Outdoors : There’s So Much to Take In : Whales: In waters 600 miles south of San Diego, kayakers marvel at the sight of the giant mammals, who are incredibly tolerant of the intrusion.

A short ride by skiff to . . . another world?

Where seemingly endless dunes of sand ripple under the attack of near-constant winds. Where early morning animal tracks are everywhere, but lead nowhere since they are quickly erased by blowing sand.

It’s a world where life of a magnificent sort fills the channel. Whales, huge and graceful, come here by the hundreds.

It’s Magdalena Island, 600 miles south of San Diego on the Pacific side of the Baja California peninsula.

Few visitors ever set foot on this island, 40 miles long and looking more like a moonscape than a landscape. Those who do, however, don’t soon forget its strange and unique beauty, its isolation.

It’s a piece of land untouched by progress, remnants of age-old shipwrecks dotting its shores.

Large frigate birds loom high in the sky, their long black wings and forked tails invoking thoughts of some prehistoric past. Long-eared coyotes roam and sniff about the tents of those who do come. They yip and yell eerily into the night. They make off with shoes, bottles or anything else left untethered overnight. By dawn, they are nowhere to be seen over the sandy expanse.

Oversized pelicans dive-bomb the channel for fish, or rest in huge flocks under a sun that beats relentlessly upon the sandy shore.

And in the channel, exhalations of whales echo in the night. The huge mammals slumber in the daytime sun, looking like monstrous floating rocks as they drift with the current. And so easygoing, they are downright approachable.

At night, when the moon is full, it highlights surrealistic patterns painted by the wind across the powdery dunes. The dunes reflect the moonlight. Twilight seems endless.

Tim Means got married here, he and his bride remaining on the island for a week. They now have a daughter. Her name is Magdalena.

And now, Means is president of the San Diego- and La Paz-based Baja Expeditions, which offers guided trips here. He lives in La Paz, so coming here now is all in a day’s work.

But what would bring John Thaxton all the way from the concrete confines of New York?

He and his wife Pat came for the kayaking and whale-watching, to escape the civilized world and to count species of birds in this part of the world.

“We do that everywhere we go,” Pat says.

The common loon and spotted sandpiper can be seen here, as can the royal tern and swallow-tailed kite. Godwits, gulls and grebes are abundant. Sanderlings and larks abound. Then there are the loggerhead shrike, the white ibis, the majestic osprey . . . the list goes on.

How about that persistent peregrine falcon, chasing down the acrobatic tern over the middle of the channel in a dogfight just above water that lasted nearly a minute?

And how could Thaxton have expected to end up carrying back to camp a nearly starved, sick young sea lion that had crawled high atop a blistering dune to die? He helped to nurse it back into a playful pup by hand-feeding it raw fish.

Lee Rodencal and Tom Borrowman left one desert for another. But they wouldn’t have been touching any whales in Palm Springs.

And here, people can touch whales. Sometimes, even when they don’t mean to. The panga boat in which Cathleen Griffin of Portland, Me., was riding accidentally bumped one.

“I’m all right, are you all right . . . is everybody all right?” she asked after the encounter.

Apparently so.

Said Dave Beckwith of Boulder, Colo.: “We hit the whale. He dove, and then came up alongside the boat and circled around, as if to check to see if we were all right. He came up along the boat and stayed there and we touched it. It was incredible.”

Karen Peterson, also from the mountains of Boulder, said she couldn’t have found a better place to forget about the computer business back home.

She kayaked across the channel, gliding quietly past several 40-ton whales, then into the miles of tidal estuaries that mark the peninsula’s shore, disappearing amid the thick-growing mangroves.

A great blue heron, standing tall in the mud-flats created by the ebbing tide, watched her slide past.

Loni Levy and Deborah Vogl followed basically the same route as the whales in coming here from their law offices in Alaska.

At least they didn’t have to worry about getting tangled up in gill nets off the Southern California coast.

It is the migratory pattern of the California gray whale that is basically responsible for this gathering of stateside travelers, brought here as part of a package put together by Chuck and Judy Nichols of Nichols Expeditions of Moab, Utah, which works in conjunction with Baja Expeditions.

The narrow channel between Magdalena Island and the peninsula is just one of several areas along the Baja coast that is frequented by gray whales, which travel the 6,000 miles from Alaska each year to give birth to and nurse their calves in Baja’s warm-water lagoons.

They play and cavort for three months, the females fattening their young with milk until they are fit to survive the trip north, and the icy Bering Sea.

The channel between Magdalena Island and the peninsula is ideal for travel by kayak, and for close encounters with the whales, because it is narrow--about a mile wide at its widest--and generally calm.

The whales can be seen jumping, their vast bulk causing splashes visible for miles. They also poke their bodies up out of the water, as if standing on their tails. They look around, then slip quietly back under.

Kayakers are advised to make noise when approaching a whale, to alert the giant mammal of their presence. The whales generally keep their distance.

“Probably the most striking thing down here is that these animals are so incredibly tolerant of our intrusion,” said Means’ partner Kent Madin, a former guide and now vice president of Baja Expeditions. “If ever they wanted to do anybody any harm, they could. They have plenty of opportunity. And yet they consistently avoid any confrontation with humans.”

Perhaps there is reason.

The most popular lagoon, 200 miles north of here, is the famous Scammon’s, named after Capt. Charles Scammon, who discovered the entrance to the lagoon in the 1850s and, going after the valuable whale oil, turned it into a slaughterhouse.

The whales were also hunted at San Ignacio Lagoon, about 100 miles south of Scammon’s by land, and even in these narrow waterways that wind through Magdalena Bay.

Between 1846 and 1874, whalers, using harpoons tipped with gunpowder charges, slaughtered about 10,000 whales in this 150-mile long bay alone.

The gray whale was said to have dwindled to just a few hundred in the late 1930s, before conservation efforts took hold. They have since come back in a big way, now numbering about 20,000.

An estimated 180 to 200 enter this channel each year at the Boca de la Soledad, its mouth, and most remain for about three months, providing ample opportunity for observation. Trips are booked through Baja Expeditions, the only company with legitimate permits to do so, according to Madin.

“It’s pretty much a nursery,” Madin says of the channel during the winter months. “That’s the main guess, that they come to a given lagoon and stay in that lagoon.”

Said Judy Nichols, whose company got its start down here after she had trained with Madin: ‘It’s the only place I know of where you can kayak in an area where you’re so close to the California gray whale. You can kayak off the coast of Santa Barbara and San Diego (during the whales’ migration) but you’re not really that close to the whales. But here, where you have a calm channel like this . . .”

Here, it is almost impossible to look out on the water and not see any whales.

Every detail is planned for a trip billed by the Nicholses as “a time of discovery and tranquility surrounded by the unique environment of Magdalena Bay.”

It’s camping in style, with meals of chicken and fish and steak prepared by the Mexican guides. Cakes are made from scratch and baked over hot coals in the sand. Baggage is transported by panga, freeing the campers to kayak from campsite to campsite.

It’s a world so isolated that all of the animals seem less apprehensive than similar species elsewhere. Pelicans seem reluctant to fly away when people approach.

Dolphins appear even less afraid of mankind.

Madin recalled that on another trip, one camper customarily took a two-mile run at dawn along the waterline.

“After he had started out running, a dolphin came along and swam next to him and paced him for the whole run,” Madin said. “This dolphin was five or six feet away the whole way. When the runner got to the end of his run he turned around and came back, and the dolphin turned around and followed him. And it happened two mornings in a row.”

Dolphins, apparently curious, occasionally show within five or six feet of camp during the night. Campers can hear them breathe, and see their reflecting eyes focused on shore. They remain for several minutes, then move on.

And the sea lion that John Thaxton carried back to camp? It crawled right into Deborah Vogl’s lap, over the outstretched bodies of the other campers.

As for the whales, just gaze out over the water, or hop aboard one of the pangas and you can learn firsthand of their peaceful nature.

Guides Angel Viscaino and Juan Jesus Lucero motor out to the middle of the channel, and into the path of a mother whale and her calf.

The whales continue on their course, apparently unafraid. They swim up alongside the boat’s rail, the mother intent on keeping herself and the baby at what she feels is a safe distance--a few feet. She spouts a cloud of mist that floats into the passengers’ faces.

They marvel, at this encounter, at the size of the mother whale and the proximity at which it is being viewed. They comment that the whales’ skin is not pretty, but rather pocked by barnacles and marine growth. They remark on the care with which the whale treats its calf.

Eventually, the mother loses any fear it might have had and begins to roll lazily about, well within the reach of the passengers, its calf by its side.

Viscaino, at the boat’s stern, reaches down and touches the baby, then grins from ear to ear, raising his hand victoriously.

He touches it a second time and lets out a hearty laugh. Several of the passengers then reach over the rail and begin to pet the baby whale. It rolls over, perhaps appreciative of the affection, its eye staring at the smiling passengers. This goes on for nearly two hours before the setting sun transforms the horizon into a display of burning red.

Cost of this seven-day trip is $799, not including air fare, but including two nights--the first and last--in a La Paz hotel.

A chartered bus travels north from La Paz for four hours on Highway 1, affording a panoramic view of the Baja desert. Falcons and hawks fly over the cardon cactus and cirio trees that stand tall and thick under the blazing sun.

Small rancheros come and go until the traffic lights of Ciudad Constitucion, Baja California Sur’s second-most populated city, bring the bus to a stop. After lunch in the parking lot of a modern supermarket, it’s back on the road.

A left turn off the main highway and the farms of the Magdalena Plain, otherwise known as the Santo Domingo Valley, come into view.

This arid region has been developed as an agricultural center recently, thanks to the tapping of water that had been trapped for centuries deep beneath the earth’s surface. Cotton, wheat, alfalfa and vegetables are grown here and shipped to the Mexican mainland.

The end of the road is the water’s edge. The townspeople gather as the bus is unloaded. They watch as the passengers step off and sink deep into the soggy beach.

As the campers board the pangas , and disappear across the channel, they leave behind the world they have always known, entering one they will never forget.