Seeing the Big Picture in the American West
Feb 1, 2012; 1:25 PM ET
When I reached pilot Bruce Gordon back in October, he was still trying to clean up from a black bear break-in at the cabin he's lived in for 30 years in the mountains outside Vail, Colorado. "I don't know when it got in, but it really wrecked the place," Bruce said. "The refrigerator is totally ruined."
Such break-ins might be considered one of the many occupational hazards for a man who spends so few nights at home, a man whose real home is in the cockpit of his 1978 Cessna 210, high in the vast Western sky.
Bruce Gordon runs Eco-Flight, a bare-bones non-profit that consists almost entirely of himself, his partner, South Africa-born Jane Pargiter, and their single, six seater plane. The motto of Eco-Flight is simple: "We put people in high places."
Over the past 20 years Bruce has flown hundreds of conservationists, reporters, interested citizens and policy-makers over Western landscapes that are facing major changes, areas proposed for protection or undergoing logging and mining or energy development, watersheds, wildlife winter ranges and migration corridors.
The goal is simple: to try to understand the changes by viewing the landscape as a whole. "There is nothing like seeing a place from 10,000 feet to get a feel for what is actually happening there," he said to me, on our first trip together. "This business is about transparency, about letting people see what is happening, and letting them decide what they think about it."
Read more of the article and view more breath-taking pictures here.
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