Prospect Park and Smiley Heights

Author's Comments

Redlands keeps a particular kind of California memory alive, and Prospect Park is where you feel it most clearly. The hill rises gently above the old citrus town, and from the top you get the layering that makes this corner of the Inland Empire worth the detour - groves in the foreground still working the land they were planted on a century ago, the valley spreading out behind them, and the San Bernardinos rising sharp and white in winter against everything else. January and February are the months. The peaks hold snow then, the smog has not yet built up the way it will by summer, and the light at four in the afternoon comes in low and warm across the orange trees. I have stood here at golden hour in late winter and watched the mountains go from blue to pink to a kind of bruised violet in the span of twenty minutes. A wide lens does the work, but a longer focal length compresses the groves and the peaks into something closer to what the eye actually feels. The park itself is quiet most evenings. The Bowl sits below in its own pocket of shade, and the paths wind through old plantings that suggest someone, a long time ago, cared about this hilltop being beautiful. They were right to. Come on a clear day after a winter storm has cleared out the basin. That is when the mountains step forward and the valley reveals how much of itself it still keeps.

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