San Timoteo Canyon

Author's Comments

San Timoteo is the California I keep forgetting still exists. You drop south out of Redlands and within ten minutes the freeway noise is gone and the hills do that long, slow rolling thing that John Steinbeck spent a career trying to describe. There is almost nothing here in the way of obvious subject. A barn, sometimes. A line of fence riding the contour of a hill. An oak standing alone in the middle of a slope, throwing a shadow longer than itself. The canyon is at its best in two opposite seasons. February and March, after the rains, when the hills go that improbable green that only lasts a few weeks and feels almost European. And then again in October, when everything has burned down to gold and the low afternoon sun turns the grass into something closer to bronze. I prefer the gold. The green is prettier in an obvious way, but the gold is more honest about where you are. Drive the canyon road slowly. There are pullouts every half mile or so and most of them are worth a stop. The compositions are quiet - they want a long lens to compress the layers of hill, or a wide one to let the road itself become part of the frame. The mountains stack up behind everything if the air is clear, and on a good winter afternoon after a storm has passed through, you can see snow on San Gorgonio from the canyon floor. Stay for the last hour of light. The hills here do not photograph well in the middle of the day. They need the angle to come around and rake across them, and then they show you what they are.

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