male announcer: This broadcast is made possible by the generous support of the Alumbra Innovations Foundation, celebrating the opening of their Museo Del Vaquero de Las Californias in El Triunfo, Mexico, dedicated to preserving the historic traditions of the vaqueros of the Californias.

And also by... And by viewers like you.

Thank you.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Don Bartletti: Harry Crosby took the risk.

He took his courage, he took his intellect, and he went to places that were essentially unseen.

♪♪♪ Don: He had done groundbreaking photography and reporting in a place where very few, if any, Americans had gone, but he found it, and he did record it.

Ristin Crosby Decker: Most people think that, when you go to Baja California, you go down to Rosarito Beach and have a margarita.

Oh, and they think of Cabo San Lucas because it's a big touristy are or La Paz, but I just think, everything in between, my dad has just brought to light a lot of history, so he's recorded all of that for all of us to appreciate.

Enrique Hambleton: Harry's approach to Baja California, was very, very refreshing, to me, because I had never seen an American become so immersed, so completely involved, so captivated by the place.

I saw it with the paintings, I saw it with the people, and I saw it with the plants.

He just fell head over heels in love with Baja California.

Bronle Crosby: He saw that it was this magical world, frozen in time, and he saw the opportunity there.

He said, "This is not going to last.

This is this little crystalline moment here, and somebody needs to do something about it."

Reed Decker: My grandfather, from building his own cameras from the ground up, to building two cars, to hybridizing orchids, it's the renaissance man.

He embodies that.

Bill Evarts: He'd really blaze the way and found all the research.

He's already been there.

He's done that.

He's written about it eloquently, then he's got the pictures to go with it.

Miguel Leon-Portilla: [speaking Spanish]... ♪♪♪ Enrique: Guys like Harry went down to Baja California, once, and when they came back, a part of them stayed there.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Don Bartletti: Harry Crosby had a distinct beginning to his photo journalism career and that he was a high school teacher in La Jolla.

Joanne Crosby: And he started going to Mexico on his school vacations, and I usually got left home because, you know, somebody had to babysit, hah.

Bill Evarts: Harry was a high school teacher at La Jolla High, where I attended, and at Easter week, he took a group of students and their mothers to the Yaqui River in Sonora.

Harry Crosby: I took a group of 50 people.

Thirty-seven or -eight of 'em were my students, and the rest were parents or older brothers.

Bill: It was an amazing thing for a teacher to take all these kids on his week off.

♪♪♪ Bill: His idea was to take us down there and try and document as best we could what was there, photograph it, look at some archaeological sites and record what we found.

♪♪♪ Bill: So we went down and camped for a week and would work up and down the valley.

Harry had a big trailer he'd tow behind his Land Rover and pack all the kids in there.

I don't think you could do that today.

Harry: I quit teaching because I was determined to try to be a photographer.

I got a call from the editor of "California Review Magazine," and he had seen some pictures of mine taken in Mexico, so he hired me to photograph Tijuana, and I went down there July of 1964.

♪♪♪ Harry: I went down there, and my attitude toward it was I did not go with any preconceptions whatever.

What I did was to park my car and get out in every different sort of neighborhood I could detect.

I got on tops of hills.

I got down the bottom of the valley, for instance.

There was one of them that had many poor homes, sort of, crates that were built out of whatever, and I photographed them just as I had up in the elegant neighborhood to the east.

Don: He must've been a kind face that people trusted, and he would just stand his ground on a street corner or a sidewalk or a hilltop and just show us what life really looked like.

He had an appreciation of a culture a little bit different than his in La Jolla.

He didn't criticize.

He wasn't making, you know, editorial comments in his photographs.

Harry: My attitude was, if you saw it, and it attracted you as a photographer, photograph it.

I walked the streets, and I took pictures of tourists, and I took pictures of merchants and the shops and the windows, outdoor, and signs and everything you can think of.

Don: One of my favorite images that Harry made is of a taco vendor on a street in Tijuana.

Your eyes led right up into this man, and the light on his face is reflected by a newspaper that he's reading.

He shows us a resident of Tijuana, a businessman who's got a uniform on.

He's got his business in front of him.

What else is he doing?

He's reading about the world.

So it's everything I would try to put it in a photograph.

Harry: I wanted to capture Tijuana as best possible.

I was determined that, wherever I went, I was gonna photograph the people.

My career as a professional photographer really began there.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Harry: I went to a football game in the fall of 1966.

Coming up the stairs, after we got seated at the football game, was a fraternity brother of mine from Occidental College, who, incidentally, had become the Lieutenant Governor of California, and he was part of a committee called the Commission of the Californias.

The commission was considering producing a book, and he wanted to know if I was interested, and I said, "I'm very interested in Mexico."

And he said, "Do you have pictures?"

And I said, "I have hundreds."

He told me they had decided to hire me.

This was four days after the football game.

I was sort of amazed.

Paul Ganster: In 1967, I was a graduate student at UCLA, and Harry invited me to accompany him on a project that he had been commissioned for, which was to retrace the route that the expedition of 1769 had taken that had led to the European establishment of San Diego.

Harry: This demanded that I start in Loreto and then come north, following the trail that Gaspar de Portola took on his way from Loreto, to San Diego, and then on to Monterey, and so forth.

♪♪♪ Harry: I invited Paul Ganster, my ex-student, to come along with me on this thing in Baja California, and he was very anxious to do it.

A hundred miles south of Ensenada, there was no more paved road until you got down within 100 miles of La Paz, and in between, there was no paved road.

Paul: We took a dune buggy that Harry had cobbled together from an old VW, and the roads in Baja California, in those days were largely unpaved, so riding through a dust bowl in an open dune buggy is a real challenge and particularly when you're dragging photographic equipment along because dust and photographs and photographic equipment don't go well together.

Harry: My, we learned an awful lot on our first excursion down there, a lot of things that you could and couldn't do.

Some people, by then, had informed me that "Only way I can imagine that you're gonna get there is either to hike or go on mule-back."

Well, I wasn't about to hike.

Joanne: It wasn't too long after that I got a phone call from him, and he said, "You have to wire me some money.

This dune buggy thing is not working.

I have to buy mules."

So I wired him the money, and he got started, and he--I think, that year, he was gone two solid months on mule-back.

Harry: You felt that you were riding back in the ages.

You could fold your arms and look at everything you went by.

You weren't going quickly enough to lose anything.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Harry: I was fascinated to see how little was known about Baja California.

I thought, my God, there's all kinds of things down there that haven't been properly reported.

Paul: We both had to make special saddlebags that could hold the equipment because these cameras were a little bit delicate.

They had very large shutters, and when you're out in the middle of nowhere, there's no repair facilities available, so we had to make ways of carrying them and then also, being able to get at them while we're on the back of the beasts.

Harry: We didn't have to break down a pack animal for me to get out my stuff.

If I wanted to stop out on the trail and get a picture, I had it all in my two saddle bags or extra bags in front of the saddle.

Handheld was the name of the game.

♪♪♪ Harry: Once we got underway in the Sierra de Guadalupe, you have to understand that the time doesn't go by quickly.

It isn't as if you're driving a car.

We covered an average, I think, for the whole trip of about 14 miles a day.

Paul: We were trying to recreate the 1769 Expedition's path, and to follow it, it was necessary to look at available historic accounts of the trip and also explore, in a general way, the history of the peninsula, particularly the Jesuit history, because there were a lot of descriptions of the missions and what was going on in the region.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Exequiel Ezcurra: There is whole cultural thing about the way El Camino Real operated.

It was a whole network of missions that were really working with serious considerations of shared culture, shared communications, and also shared concerns for the environment.

And, in some way, for me, that is what is so emblematic about the road of the Californias--is not so much a landscape.

Of course, it is a landscape.

It's not so much a set of missions.

Of course, it is a set of missions, and some really wonderful, but is a perspective on life, a culture.

Harry: All the parts of it that are really impressive, that have rocks along the side and are straight, when you get up on a mesa, you can, if the land allows it, they would go just as straight as a string, and that was because of the Jesuits.

They were interested in making a proper highway--well, highway for those times.

Exequiel: The Spaniards didn't pay much attention to Baja California.

As a matter of fact, it was still considered an island until the late 1600s, and that created an immense opportunity for a group of friars, the Jesuits, to colonize Baja California, because nobody else wanted to do it, really.

Many were good explorers, good geographers.

They loved the natural history of the places they were going, and they started colonizing Baja California.

Bill: There's so much more to it than just an old trail through the desert.

Everything that grew up in Southern California, most of it came from Baja.

It came up that trail, all the livestock, all the original colonists, all the know-how to be the vaqueros and ranchers, and so forth, that populated Southern California up till when the gold rush--and then the Americans came in, and history changed.

But to be able to see in context that original material and see how it looks today as it did hundreds of years ago, I think, provides a really wonderful insight into how Southern California came to be.

♪♪♪ Harry: I had no special way of photographing missions.

They varied from--some of 'em were ruins.

Some of 'em were restored.

Some of 'em were Jesuit, and some of 'em were Dominican.

I just took each one and got the best position I thought that I could get to take picture or pictures.

One of the cases where I used one of my longer lenses, my 135-millimeter lens, that first mission, the one south of Loreto, I photographed it by climbing a very steep embankment--may I say, with difficulty?

And I think that's one of the reasons I had never seen photographs before or since of that mission from the angle that I took, and another interesting thing about it is that picture has been reproduced in Mexico more than, I would say, most of my mission photos.

"The Call to California" was a large success, and I was called in to speak to Dick Pourade again, the editor, and he wanted me to do a book which I would write as well as illustrate.

"The King's Highway in Baja California" was the name that I gave the book, and it was an early attempt, on my part, to describe how the trail was developed and why I had not written the book before, and I thought that would be a very flattering thing to have a book with my name as author and also a way to use the vast majority of photographs, practically no repetitions, from "The Call to California."

Enrique: What impressed me most about Harry, when I first met him, was his absolute enthusiasm about Baja California.

I had never met an American that had that kind of enthusiasm.

I found his approach very pure and very simple and very directed, which I liked.

He was a fountain of knowledge.

Harry: I made two trips, rather quick trips, without hiring mules, down to places on the peninsula that I had seen, ranches and things that I thought would make really good illustrations.

Enrique: The Camino Real essentially is overlaid over Indian trials; why?

Because that's the easiest way to get from here to there.

The dirt roads of the 18th and 19th century overlay it.

The current Transpeninsular Highway, in great part, overlays the original routes.

Bill: The trail systems where El Camino Real eventually was placed, I think, was for fairly obvious logistical reasons where they needed places where there was water.

They needed the path of least resistance, but they wanted to go as directly as possible where their animals could be ridden and where their beasts of burden could take loads, and they needed places where they could stop for the night and have room for the animals to roll in the dust.

So there were a lot of factors that went into where the road was placed, but, again, the landscape was always, sort of, the arbiter in the background, and there are certain paths of least resistance, and I'm sure that many of the trails followed, which originally were Indian trails.

Lucila Leon Velazco: [speaking Spanish]... Eve Ewing: Out here, in our California, the water comes clear to the coast, so you could have wagons going up the coast, but not in Baja California, and the Portola Expedition that came up by mule, they all go through those mountains.

Harry: When you came to the edge of a mesa and were looking down into the arroyos or out to the sea, you weren't seeing very much that wouldn't have been there 300 years ago.

You had the feeling that you were looking at something every basic.

It isn't like going into American California.

It's very hard to find a place that doesn't look very changed.

Riding the trail was a beautiful experience.

It was a absolutely marvelous opportunity to step back in time.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Eve: Harry said, "Eve, the best advice you ever gave me was "Don't go into the mountains without a local guide that really knows the country," and, of course, he found Tacho Arce.

The rest is history.

Harry: I have pictures in one of my books of Tacho Arce, my most important guide and the most wonderful individual that I met in all my time down there, a man who was extremely intelligent, good-natured beyond belief, knew the country.

Going with him on a long trip, and every ranch you came to, he was met literally open arms.

He was a favorite with everybody.

♪♪♪ Harry: I have frequently referred to Tacho and my grandfather as the two people that, in a sense, I learned the most from, and in certain ways, it was more important than college.

♪♪♪ Vev: Everywhere you go in Sierra de San Francisco, they're mostly Arces because they're all descendants of one of the early Spanish soldiers that was guarding the mission there.

He was known for his sense of humor, Tacho, just, really known for his sense of humor, and he said, "Oh, yes," he said, "you could throw a rock in the night, and it will land on the head of an Arce.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Harry: On the way north, on the original trip, we were camping at the foot of the Sierra de San Francisco, and then something rather shocking happened.

We went up, and I give you my word, this is what happened, and talk about a coincidence: You've skirted along a very narrow trail, and we turned a corner and came into a space which had an overhang about 40 or 50 feet away from the wall, and the space was about 80 feet tall.

♪♪♪ Harry: And there were paintings on this curve, the heads of which were 40 feet off the ground.

What a shock to think about prehistoric people painting 40 feet off the ground.

Enrique: In the area of Sierra de San Francisco and Sierra de Guadalupe, where the best paintings are, they were known as the Cochimi.

The Cochimi were not the painters.

They had a common legend among them which ascribed the authorship to a group of giants come from the north.

When you see the paintings, they're spectacular.

They're huge.

They're enormous.

They're among the five most important concentrations of prehistoric art on earth, but you also see the signature of the painters, which is their hand.

They dipped their hand in the pigment and placed it on the wall, and their hands are the size of yours and mine, so, were they giants?

Yes, but up here.

Miguel: [speaking Spanish]... Harry: I tell you, when we walked in there, the scale of it was so much bigger than the Spanish and French ones, so we asked every rancher and everyone we ran into if there were any more of these rock paintings, and it was mind-blowing how many there were.

♪♪♪ Ristin Crosby Decker: I am completely blown away by the fact that those people got up as high as they did.

They had to have had some kind of palm ladders or something because some of that stuff is up so high it's kind of dizzying to even think about trying to paint something, and the fact that they kept over-painting, you know, obviously, it was a magical place for them because, otherwise, they wouldn't go to all that trouble, you know, of getting up so, so high and then continuing to paint over and over and over in the same places.

Enrique: Something happened that was a catalyst, a spark, that made these people take a leap from little stick figures with your finger to these huge murals, spectacular works of art that required hundreds if not thousands of man hours over centuries, maybe millennia.

We don't know.

We found an enormous amount of stuff to photograph that hadn't been documented.

♪♪♪ Harry: I photographed 180 sites by the time my first book was published, and they're only about 12 of them had ever appeared in print anywhere.

I had a Hasselblad Super Wide, which is a 38-millimeter lens on a two-and-a-quarter square image, and when you're photographing caves and cave paintings, sometimes you can only get maybe 12 feet away from a big painting, and, boy, did that Hasselblad ever serve because you could get a big painting even in a small distance.

Ristin: My dad had asked me to help him reproduce this El Batequi mural.

He showed me the photographs, and we kind of pieced 'em all together, and so I kind of reconstructed a lot of it.

♪♪♪ Harry: The rock art of the Sierra de San Francisco is known worldwide.

They're organizing trips there.

I think I'm not exaggerating.

It may be more than 5,000 people a year visit up there, but I didn't envision any of that happening.

I didn't envision anything happening.

I thought I was there for one time.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Reed Decker: Interesting, interesting.

female: You got beans, okay.

Harry: A horse can slip and slide and-- Joanne: And then they freak out and-- Reed: And then, yeah, exactly.

Harry: And mules aren't--mules, it's a dominant characteristic, so mules never inherit the horse's problem.

They get from the-- They get what it takes to work genetically-- Joanne: Could you, please-- Harry: --and it was very interesting.

female: What year was that?

Ristin: This was in the '70s.

Joanne: Seventy-- Ristin: Traveling was always something that I really, really got excited about.

Being in Mexico was really exciting.

I mean, I thought it was pretty darn fun.

It was just breathtaking to get to some of these sites.

The first one I went on was in the early '70s.

Riding a mule all day, every day, was interesting.

Talk about fanny fatigue.

Joanne: It was harder than hell, I'll tell you.

Boy, that's tough.

I tell ya, there isn't a square inch of Baja California that isn't rocky.

Reed: Not everybody goes down to look at, you know, ancient cave art with their grandfather in rural Baja California, you know?

It just doesn't happen, and so, once you start, kind of, adding these things up, time and time again, and realizing that "wow, I'm being granted an exposure to things, to people, to places, to cultures at such a young age that most people will never experience in their entire life.

What he taught me is to really embrace other people and their culture and what they have to offer.

Bronle Crosby: He was always diving into his darkroom, and he had the light that signaled when you couldn't knock on the door and pester him, and one of the best things was to go in and stand over his shoulder and watch him work.

He was really kind about that.

He would let us go in and watch, and it didn't smell very good, and it was pretty closed quarters, but it was pretty darn fascinating, watching the paper floating in all of those solutions and these people rising up out of it, so I thought it was magic.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Joanne: When he began to photograph the cave paintings, he, just, was hooked on the whole thing.

I don't--can't even tell you how many times he went down.

Bronle: Growing up, there were sometimes lengthy intervals when my dad was just plain gone.

I remember kind of having a stomach ache in the evening 'cause it just felt wrong just not having him there.

The longest one was, I believe, three months, and my mom was Really, really nice about it.

There were never rouse or "Oh, my God, you're leaving again?"

None of that, but she got pretty tired, and she had a lot of responsibility with three little kids.

♪♪♪ Don: Well, Harry's importance in documentary photojournalism, showing things as they are, he had no influence on the people or the places.

His only influence was waiting for the light to be right, changing his perspective, changing his lens, changing the focus.

That has stayed with me.

Harry: When I got the job in 1980, to do a book on the people of the mountains of Baja California, I realized that, living among them and spending many nights at ranches and all that, it provided good photos, but it didn't provide me with adequate information about their backgrounds.

Well, I knew the mainland reasonably well.

I'd spent time in Sonora, Sinaloa, Nayarit, Jalisco, and I could tell these Baja California people were different.

They were more isolated, but they were different in other ways.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Juan Bautista: [speaking Spanish]... Harry: I quickly learned that I could quiz everybody and get some--a sense of what we were going toward or what is the next ranch we're gonna come to, and they'd tell me something about that rancher or ranchers.

Sometimes it was a pair of brothers and their wives and children and every combination you can think of.

World news?

I never heard anything mentioned.

The nearest village?

Yes.

The fellow who had just gone down there for supplies to bring back to his ranch was telling about who was sick and who got married.

Enrique: Every time we'd go to a ranch, he would sit down to interview these people, who were they, what was their grandfather's name, where were they born, who were they related to at the next ranch, how was that relationship significant.

All of these questions were wonderful to watch.

We'd watch Harry make the question and then watch the people respond.

It was great to see how both sides relaxed when the process began.

Harry: I give you my word, in almost every case, the women in the kitchen went right on.

I could walk around.

I could point the camera at them.

They went on stewing or working on tortillas or whatever they were doing, and sometimes they were talking to each other.

They just went right on, talking to each other.

Don: And his style was enviable because you don't find many people on these Baja ranchos staring at him or acting for him or being aware so much of who he was.

Harry: I was present at a luncheon where a young man had dropped in.

This was a fairly remote mountain ranch and Guadalupe, and he was there to see his girlfriend, to be "fiance," and they sat at the table, and she blushed and said virtually nothing, and he talked to the parents, all very politely, and I photographed the whole thing, and I did not have--none of my pictures showed that anybody was even conscious that a picture was being taken.

♪♪♪ Lucila: [speaking Spanish]... Harry: "Last of the Californios," as I envisioned it, would be a, sort of, a history of those people as well as giving a sense of being among them and traveling with them, and so forth.

When families got together, it was very obvious that they were very close when some of the children or a brother and his wife would show up at a ranch.

They would really all sit down together, and they talked and chattered, and so forth.

It was really a way of life, and it was marvelous to be exposed to that and know it, really understand it.

Miguel: [speaking Spanish]... Eve: I think I've learned, from my many years down there, that the most hospitable, civilized, and elegantly mannered people are the rancheros, the Californios.

Harry: Probably half of the mountain ranches that I went to are abandoned now.

Just, the hindsight which allows me to be so grateful as to what I saw and experienced for real.

I mean, it wasn't some kind of an act that was put on.

I saw what was really there.

I'm sorry I didn't see it 20 years earlier.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Don: He was our ticket to Baja California and the hidden ranches of Baja Sur.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Don: He gave us his camp kitchen that he had used, very convenient, portable.

It could be latched to a donkey, but it had a griddle.

It had a pot and all the utensils--everything we needed.

He showed Marjorie Miller, my reporter, and I, a lot of the photographs that he had taken on the ranches during his explorations of Baja, and among those were very beautiful portraits.

He said, "Would you deliver these pictures to these people?

I'll give you the names of the ranches and their names."

So, when we got to Rancho Represito, and Rancho Vivilejos, and several others, pulled out those prints, eight-by-ten prints, and people looked at them like they were lookin' at ghosts.

They were lookin' at themselves from ten years ago, and they just opened their hearts, their emotions.

They were just themselves, and that is a gift a photojournalist can't buy.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Harry: I went up to the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, determined to take all the information I had got in Baja California and see what I could find up here because they've got a lot of stuff that Baja doesn't have.

And I was not a historian.

I'd never studied history, but when I got up there, I couldn't find any publications that did more than little hunks of it here and there or were very general or, as I knew, in some cases, inaccurate because I'd been over the trail.

I certainly knew, by the time when I finished up there, the two weeks I spent up there, that Baja California had been just lightly skimmed.

Paul: I must admit, one of my favorite works is Harry Crosby's "Antigua California," partly because I'm sure I've read it more than any other human being other than Harry, in the various editions, and so on, but the fact that it gives such a terrific basis for understanding the later history of the peninsula and was a monumental work in the sense that it showed people who didn't think there was much of a historical past in the peninsula that there is a complex and rich historical past.

In the beginning, there was only one California, just one.

There was no Mexico.

There was no United States.

With the coming of the Jesuits in the beginning of the building of the missions and the Camino Real, there was Antigua California, and there was Alta California.

The first capital of California was Loreto.

Only one California.

Lucila: [speaking Spanish]... Bronle: When my dad gets fired up about a project, he talks about it and little else.

So the project becomes a member of the family, and it becomes a large part of everybody's life.

Harry: And I really pitched in and went to work on "Antigua California."

Well, I worked on it for ten years.

♪♪♪ Bronle: I did an awful lot of the copy editing on "Antigua California."

Now, as you know, that is a serious tome, and I have personally read that book, cover to cover, five times in going through it, to edit it, so it's my friend.

My mom would type all of his manuscripts up.

He would handwrite on legal pads and then sliced 'em all up with scissors and scotch tape 'em back together, pre word processor, and mom would retype them clean so that he could slice 'em all up again.

She was very kind about it and very patient about it with a few eye rolls, and then, because, of course, she was a consummate watercolorist, he asked her to reproduce those Tirsch, Father Tirsch paintings.

Joanne: He was one of the Jesuit missionaries, and we didn't have anything to go by except a calendar, and the calendar was very poorly reproduced.

The backgrounds were muddy, so Harry photographed them, and we projected them, and I made the drawings.

The only thing I knew, for sure, was that the Indian women wore blue skirts because bolts of blue cloth were shipped over to the padres, and I think they dictated what the Indians that they'd converted wore.

Bronle: This is what my father wrote for the dedication of "Antigua California": "To Joanne Haskell Crosby, sole keeper of the hearth and single parent while I did extended fieldwork and archival research off and on for 30 years.

Thanks to her love and generosity, I was always able to return to a home and a family.

My warmest thanks for that and much more.

Lynda Claassen: Is this Enrique?

Harry: It's--yes, Enrique Hambleton standing beside of the-- Lynda: Gigantic.

Harry: A good-sized agave.

Reed: He is lookin' young.

Lynda: Maybe he's contemplating roasting it.

Harry: Yeah, that was--he was a youngster then, and he was--I don't think he was 30.

Harry: The business of having a publicly available repository for your work, for your photographic work, your written work, it's important from the standpoint of making your stuff available, and whatever value it has being available makes it part of history.

Lynda: So you'll see that you're here a couple of times as author, as former owner, and as photographer.

Reed: Well, how do you decide who and what goes into special collections?

Lynda: Anything that's manuscript that's unique material would come here, so any original writings, original photograph-- Reed: Letting people be exposed to a part of the world that they never would be exposed to is-- that's a pretty important thing.

You may be out there, trying to create amazing photographs, but do they really have depth and gravity that will warrant them to be put into a special collections by UCSD, or it has some historical value?

Harry: You give opportunity for people to judge not just a few pictures from one book or something else but get an idea of what you've done and what you envisioned as being important while you were here on this earth.

Ristin: I think he was pretty blown away that a place that was so close by was so undiscovered.

That's what got him so fired up about all of the things that he found when he first went on the El Camino Real with the mules a long time ago.

♪♪♪ Enrique: The peninsula, it's so pure, so clean, so powerful, so magnificent that it just purifies me.

It feels good to be there.

There's a phrase that we use a lot in conservation in Mexico is: Conocer para conservar.

You need to know something before you can conserve it.

Exequiel: Because the peninsula is isolated from the rest of the continent, a lot of species have evolved there that you don't see anywhere else in the world, and that is what makes it so incredible.

Eve: Wilderness is really a state of mind.

It's that place where all myths are born.

These stories come out of wilderness, and that's that edge of where what you know ends, and what you don't know begins.

Harry: I know a lot of people who travel a lot and don't really pay that much attention to why the people are the way they are, and so forth.

I took photographs that--where I had the idea that I could capture a sense of my vision of what I was looking at, capturing the essence of what was the result of paying attention and understanding people.

Don: Harry Crosby's influence on me is undeniably a recognition of what's on the other side of the border is shockingly beautiful, both in the people and the cultures, the remoteness of these ranches, the old ways, the portraits of people who are living essentially like they did hundreds of years ago, and the recognition of Mexico and what's south of the border as a beautiful place that's important to revealing for all of us who are in this impossible, speeded-up world of change, to say, "Hey, you know, there is a place on this planet that isn't changing too fast, and we should recognize it," and his pictures can go a long way to help to slow us down a little bit and say, "Hey, don't mess with that trail.

Don't mess with that ridge top.

Don't dam up this little creek.

Leave it the way it is."

Because look at Harry's pictures: He's showing that this is something that once you take it away, it's gone forever.

♪♪♪ Don: And I think Harry has done all of us such a great favor in bringing that to our attention.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ announcer: This broadcast is made possible by the generous support of the Alumbra Innovations Foundation, celebrating the opening of their Museo Del Vaquero de Las Californias in El Triunfo, Mexico, dedicated to preserving the historic traditions of the vaqueros of the Californias And also by... And by viewers like you.

Thank you.