FOOTHILLS
The Great Central Valley of California stretches like a vast, sunken sea—some 450 miles long and 50 miles wide—held in gentle captivity by encircling mountains. Along the basin's edge, where the valley begins its slow surrender to rising ground, the oak-studded foothills emerge. These hills, ascending toward elevations of 2,500 feet, form a transitional zone—a liminal landscape neither wholly wild nor entirely domesticated. It is here, in this quiet threshold above the engineered plain and below the Sierra’s conifer belt, that these photographs were made.
While the Central Valley below has been dramatically reconfigured—an empire of agriculture with laser-straight furrows and canal lines—the foothills remain largely as they were before the arrival of the forty niners. Apart from a few reservoirs—mostly cradled in the Sierra’s lower reaches—and some clustered oil fields around Kern County, the land here has resisted transformation. Its contours hold the memory of centuries, a slow, abiding rhythm that predates maps and surveys.
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Despite covering more than 25,000 square miles, this region holds no National Parks, no federally designated Wilderness Areas. It is a working landscape, not a recreational one. These hills belong to ranchers, linemen, oil field crews, wind technicians, and the Army Corps of Engineers. Their presence is quiet but insistent, marked by the infrastructure of labor: fences, turbines, levees, tanks, and tire tracks. This is not a place celebrated in glossy travel brochures—but it is, unmistakably, California.
To many who know it, these softly rolling hills, dotted with live oaks and golden grasses, represent the essential, archetypal Californian terrain—at once familiar and elusive, singular in its beauty. And yet, this landscape remains mostly hidden in plain sight: privately owned, largely unprotected, and inaccessible to most. Its understated beauty is reserved for those who live within it, or happen to pass through it on their way to the much lauded alpine country above.
Roads curl through the valleys like rivulets, their paths dictated by topography. Wind turbines balance on the crests like quiet sentinels, their blades sweeping through the air with reverence. Ranch houses, barns, and corrals seem not so much built as revealed, as if coaxed gently from the soil - appearing as natural as the trees around them. Even telephone poles and barbed wire fences take on a peculiar grace, tracing the land’s undulations, weaving lines through forms.
Here, the human and the natural do not compete but conspire—woven together into a living tapestry of form and function. In this overlooked region, beauty does not announce itself; it waits, patient and unassuming, for those willing to look slowly, and closely.
