Some of the best

Mummies and me

A while back I was looking around the deserts of southern Peru when I came on this small military outpost. I stopped at the mess tent to ask the soldiers questions about stuff they might have seen on patrols into the desert. I noticed that they had a young condor tied by the foot that they would feed scrapes of meat from the cook tent. In the picture you can see the bird jumped up on my leg thinking I might have something for it to eat. I did not but the bird thought the image printed on my t-shirt might be worth a bite. In one and a half seconds that little buzzard grabbed the cloth an inch below my collar and ripped the entire front of my t-shirt off. Now for the other shots. I asked the guys what kinds of interesting things they had run into out in the desert back towards the mountains. They told me about a lot of stuff but when one of the guys told me had seen through his binoculars what he thought was mummies he got my attention. The guys were at the end of there day patrol and hadn't had a chance to walk the extra five miles over to check out what the guy with the glasses had seen. I pulled out a map and had the guy show me where he had seen the bodies. I drove to a nearby town and found a guy who would rent me a dirt bike.

Whales and skiing in Alaska

I was once hired by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to conduct aeriel surveys for marine mammals over the Bering Sea to establish abundance and distribution. I spent a year flying 10's of thousands of miles of transects at 750 ft. I've also done thousands of miles of aeriel surveys over the sea from Halifax, Canada to Key West, Florida. I saw some incredible animals in the Bering and the Aleutian Islands but the time and distance between sightings made the Bering boring. The area off New England was my favorite. I have an outrageous collection of photos of whales, walrus, seals, turtles and fish.

Equator

I'm sitting on the equator or so this monument thinks. When GPS first became available to civilians, I bought one and was headed to the Amazon to do some exploring when I decided to go to the place pictured to see how accurate this line really was. When I got there I found that I was some 80 yards north of the actual 00 00 00. I got a cab and had the driver take me to the real equator. When we got their, a side walk just outside a brick factory, I told the driver what we had done and he freaked and jumped out of the cab and started telling people on the street what we had accomplished. Soon we had a crowd of towns folk jumping up and down yelling in spanish "we're at the real Equator"!!!!!............... .

Witches Rock and Olie North

In the first movie about surfing seen around the world "Endless Summer" one of the places featured in that film was hear at Witches Rock. Most days there is a beautiful right breaking tube that is wonderful to ride. Not today. Behind my right shoulder is Olie's point. Behind which Reagan and Oliver North launched some their clandestine attacks on Nicaragua. I was there to talk to an old cowboy who remembers those days.

Me and an Embera friend

A couple of months ago a friend of mine from Panama told I had to meet his son and let him show me how much he knew about the jungle along the upper Chagres river. We took his father's big cargo dugout up to a trail head where kid took me to see his favorite spot to fish for Juapote.

Alligator Hole River Manatee rescue

Some time ago I was contacted (I was in Ghana) by folks from the U.S. and Jamaica who wanted me to rescue a land locked manatee in Jamaica. Others had tried but had failed. I got together with a group local guys from the Alligator Hole river area and government folks and two veterinarians from Sea World. These manatees were not like manatees I had worked with in Florida, Central America and Puerto Rico. They didn't like people at all and had caves up under the vegetation along the river banks that they would hide in. They also new how to avoid nets by either going around, under or though them. After taking stock of the situation I decided to set a trap for the one I was after using the same method I had used in Africa to catch hippo. The one I was after had been tied by the tail in the middle of the river when it was very young. As it grew the rope broke loose from its' anchor but remained tight around the girls tail. It embedded its' self into the manatee's flesh. When we got her on the beach we removed the rope weighed her (1200 pounds) and took some blood for DNA stuff.