Travel Photos - Northern California

Northern California has a majestic quality about it. It is grand, yet intimate. Below are some of my favorite personal photographs taken on road trips through the Sonoma and Napa Valleys, the Monterey Bay area, and some lesser known areas north of San Francisco.

Portola National Forest, between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, is a mixer of Redwood Forest and flowered, open hillsides. If visiting or camping, spring is the most beautiful and colorful time to see this area.





Also during the spring and summer, fog creeps in off the ocean every morning and settles into shallow spaces between the hills and trees. Hilltop islands protrude out of the foggy forest floor.

Springtime also brings out the Banana Slug, a northern California native.



Portola in the late summer is fields of dead grasses, thousands of caterpillars, and garden snakes. Within this, however, you can find some amazing moments.



Drive along the coastal areas north of San Francisco on California Highway 1. By the early afternoon, the fog that rolled in during the morning warming of the oceans has evaporated. However, the cooling of the ocean water at sundown brings in even denser, more dramatic fog. Like quickly rolling thunderstorms, this fog cruises long the ocean surface, crushing over the hills that seperate the valley from the ocean.



It happens so quickly you feel like you're watching it happen in time-lapse photography. The fog quickly reaches the inner hills.




South of Portola Redwood Forest is the Monterey Bay area, and it's famous 17-Mile Drive, a protected segment of Highway 1 that offers some of the most spectacular natural scenery in the country.


The atmosphere can change dramatically at different parts of the day. Here: early morning. Bird Island is in the background, which has a white cap from all of the birds that leave their droppings.


Hidden within the twisted woods of 17-Mile Drive are many multi-million dollar homes. Many of the homes are built right on the ocean cliffs, overlooking the ocean.

In the Vineyards of Siena

September 1987—Siena, Italy

Waking before 5 in the morning is always severe for me. I do it now, 6 days a week. Each morning except Sunday I accomplish something of a drop out of bed. I gather on a dirty pair of jeans and a shirt. I throw my old shoes into a grape basket and I venture barefoot out into the early morning.

My shoes are impossible, and I don’t like to wear them. They gave me blisters because they don’t fit. I’m better off barefoot. Besides, there is a certain rebellious satisfaction being barefoot.

Underneath, I love the feel of the cold cobblestones and dirt against the skin of my feet. Around me, the air stands still and I pass through it. Above, the sky is a tight metallic black. Down in the fields, everyone works in a curious silence, as if we are all absent of any identity. The only sound comes from Pitento yelling at his poor old donkey. And then the sun would come up over the hills and fill the valley. When the light hits the vines, they shutter, turn and open their leaves. What a sight! I mean, what a fucking beautiful sight! It’s so tangible, so real, so beautiful that every time I see it, right then and there, I forget everything that really matters to me.

This morning, we are having breakfast in the early sun, like we always do. When the women come down from the hills on which Siena was built, we’d leave the vines to have a snack. They would rbing a breakfast of old formaggi, pecorini, and panini varsi so formidable and so fowl that when I tried to feed it to the pigeons in Piazza del Campo last week they flew from it. And vino. Yes, wine in the morning. It is the only truly digestible thing to consider, so we are pleased to see it.

We are gathered around now, eating our breakfast. From the outside, we must look like peasants did in the 12th century. At least I feel that way, sitting on the ground to eat under the same big circle of sky like they must have at times. It is always odd because most of us are only teenagers, socially lost travelers who have stumbled onto this place and who have stayed, or more precisely, who have left homes in search an identity of our own. To define ourselves, our bodies, and our places in the world. You’d think, after so many thousands of years of humans endeavoring to do this, that we’d know how to do it by now.

I only know who I do not want to be, and I know only where I do not want to be. But I wonder, sometimes, if running away has any real purpose for me, if, in the end, I have no idea who I want to be and to where I'm running.

Perhaps that's the price of trying to define ourselves. Perhaps there is a gap that must be created, that we remain an unstable position between the subject of our pain and pleasure and the object of out pain and pleasure. What I mean is this: we are sitting in a vineyard eating like peasants, drinking wine from used Evian bottles. The older men are flirting with the younger women while chewing on fat slices of salami, and the shy ones (that would be me) draw circles in the dirt with our toes. Everyone is talking and eating and even dancing to Pitento’s silly ad-lib poetry. It's 8 in the morning and everyone is tripping and singing with mixed up minds. We’re all drunk. But I know that in a breath, all of this will be gone. We'll leave the singing and dancing to return to the vines and the hot September Tuscan sun, where we have no identies, no place to be.


I guess there are only a few things that really matter in life: one’s health, one’s happiness, one’s ability to love, a comfortable pair of shoes, and a tremendous passion for everything else which doesn't really matter in life, but do, because you have so much passion for life.


Downs © Copyright 2005