In the America's with David Yetman

Americans did not submissively accept the rule of Europeans and their resistance and reception of the foreigners varied greatly. We visit the Dominican Republic, where Columbus established a beachhead, and then to the Mexican port of Veracruz where Hernán Cortés landed 28 years later. We follow his route across lofty mountain chains to Tenochtitlán of the Aztecs, today's Mexico City.

Columbus spent nearly a decade lobbying for his trip remaining mostly in Huelva, a port on Spain's southwestern coast. On his voyages, he brought the heritage of his surroundings and their many assumptions shaping his mission. The sailors he chose were critical to the success or failure of his mission. Understanding them helps clarify the influence and destruction they would heap on the Americas.

Huelva and its surroundings reveal a wealth of cultural and historical influences, from Romans through Moors to Spaniards, from technology to disease, through (perhaps) Italians and (perhaps) Portuguese ancestry that Columbus and subsequent would-be conquerors carried with them to would transform the Americas into a European province.

The Colorado River was dammed at Glen Canyon in the early 1960s. The resulting reservoir, Lake Powell, is the second largest reservoir in the United States. As a prolonged drought grips the southwest, the lake is shrinking. The falling water levels reveal a wonderland of canyons from angles never before seen and the new landscapes reveal fragments of ancient peoples who made Glen Canyon home.

For millennia, gray whales have made an annual pilgrimage from the Gulf of Alaska to the protected waters of San Ignacio Lagoon, where the mother whales feel safe from predators, give birth to calves and urge the newborn giants to make contact with humans. The Mexican government, boatmen and fishermen guard the whales and nurture the friendship between people and the gentle leviathans.

The Salton Sink has been home to the largest body of water in California for more than a thousand years. Three hundred years ago, it was Lake Cahuilla, a freshwater lake. Changing geology and extensive industrial agriculture have resulted in a very salty and polluted sea. Once a booming tourist mecca, drought, agriculture, and failed development have produced a nearly dead body of water.

A little over one hundred miles south of the U.S-Mexico borders in the state of Sonora, international conservation groups have discovered the ideal habitat for jaguars, mountain lions and ocelots. Through their efforts, former cattle ranches in North America now belong to these top predators, who leave their images on cameras that now document populations of the secretive beasts.

New Mexico’s northwestern quadrant has been home to a variety of native peoples. The places they chose to live are a showcase of the powers of volcanoes and erosion. These natural monuments help define the territories these people have chosen and have become symbols for their homelands. Towering volcanic remnants shoot up from the earth while others record disruptive flows of lava.

More than a thousand years before the arrival of Europeans in the southwestern U.S. native peoples were establishing their occupation of the Colorado Plateau, learning how to live in a climate where winters were bitter and summers torrid. And they left behind proof of their scientific and technological accomplishments in plain sight—with a little assistance from contemporary archaeologists.

Nowhere else in the world offers a more graphic view of deep forces of geology at work than the Four Corners portion of the Colorado Plateau. The arid climate,peculiar volcanoes, powerful forces of erosion, and clashes of tectonic plates makes for the highest concentration of national park features in the United States. Travel from deserts to forests and move through the spectacular formations.