Thank you to Miguel Garcia of Miguel Garcia Studios for filming for us on our wedding day!
Music:
"To Good Friends / On the Other Side" - Laura Shigihara and Yasunori Mitsuda
Mountains: Big Bear Lake
Amidst a rare visit to California for wedding details, Jane and I took her mom on a two-night trip up to Big Bear Lake. The weather was beautiful throughout those days, and we spent them walking through the pine woods on the north shore of the lake, and climbing up to the PCT along the Cougar Crest Trail (Jane's mom all but outclassed us on the mountainside), savoring the panoramic views of the lake below us and of Old Greyback, towering into the clouds beyond Snow Summit. After a late afternoon browsing the shops in Big Bear Village, deserted and quiet in the lull prior to the holiday-ski season, we retired to our two-bedroom lodge on Lagonita Point. Jane started the rice cooker while I walked down to the lake shore to photograph the sunset. That night, we sat around the table enjoying homemade hot pot, and kept the fireplace going late into the evening.
Chaparral: Winter at Home
These photographs were taken during the Christmas holidays, all within two miles of my childhood home, a house on a hilltop overlooking the dry brush of the La Puente foothills. One footpath leads from our residential neighborhood right down to the horse stables in the Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park, and another from the driveway in Trailview Park up to the district's water storage tanks on the hillside. From those places, a network of trails cuts across the chaparral, following the curve of the hills and the swath of the power line through Powder Canyon. It is a remarkably desolate place. Though I am usually never far from another hiker, and I can always be reassured by the rank and file of the electric pylons that ascend and descend with the land, ever-pointing towards home, I cannot help but feel acutely aware of the desert around me - the scarcity of green life, the distant howl of coyotes hunting, and the cracks that form in the parched earth, even in the depths of winter. As I stand astride the ridge overlooking Powder Canyon, the scale of my surroundings defies rational thought, making me shiver; I look out and see every little place where I grew up, hidden beneath the hills in the blue hours of the morning. I watch the first pink rays of sunlight dance on the San Bernadino Mountains, more than thirty miles and countless cities and county lines to my north; thirty miles to my south, the light glimmers on the Pacific Ocean, an undeniable bookend to every other place from my childhood. It is a landscape that I feel paradoxically intimate with and fearful of as I move through the twilight, climbing the steep slopes, and perching amidst the brush as I wait for sunrise or sunset. It is home.
