A path through a forest

Greg arrived at Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park alone at first light, the coastal fog settling into the canopy above, and titled the resulting panorama "Went to the Woods" — the Thoreau line that names the reason anyone with a camera and a permit wakes at 4 a.m. to stand in a redwood forest. Prairie Creek is the old-growth coast, the Holocene forest as it looked before the 19th century, the trees growing in an ecology of fog and alluvial flat that no other climate system produces. This medium format panorama assembles multiple frames into a composition that captures the full depth of the forest — near trunks sharp and deeply furrowed, far trunks dissolving into the fog that feeds them. The fog was not weather; it was the forest breathing.