Sierra Blogging Post Archives

The early bird gets the... memory card?

Rocky Mountain Adventures, a whitewater rafting company on the Poudre River in Fort Collins, CO offers a photo package with their trips so you can take home great shots of you and your friends navigating the river. But that's not the cool part - they use homing pigeons to transport the images back to base camp in town so the photos are ready for you to pick up once you make your way back down.


Because the drive between RMA headquarters and the launch site is about 30 miles, it would be next to impossible to transport the photos by vehicle and develop them by the time the rafters return to base camp. So as soon as the photos are taken, the memory card is put in a tiny backpack and given to a pigeon who flies it back to headquarters.

Photographer Caitlin Wyman loves the pigeons and says they really work. "Pigeon Express; it's awesome," said Caitlin Wyman, who takes pictures of the rafters for RMA.

The pigeons are usually reliable, barring bad weather or other natural disasters. "On rainier days, they'll kind of park themselves under a tree and wait until the storm is over," Wyman said. Plus, you have the occasional no-shows. "There are hawks, ospreys in this canyon; they do get them. What are you going to do?"

Love it.

Photo Credit: A Rocky Mountain Adventure group rides the North Platte River in 2000. Rocky Mountain Adventure also works the Poudre River and uses homing pigeons to help get camera memory cards out of the canyon and back to RMA. (V. Richard Haro/Coloradoan library)