After spending a quarter-century photographing America’s vast national parks, I turned my attention to the landscapes of my city, San Jose, California, located in the heart of Silicon Valley. This shift mirrors an evolution in environmental thought: from conserving distant wilderness to embracing an inclusive ecology that acknowledges the intertwined relationship between human life and the natural world.

Within walking distance of my home, the Coyote Creek Trail—a paved path bordered by a narrow strip of nature—winds twenty miles through suburban development. The trail is not remote or pristine, but a managed urban ecosystem where human control continually presses against the persistence—and occasional, unexpected wildness—of the creek corridor. Over more than a decade of returning, I’ve become attuned to its shifts—seasonal rhythms, wildlife patterns, and the cycles of drought and flood.

These changes are mirrored in a transient human presence. The creek’s watershed was once home to the largest homeless encampment in the United States. Though the Jungle has been cleared, makeshift shelters appear and disappear. For some, the trail is a place to pass through; for others, it is a home. Shared by joggers, cyclists, and residents with nowhere else to go, the trail has become a quietly contested space, where layered uses and overlapping claims expose the tension between recreation, conservation, and survival.

Under new California environmental regulations bolstered by a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in 2025, the city tried to clear all remaining encampments along Coyote Creek—a turning point in the landscape’s ongoing transformation. As Silicon Valley restores its waterways, these photographs bear witness to the final visible days of a community, inviting viewers to confront the stark inequalities in one of the world’s most prosperous regions and to consider the moral imperative to protect both people and the environment.

This project is a sustained exploration of a place where the boundaries between the wild and the human blur. It examines what is usually overlooked: how a fragile strip of urban nature doubles as both habitat and precarious refuge for those who endure on society’s margins. Using photography as both a documentary and conceptual tool—applied to a recreational trail, a terrain largely unexplored in photographic practice—I’ve found a framework through which to explore universal themes of transformation: of nature, of people, and of how we understand our complex place within the land.