Hunting The Desert Whale: Personal Adventures in Baja California

Describes Gardner's adventures in Baja California in search of whales off the coast. Gardner was a mystery writer who created "Perry Mason" character. Black and white photographic illustrations. [From jacket flaps] Earl Stanley Garner is known throughout the world as a writer of crime stories and the adventures of his famous character Perry Mason have been told in print and on television in innumerable countries. After becoming an attorney, Gardner specialised in criminal trial work and started writing as a hobby in his spare time. For the past fifteen years he has devoted his energies almost exclusively to literary work. But Gardner is also an amateur photographer and a great lover of travel and adventure. It was this urge for new horizons and untrodden paths which sent him to the mysterious territory known as Baja California and resulted in the fascinating book Hunting the Desert Whale. This book might fairly be described as 'four adventures in one'. Its setting is Baja California, on the east washed by the waters of the Gulf of California and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. The territory can be reached by road - a hazardous, rough route that is best travelled by specially-equipped vehicles or, better, by aircraft, piloted by a man who knows the vagaries of the climate and the treacherous air conditions that produce air currents and turbulence. Erie Stanley Gardner has explored that part of the Baja that is virtually unknown to men of today. Traveling by road, he and his companions made camp on the shores of Scammon's Lagoon, which the grey whales, coming down from the Bering Sea, visit every year, and where every second year the young whales are born. But the grey whales resent attention, and photographing them proved both difficult and dangerous. The sandhills at the back of the lagoon provide still further adventures, for the Pacific casts up on these shores the flotsam and jetsam and the wreckage of vessels that she has swallowed through the years. Here the adventurers found ancient timber vessels, a World War I aeroplane, and 'loot' of all kinds