfully landed with all its parts still attached). We then took a shuttle to our hotel in the resort city of Cabo San Lucas, about an hour away. The next morning, a bus picked us up at our hotel and ferried us to the downtown office of Baja Expeditions, our tour operator, where we rendezvoused with the other guests on our outing. Our group then headed back to SJD, this time to the private aviation terminal, to board the single-engine bird — a 13-seat Cessna Grand Caravan — that would carry us on the final 300-mile leg to the dirt airstrip at Laguna San Ignacio and our desert camp.
We walked from the terminal across the tarmac to our small plane, incongruously parked amid an armada of sleek private jets like a child’s tricycle in a Ferrari showroom, and wedged ourselves into its cramped passenger cabin. What the two-hour flight lacked in comfort it made up for in scenery: A small plane flying 150 mph 7,000 feet above the ground is a pretty good platform from which to appreciate the topography and geology over which it passes.
Cabo is at the tip of the Baja peninsula, in what is called the cape region. Immediately inland and to the north, a range of mountains looms steeply above the coastal plains. The uplifted block runs north-south for 50 miles, but it is deeply incised east to west by canyons that separate granitic ridges. Although the region sees only about 9 inches of rain annually, the canyons are carved and drained by periodic deluges that have created vast, braided washes. These emerge from the mountains and transport immense quantities of tan sediment across the plains to the sea, where it becomes the raw material of Cabo’s broad beaches.
Baja California has a somewhat tortured geological history, complete with ancient collisions of tectonic plates that raised great mountain ranges, subduction that drove volcanic activity and metamorphosis of overlying rock, and eons of erosion that ground down the ancient peaks. The most recent developments are in some ways the most interesting: The peninsula (and a great deal of Southern California) was originally attached to mainland Mexico, but was torn away from the North American tectonic plate when the Pacific Plate (which underlies pretty much the entire Pacific Ocean) crashed unto it, fracturing it and dragging its edge off to the northwest. The Gulf of California rift zone opened up over the last 5-10 million years, allowing the sea to flood in; a below-sea-level extension of that rift zone continues northward through the Salton Sink in California’s Imperial Valley, which would become part of the Gulf if a few intervening topographic obstacles were removed.
From the air, it is a richly featured landscape nearly devoid of vegetation. We flew over cinder cones and lava flows, as well as numerous dissected plateaus, coastal lagoons and channels, bajadas, bays and very few signs of human habitation — occasional dirt roads that appeared to lead nowhere, tiny isolated hamlets, a few irrigated crop circles.
After two hours of this, we descended toward the lagoon and a gentle landing on the short runway. We were greeted by Baja Expeditions staff members bearing flutes of champagne, ushered into comfortable SUVs, and driven a few minutes to our relatively luxurious “glamping” accommodations, featuring a roomy tent furnished with a king bed, shower and sink with hot-and-cold running water, even a cassette toilet. A dining hall, kitchen and well-stocked bar were a short walk away. Overall, the camp included 36 guest tents, 12 like ours and 24 larger versions with a sort of living room in addition to the sleeping area, strung in a long row along the shoreline.
Flashback
This was my second visit to San Ignacio. The first was 25 years ago, and in many respects could not have been more different. In 1999, I booked a trip through Baja Expeditions for myself and my mom, who really loved whales, to celebrate our 40th and 60th birthdays, which had occurred two days apart the previous year.
Baja Expeditions was headquartered in San Diego then, so that’s where we met our fellow guests and guides. The company shuttled us to the airport and put us aboard a vintage DC-3 — a model manufactured by Douglass Aircraft Co. between 1936 and 1942 — and flew us to the Baja port town of Loreto, where we disembarked to clear Mexican customs. Then it was back on the big old plane for our flight across the peninsula to a dirt airstrip at San Ignacio, followed by a ride in a repurposed school bus to the Baja Expeditions base camp. Considerably more rustic than its 2024 incarnation, the camp at that time featured small dome tents and folding cots for guests, a communal restroom, one outdoor shower, and an Army surplus mess tent that would not have been out of place on the set of M*A*S*H.
It was more Indiana Jones than desert resort, and frankly, more enjoyable than our “glamping” digs in many ways. But one thing did not change over the quarter century between visits.
Whales.
Upon our arrival, Leslie and I retrieved on-the-water gear from our duffel bags and joined the rest of our group at the equipment trailer for personal flotation devices and rubber boots, which were welcome but blindingly white. This was probably smart; being reflective, they would not absorb heat and cook our feet in the warm desert sunshine. But our group looked like we’d geared up at an Imperial Stormtrooper surplus outlet.
Properly if unfashionably dressed, we headed off to the waiting pangas and hopped aboard. Our captain floored the throttle, and we spent the next 20 minutes in a kidney-rattling sprint across mildly choppy water toward the lagoon’s entrance.
Whale watching is strictly controlled in the sanctuary: Boats are allowed in only one small area of the lagoon, no more than 16 boats can be in that area at a time, no more than nine passengers (not counting captain and guide) may be aboard each vessel, and groups are limited to 90 minutes on the water at a time (It’s OK to put ashore on a beach for a half-hour before beginning another 90-minute period). Boats are not supposed to approach closer than 30 meters to a whale, although nothing prevents the whales from approaching boats on their own. Access to the lagoon is limited to the hours of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and an enforcement officer posted on a moored vessel at the entrance to the restricted area checks tour boats in as they arrive.
Our captain’s strategy was to head toward the sight of spouts and idle in what appeared to be the path of a cruising whale or group of whales, allowing them to come near or avoid us as they chose. This would be the pattern for all the time we spent on the water over the next three days, and it was strikingly successful. We had close encounters with individuals, with groups, and with mother-and-calf combos.
How close?
Close enough to touch, it turned out.
A win for the whales
When my mom and I were there in 1999, Laguna San Ignacio was at the center of a raging global struggle involving local fishermen, the Mexican and Japanese governments, international environmental organizations, and the ecotourism industry. Later that year, a panel of scientists was to issue a recommendation to Mexico’s equivalent of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regarding a permit application submitted by Exportadora de Sal S.A. (ESSA) to build the world’s largest solar salt production facility there.
The company, jointly owned by Mitsubishi and the Mexican government, had proposed a massive reworking of the landscape. This is how I described it in an op-ed piece published March 21, 1999, in the Ventura County Star, after my first visit:
The project will consist of a battery of huge diesel pumps, which will suck 6,000 gallons of seawater out of the lagoon each second and pipe it into 116 square miles of evaporation ponds enclosed by earthen dikes. Roughly two years after the water leaves the lagoon, it will have evaporated completely, leaving behind the salt. The crystals will be scooped out, cleaned, and transported by conveyor belt to a mile-long pier jutting into the lagoon entrance, where it will be loaded onto freighters.
It seems obvious that constructing an industrial facility like that in one of the few remaining sanctuaries for gray whales would be a profound violation of both its ecological integrity and the sense of wild isolation that helps draw thousands of avid whale watchers to the area each year. But the battle between ESSA and opponents of its proposal went on for six years, the company arguing that whales and industrial salt production could coexist, and scientists and environmentalists asserting the opposite. It was not lost on project opponents that ESSA first filed its application just a month after the U.S. government in 1994 removed the gray whale from the endangered species list, where it had landed because of a century of commercial slaughter that reached even into the breeding lagoons of Baja California.
Fortunately for the whales — and future generations of those who treasure them — the project opponents were victorious, overcoming the vigorous efforts of one of the largest corporations in the world. The Mexican government announced in 2000 that the project had been scrapped. (Details of the international battle against ESSA over the San Ignacio project were recounted in this piece published on the 20th anniversary of that victory by the Natural Resources Defense Council.) The lagoon and its surrounding landscape remain wild, the whales unmolested, the ecotourism operators thriving.
This enabled Leslie and I to join four fellow guests, our guide and our captain in the panga on a sunny afternoon in February for the final 90-minute excursion of our trip. It had been a remarkable day already, with multiple sightings of mothers with calves, whales that cruised along just a few yards from the boat, whales breaching and whales spyhopping.
Toward the end of our session, we received word by radio from the captain of the other panga in our group that he had come upon one of the legendary “friendly” whales of San Ignacio — individuals that seek out tour boats and present themselves to be touched by the passengers. It’s the holy grail of whale watching, and does not regularly occur anywhere else on Earth.
We motored across the lagoon and powered down near the other boat. Sure enough, a whale was floating right next to it, periodically raising its head out of the water for a human stroke. It soon turned and came toward us, gradually edging closer to our boat, just inches below the water. Eventually it surfaced and rotated onto its side, raising one of its pectoral fins vertically from the waves. It slowly drifted closer, until the fin was right against the side of the boat, where Leslie and another passenger, Julie Heyn, were able to simultaneously reach out and stroke the slick, mottled skin.
It was a deeply emotional encounter, leaving Leslie and Julie both in tears — similar to the reaction Leslie and I had when we witnessed the total solar eclipse in 2017, a moment of transformative wonder that was simply overwhelming in its unexpected power.
It is impossible to know what is going on in the big brains of those leviathans when they engage in this behavior; they inhabit a watery planet we humans barely understand, and whatever thoughts they have are those of the three-dimensional deep and of vast distances. They are descended from terrestrial quadrupeds, however, that ancestry apparent in their skeletons. There are remnant pelvic bones along the spine near their tails, and the structure inside those wedge-shaped pectoral fins is very much like that of our own arms (albeit on a massive scale): scapula, humerus, ulna and radius, ending with carpals, metacarpals and phalanges.
In other words, what Leslie experienced, and I had the privilege to witness, was an interspecies handshake, initiated by a creature of the sea with a denizen of the land for reasons that only the cetacean can understand. That does not make the contact less magical — in fact the essential mystery of the whale’s motivation only deepens the sense of awe-struck gratitude that still lingers in us weeks after that afternoon encounter in a remote lagoon surrounded by stark and silent desert.
Leslie Nichols and I are going on a cruise to Cabo with Leslie Cornejo with a stop to see the eclipse in April. I also want to explore Mezcal.
Wow, wow, wow John! What a fantastic trip with Leslie shaking hands or high fiving a new friend. I got goosebumps reading your story. Loved the information about your previous trip with your mom and the history of how the lagoon was not taken over so they are still have the ocean there for groups to enjoy. Love the great photos. Glad Leslie was able to go after breaking her wrist so close to your departure. Thanks again for taking the time to write about your travels.
Hi to Les!!