San Pedro Mountain Road (2021)
In 2004 I moved with my wife and kids to the California Coast, bought a house, and immediately had anti-buyer’s remorse.
“Buyer’s remorse” is, of course, the emotion one feels when one splurges foolishly on some car or stereo or another big purchase and then, as the glow of the purchase fades, the realization that you overspent sets in. Anti-buyer’s remorse is exactly the opposite.
The house in California was expensive by any measure, and it stretched our finances to their limit, but I would have found a way to pay more had I realized what we were really buying. There’s the house, of course. But there are also the beaches, surprisingly empty of tourists during the week, and the night skies, so dark that often you could make out the Milky Way.
The biggest surprise was Montara Mountain, soon to be part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and the road that led by our house and up onto the mountain. The road, called San Pedro Mountain Road, was established in 1914, and winds its way over the lower parts of the mountain, connecting my town of Montara with that of Pacifica, over the mountain to the north. At some point the road was abandoned, the modern Highway One skirting the coast replacing it, and the road and all of the land around it more or less free of development.
In the ten years I’ve lived here now I walk the mountain with my family nearly every night when we are not traveling, thousands of walks now, and each one has been different. Different flora, different fauna, different lighting, different trail friends, and the ever-different ocean.
If I had known about the empty beaches, the dark skies, and especially about the mountain hike I would have happily paid more for our house.
Part of the walk is treed, the trees planted many decades ago by the ranchers, some of the trees indigenous, some imported from far, far away. The trees have a special character, a personality, an individuality that is compelling to look at. And so I began to photograph the trees along the path that we have walked all these years, adding to my ongoing portrait of Montara, making these nine prints out of many more images as a Christmas gift for members of my immediate family.
In early 2023, not long after making these images, a series of powerful storms struck the area and several of these trees were uprooted, toppled over and abandoned, or cut through and removed if they had fallen across the road. I did not intend the project when I made it to contain a sense of loss.
