Remote access. Small groups. Real field conditions.
This is a story about getting there. The park itself, we didn't enter this time. That's for October. This was the reconnaissance: learn the road, meet the people, understand what the real journey will ask. What we found was that the getting there is its own country.
I've literally spent months in the weeds of this thing. Literature, permits, institutional history, maps, correspondence in two languages — the kind of detail work that makes you forget why you started. So, here's my account, and I'm sticking to it, before the trees close in again.
Two months ago I wrote about a photograph of a maned wolf. A male, collared, sitting in the grass at Los Fierros, identified only as M8. I said that finding him was reason enough to go.
There is a photograph at the front of Louise Emmons's monograph that I find I cannot stop returning to. This is what it has come to mean.
The part of Noel Kempff that the river circuits never reach: the Huanchaca tableland, the Los Fierros savanna, and terrain that has had no visitors in a decade.
Twelve days on the blackwater rivers of northern Noel Kempff — macaws, river mammals, and some of the most biodiverse forest in the Amazon basin.
Six days through Bolivia's southern high desert and the Salar de Uyuni — flamingo lagoons, geothermal fields, wind-carved stone, and some of the clearest night skies on Earth.
A 4-day expedition through Bolivia's southern altiplano and the Salar de Uyuni, designed for participants of the 10th Chronic Hypoxia Symposium. A portion of each participant's fee supports research at the HAPPI-IPPA clinic.
A private 4-day overland journey through Bolivia's southern high desert and the Salar de Uyuni — designed for couples, documented by one of Bolivia's most accomplished photographers.
A 10-day photography trek from high Andean puna through cloud forest and conservation lands in Bolivia's Yungas — hiking Inca trails, camping wild, and photographing one of Earth's richest ecological transitions.
