THE MT. BALDY EXPEDITION
"We have become so caught up in reading stories such as this that we deem it reasonable and necessary, both for our own sake and as a service to our society, to become explorers and engage in everything we have read explorers engage in. For that reason, we are setting out on a voyage of discovery we have titled The Mt. Baldy Expedition."
- The Mt. Baldy Expedition Announcement Lecture, Dogmatic Gallery, March 6, 2004
In 2004, inspired by predecessors such as Ferdinand Magellan and Enrique de Malacca, James Barry and I began a collaborative, mixed media project titled The Mt. Baldy Expedition (see quote). The project's structure was that of a journey of exploration in which we set out to build a sailing dinghy, sail it across Lake Michigan to Mt. Baldy, a sand dune in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, and return to share our findings with the world.
Throughout the six-year project, we continually communicated our activities by creating and exhibiting a series of "mini-projects" designed to act as an invitation to others to participate in the wonder, romance and adventure of commonplace exploration. These projects took, at times, both a serious and whimsical form and included photographic series of the Chicago lakefront, bird watching and plant identification; lectures on the history of exploration and its ties to contemporary globalization, the history of contemporary and historic boat building materials, and workshops on knot tying and the history of rope; text pieces such as an interview with our parents exploring the topics of play, learning and risk and a letter writing campaign to world leaders; illustrations such as a paper boat pattern of our expeditionary sailing dinghy and a booklet of nautical knots. We began publishing a blog, The Push Forward Chronicles, soon into the project to keep our audience and donors informed of our progress. We used it to post updates, photographs from shipbuilding at the MTBE Boatworks, projects, and lists of donors and sponsors.