Our Guides

Bob Marshall is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has covered the people, stories, and environmental issues of Louisiana’s wetlands for more than 35 years for The Times-Picayune as well as for national publications. In 2017, he returned to the New Orleans Times-Picayune to write a regular column on environmental issues after a four-year stint at The Lens.

Marie Gould, founder of Lost Lands Tours, has spent more than 25 years boating and kayaking in the wetlands surrounding New Orleans with her husband, Bob Marshall.  She had a long career working in education, including serving as the public spokesperson for the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for 12 years, and was a seasonal forest ranger with the US Forest Service. She ran a program that brought New Orleans children to the Colorado wilderness and rafting the Grand Canyon.

John Hazlett  is a retired professor of American Literature at the University of New Orleans where he directed the BA in International Studies Program. He had taught at universities and directed summer programs around the world.

An avid kayaker (and failed fisherman), John is determined to navigate as many of Southeast Louisiana’s waterways as he can in the next ten years.

Since building his first kayak in the late 1970’s, Clyde Carlson has paddled many rivers, creeks, bayous and lakes throughout the Southeast United States. A retired civil engineer, he now enjoys showing the natural beauty of the swamps and marshes to locals and tourists alike.

When not leading kayak swamp tours, Clyde enjoys fishing, canoeing, and bicycling with his family and friends.

In between taking every opportunity to paddle in Louisiana swamps, Dan Pellerito is the certified athletic trainer at a prestigious local high school, and an active volunteer for the United States Olympic Committee’s Sports Medicine program. He has traveled both domestically and internationally with the USA Luge team as an athletic trainer, throughout Canada, Germany, Austria, and Latvia.

Dan lives in New Orleans with his wife and three children and spends summers paddling/fishing backwoods ponds and rivers in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. He enjoys taking groups out into the flooded forests and bayous of Maurepas Swamp to learn about the environment and ways to peacefully coexist with the various flora and fauna of southeast Louisiana.

After 23 years of fighting for justice and wrangling law students as a law professor at Tulane Law School, Katherine Mattes has officially retired and paddled off into the sunset—specifically, to Southern California. But like a migratory bird (or a particularly determined mosquito), she regularly returns to New Orleans, and when she does, she’s thrilled to guide tours through the wetlands she fell in love with decades ago.

Katherine first came to New Orleans from Southern California in 1995. She quickly found herself enchanted by our swamps, so much so that she and her late husband got married on a boat in Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp. Ever since, she’s been passionate about sharing the magic of these ever-changing landscapes with visitors, whether by kayak or just good old-fashioned storytelling.

Now retired, she spends her time exploring new waters, but Louisiana’s bayous will always be in her heart and she still spends time here. Join her for a paddle, and she’ll show you why the swamp is the most unexpectedly charming place on earth—no legal briefs required.