Field dispatches from Bolivia's remote landscapes — observations, encounters, and reflections from the rivers, forests, and highlands where we work.
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 northern park's rivers gave me one Noel Kempff. The south offers another — older, drier, almost unvisited.
A detour in Bolivia's Chiquitania leads to a settlement beneath sandstone cliffs — nearly erased by a flood in 1979, now held together by the families who came back.
On what wilderness asks of those who go into it, and what it offers in return.
