Aerial image of the winding Colorado River meeting the Pacific Ocean in Baja, Mexico. (Jassen Todorov/Caters News Agency)

Spanning nearly 1,500 miles, the Colorado River runs from the Rocky Mountains through the Southwestern United States to Mexico, where it meets the Pacific Ocean. San Francisco-based photographer and pilot Jassen Todorov, 41, recently captured stunning aerial images as he flew over the sprawling river in Baja, Mexico.

“I am a pilot and I love exploring and sharing our world from above,” Todorov told weather.com. “I look for interesting, striking and picturesque places [and] I am also interested in patterns, both natural and man-made.” And the Colorado River creates some breathtaking patterns indeed. In Todorov’s photos, the tributaries look like tendrils as they crisscross the desert landscape and converge at the delta, creating a tree-like pattern that is visible only from the sky.

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“I have photographed many places and the Colorado River is one of the most fascinating sites ever,” Todorov said. It is both very beautiful and also a great tragedy [because] at the delta, there is almost no water flowing into the Pacific Ocean as it is almost completely dried up.”

Due to drought, the Colorado River has been running low for the past decade, according to The Smithsonian, and climate change is likely to decrease the river’s flow by five to 20 percent in the next 40 years.

(MORE: Stunning Aerial Images of Death Valley National Park)

Torodov is a violin professor at the San Francisco State University, but has been taking photographs for the last three years in his spare time. He also owns a four-seat 1976 Piper Warrior plane, which he flies about twice a week and uses to capture his spectacular aerial photography.

His aerial photography of the United States has been featured twice before on weather.com. In 2015, he won a first place International Photography Award, second place in the Sony World Photography Awards and was named Nature Photographer of the Year.

To see more of Torodov’s work, visit his website or follow him on Facebook.

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