IT TAKES TWO

Somewhere between Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido, just off the coast of a tiny volcanic island called Raikoke, a small vessel bobbed in the chop of the Sea of Okhotsk. An assorted group of photographers, scientists, and filmmakers lined the boat’s railing and stared in disbelief as the landscape came into focus. The island, usually lush and green, smoldered in an ashy gray state of complete desolation. The air was heavy with sulfuric smoke tendrils, and flocks of birds circled in infinite loops overhead with nowhere to land. The sea-lapped shores, once home to a thriving sea lion rookery, had been reduced to smoking rubble.

The volcano had been dormant for almost a century. Colorado-based filmmakers Taylor Rees, 35, and Renan Ozturk, 41, hadn’t planned to pull up to its shores less than three weeks after an eruption. The husband-and-wife team—recent co-founders of production company Expedition Studios in Ridgway—originally designed the trip to the remote Kuril Islands simply to explore, climb, and photograph one of the most inaccessible volcanic archipelagos in the world. But as they inevitably do on the far-flung trips that Ozturk and Rees embark upon, things changed.

Just before their departure from the port city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, they met a Russian marine mammal biologist whose boat had been destroyed by the ash when the volcano erupted while he was at Raikoke. He wanted to go back to check on the rookery as Sweeping cinematography, often courtesy of a fleet of drones, captured the isolated beauty of the Kurils and the wildlife clinging precariously to a habitat under attack, not just by an unexpected eruption but also by climate change.