Soaring Above These Historic Lands
The Beauty of Moses Coulee
Video by Ryan Haugo, Senior Forest Ecologist
Last year, we partnered with the Yakima Valley Community College to build new aerial tools for forest conservation.
Recently, we brought this tool to the Nature Conservancy Field Station in Eastern Washington. It gave us a chance to film the first attempt for the Conservancy at flying the “quadcopter for conservation” through the beautiful perspective of our 33,000 acre Moses Coulee Preserve – an amazing preserve that doesn’t have a lot attention today.
It’s a staggeringly beautiful place created by the great lava flows and flooding of the early Miocene epoch. Today, it’s mostly farmland, providing a stunning contrast of bright green fields, breezy plateaus and a deep river gorge that has developed over the past 20 million years. As a result of the erosion, beautifully textured igneous rock canyon walls and precious sagebrush habitat that local wildlife rely on are abundant and easily accessible by foot and the many trails throughout the preserve.
This bird’s eye view helped to see both the beauty and the landscape scale of our conservation in and around the historic preserve!
