Director’s Statement:

When Covid hit and the high school where I taught pivoted to ZoomSchool, mornings typically spent getting ready for the day and commuting opened up to other possibilities.

I made it my morning practice to head to the hills.

When leaving my house at first light I could often walk a mile to the trailhead and a mile and half up into the Santa Monica Mountain foothills before crossing paths with another human soul.

As the days and weeks went by, I was surprised to discover that of the 1,800,000 inhabitants of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles I was often the only sunrise regular on the Serrania Ridge Trail.

I did not set out on the trail each morning with the intention of producing a documentary film - but the phone in my pocket has evolved into an extension of what makes me - and most of us - human. Like a new feature in an operating system update it serves as a tool with the potential to enhance the human capacity to remember and imagine, to create and wonder, to appreciate beauty, to pursue purpose, and to connect with others.

And so it came to pass that this film organically evolved into the record of an intentionally cultivated experience of expansive solitude and communion with the natural world not in a remote, exotic or unexplored region, but on a relatively unremarkable suburban hiking trail.