The Lost Sea Expedition — Finally, the Whole Story

I, Bernie Harberts, did not use generative AI to write or illustrate this article. Spell check and grammar check, yes. AI, no.

Twenty years ago, I built a small wagon in my friend Mel Wyatt’s garage, hauled it and my mule Polly to Neptune, Saskatchewan, hitched Polly to the wagon and headed south. My dream was to follow the path of an ancient sea, the Western Interior Seaway, from Canada to Mexico. I’d film the whole voyage myself. That meant no crew, no drones, no AI, no cell phone and no GPS. Just some paper maps, two movie cameras, Polly, and our handmade wagon.

If I needed an aerial shot, I climbed a windmill. Man it sucks to forget your camera on top of a red Texas hill after you’ve walked through a long shot and have to backtrack an hour to retrieve it.

Polly and I spent 400 days on the road. That included a brutally cold winter on the plains, the kind of weather that, as fossil hunter Barbara Shelton told me, once drove settlers to madness. “The wind would blow and blow and blow,” she said, “and people would go crazy.”

I experienced that madness firsthand and documented it too. When I got lonely out there on the prairie, I tied messages into tumbleweeds and let them go bouncing off across the grass, each one carrying a stamp and a note, hoping someone somewhere would write back.

I’m still waiting for a reply.

Along the way I met people who opened their homes to a man and his mule night after night. Lakota elder Ben Rhodd gave me a buffalo stone that became a central character in the film. In Crosbyton, Texas, creationist Joe Taylor gave me the only Christian perspective on the Lost Sea that anyone would put on film for me.

The Film That PBS Couldn’t Show in Full

Back home from the voyage, I produced a feature-length documentary about the journey. I was thrilled with how it turned out. The Lost Sea Expedition premiered on Rocky Mountain PBS, which was a huge thrill for what was essentially a one man, one mule film production outfit. It went on to win the WINNIE Award at the EQUUS International Film Festival and racked up 195 reviews on Amazon Prime.

The only problem was that the Lost Sea Expedition had to be broken into four parts to fit the PBS format. While the individual episodes were exceptional, what was lost was the epic feeling of experiencing a continuous, 394-day journey across America, tied together by dust storms, prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, and the extraordinary people who told me about the sea I was looking for.

I always felt the film needed to be seen whole.

At long last, two decades after Polly and I rolled out onto a windy Canadian plain in our tiny wagon, I’m releasing the full, uncut, original feature-length version of the Lost Sea Expedition. The version I always dreamed of sharing. The version that lets you feel every Colorado pothole, Kansas rattlesnake rattle, Oklahoma prairie breeze and moonlit Texas night.

No drones. No AI. Just one younger version of me, mule Polly, and America.

Want to know more about the whole making of the Lost Sea Expedition series? Find the full story from maps, photos and posts straight off my mule wagon to behind the scenes footage, at LostSeaExpedition.com.

Watch the full documentary here, free on YouTube.

Let's Keep in Touch

Sign up for The River, the RiverEarth newsletter, for occasional doses of rambling and homestead life. Plus you'll get a free copy of my 155-page illustrated ebook 19 Million Mule Steps.

Just enter your email below and hit Subscribe.

Explore More of RiverEarth

• Travel by Horse and Mule
• Travel by Sail
• Tasmania by $10 Bike
• Around the Homestead
• Travel Grit Website: Interviews with Long Riders, Sailors and Adventurers