I’ve never been to Las Vegas before! I landed at the air port and all met up with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution crew (Bill, Evan, and Maryann) to drive out to Echo Bay in Lake Mead. A beautiful drive full of canyons and tumble weeds was just about what I expected the dessert to be like, just not 30 degrees! The canyons seemed to change every hour as the light hit them from every angle,  sometimes they looked like they were on fire. Lake Mead is absolutely breathtaking. It is sad to see the “toilet bowl” effect from the water levels decreasing. You can distinctly see the white ring around the lake where the water has dropped over 100 ft in the past 10 years.

No wake zone markers sit high above you on cliffs that were once submerged. We came out to dive with the National Park Services Submerged Resources Center to document a piece of history. A Cold-war era B-29 Superfortress bomber plane that crashed during a scientific mission in 1948. It used to be much more of a technical dive in 250ft of water but since the water levels have decreased its now around 140ft and more divers can reach the wreck, even though you must have a permit to dive it, and since its now just within ambient light more algae and muscles are able to cling to it, so The National Park Service and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are out to document it.

We dropped a 4000 watt chandelier for extra light that was powered by generators on the surface. After preparing our rebreathers, and several HD and 3-D cameras, we were ready to splash. It’s a chilling 49 degree water, after passing down the large table sized cameras along with several 150watt HID lights we descended down into darkness closer and closer to our site. We had a surprising 25ft of visibility, but still hard to see in the hazy brownish green water. Finally the ghostly image of the B-29 bomber came into view and I turned on my lights. The B-29 is 99ft long and 140 ft from wing to wing. The tail is the shallowest section and is slightly broken from the rest of the body. Out of the 4 engines only 1 remains intact on the port side. The nose is squished and through the windows you can see the pilots seat, steering, gauges and other instruments.

Evan, Brett and I shot and documented the wreck from wing to wing, also shooting the broken tail section and the oxygen bottle that uneasily rests underneath it. It’s a very ghostly looking wreck but with the powerful lights you can still see glints of silver paneling of the once powerful bomber.

As the sun rose and set over the red canyons and after several days of diving Lake Mead it's hard to believe that this beautiful place is less than an hour away from Sin City. It was a wonderful shoot with wonderful people and I hope we all come back again soon.

For more information on the National Park Services or the B-29 bomber visit:

http://home.nps.gov/applications/submerged/dispproj.cfm?alphacode=LAME