San Francisco has no shortage of overly popular and iconic views. Every tourist who comes to visit this city makes the obligatory stops at the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Warf, Alamo Square, Coit Tower, etc. However, some of the most beautiful and scenic places in San Francisco are those that you can only find when you have lived here for a while. These are the hidden gems that make San Francisco truly unique.

One such location is in the Presidio, a sprawling park and former military fort on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula. During any normal hour of the day, you may see people on the various paths hiking or running with their dogs. However, for the very few of us who enter into these woods before sunrise, it’s almost an entirely different world.

I chose this location for this VAST photo because I knew that as the sun rose to the East behind the trees, it would produce incredible light. I found my spot, and set up my tripod, gimbal, and camera to begin taking test photos in order to get a finished shot that was perfectly in focus, and perfectly exposed. Once I was sure that I had everything right, all that was left to do was wait for the sun to slowly rise over the horizon, and take the twenty-one overlapping exposures that I would use to stitch this VAST photo together. While I waited patiently, I suddenly froze as I saw out of the corner of my eye something I did not expect to encounter: a wild coyote, casually walking past me at a leisurely pace. Not a single other person was around, and the coyote paused his morning jog about five feet away from me to stare in my direction, clearly as surprised as I was to encounter anyone else outside at this magical hour.