A Celebration of Sonoma County Regional Parks – Leslie Huerta, 15

I knew that this project had to be meaningful to me in some way to be as motivated as possible when working on it. In the end, I decided that my project would be a quick video showing a brief history of Sonoma County Regional Parks and how those parks help life flourish. My family has always enjoyed spending time outdoors, so during the weekend, we would often go hiking at one of them.

The main reason this project was meaningful for me was because I remember that before the pandemic, Irma Cuevas would lead a guided hike around one of the regional parks on the first Saturday of every month in an attempt to engage more people to go outdoors. I also remember that often times, my family would be the only ones to show up. It was based off of this memory that I decided to create a video that would hopefully help convince others to visit these parks more often. I wanted to do this through photography to show the incredible sights you could see when visiting these parks, so the majority of my time working on this project was spent hiking and taking pictures. This part of the project was easily the most enjoyable for me.

Coming up with the idea for my project was the first in many obstacles I faced when completing it. I will admit that the open-ended aspect caught me off guard, and I was not sure of what to do. I wanted my project to have some sort of purpose, but I also wanted to be creative. In addition, I had to keep my family’s daily schedule in mind in order to plan work time for my project.

Get inspired to go outside with this video of Leslie and family enjoying Sonoma County Regional Parks: