One Photograph: Along The Kortum Trail
When I lived out at California’s Sonoma Coast for nine years, one of my favorite weekend hikes was the Kortum Trail which runs from just north of Bodega Bay to Jenner, at the mouth of the Russian River. It’s a mostly flat, but breathtakingly beautiful hike the hugs the coast for most of its length. I took hundreds of photographs on these hikes while inhaling the sea air and getting some good exercise. None of this would have been possible without the man the trail is named for: Bill Kortum.
Kortum, who passed away in 2014, was a veterinarian who led a lifelong battle to protect the Sonoma County coast from development. In the 1950s and 60s, his activism thwarted PG&E’s plan to build a nuclear power plant on the San Andreas Fault at Bodega Head. He led campaigns that resulted in the formation of the California Coastal Commission in 1972 and worked on legislation that extended to the public unprecedented rights to access the state’s over 1000 miles of shoreline and oversee future development. He was elected to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors in 1974 and continued his efforts both at the coast and inland to protect wild areas from urban sprawl. It was not an easy fight. Sonoma County was deeply Republican in those days and Kortum had to fight developers, builders and bankers.
If you drive north from San Francisco along the Pacific Coast Highway through Marin and Sonoma Counties and pull off to take in the view—maybe take a walk on the sand or dip your toes in the surf, you have Bill Kortum to thank for the right to do that.
The author along the Kortum Trail, 2018