When you travel to Baja California with National Geographic-Lindblad Expeditions, you’ll be among the privileged few to enter the secluded birthing lagoons of the California gray whale. “I think guests walk away from their experience in Magdalena Bay with a profound sense of the connection that we as human beings can form with wildlife,” says naturalist and certified photo instructor Gemina Garland-Lewis. In this Expedition Spotlight, she shares more about these incredibly curious whales and why encountering them in the wild brings her “tears of joy.”