Though I’ve taken hundreds of photos of the Boise foothills, this one’s my favorite.

I was a student at Capital High School in the late 1980s when I fell in love with the foothills. My buddy Dave and I embraced the new trend of mountain biking with fevered excitement. Companies like Specialized and Trek were mass-producing bikes like the Stumpjumper, and suddenly, the boring, brown, sagebrush-covered hills behind Camel’s Back Park weren’t just for hikers and horses anymore.

We rode 19 miles from our neighborhood in West Boise to the North End. We then pedaled our heavy bikes up the long, steep climb of Crestline Drive to the trailhead at Hull’s Gulch. Back then, we never saw another mountain biker, only hikers with dogs or riders on horseback. We scared plenty of locals as we blazed our way down the trail and through the corners. I didn’t realize at the time that we were probably exceedingly annoying to the regular trail users.

We’d occasionally stop to drink water. That’s when I noticed them: velvet waves of sand and grass, laid out as far as the eye could see. I wanted to photograph them even then, but it took 30 years to find the time and patience required to do it right.

Starting in 2016, I spent six years driving every road and walking every trail I could find. I was seeking to capture the subtle contours and shapes that had given me that flash of inspiration three decades earlier. I spent many happy hours with the sun on my back and a tripod on my shoulder, walking the foothills.

It’s my favorite photo of the foothills because it encapsulates the gorgeous flow of the foothills with the high mountains behind. It perfectly matches the vision I had many years ago. 

Today, this bit of paradise is being cut to pieces by earthmovers; it’ll soon be a tangle of streets and homes. It’s a heartbreaking reality that I’m afraid I’ll never fully recover from. Until I remember that I live in the foothills, too and everyone’s got to be somewhere.