the sleeping lady

North of the Golden Gate, the city loosens its grip.

The urban buzz thins into the rush of wind through bay laurel, and the angular grid of downtown gives way to a softer geometry: ridgelines folding into one another, oak savanna rolling open above the Pacific. Mount Tamalpais rises here, 2,571 feet of stone within the ancestral homeland of the Coast Miwok, the Indigenous people of present-day Marin County. Locals call it Mount Tam; its contours against the western sky have earned it another name: the Sleeping Lady.

The ascent is improbably brief. A drive that begins amid the espresso machines of Hayes Valley can deliver a hiker, within the hour, to a fire road running through Douglas fir, the air sharpening with the resinous note of crushed bay foliage underfoot. The city feels farther away than the journey can account for.

// Continued on PAGE 112 in VOLUME I //

PHOTOGRAPHY // Thom Milkovic