River Valley Reverie
Trails of the Minnesota River Valley Refuge
Minnesota is divided east-west by the Mississippi River and north-south by the Minnesota River. They join just southeast of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. Nestled within the confluence of these two mighty rivers is Minneapolis Saint Paul Airport. In the mid-1970s, the Municipal Airport Authority decided to add a runway and expand the airport. The local populace immediately recognised this expansion’s potential negative impact on the local environment. To protect the Minnesota River Valley from the effects of this, and future, development Congress passed “HR13374 Minnesota River Valley National Wildlife Refuge” which designated the first 9,500 acres of the valley as a wildlife refuge under the control of the Unites States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and a trust was formed and funded to acquire more land along the valley and place it into the Refuge’s protection.
Fast-forward fifty years, and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) collectively manage the Minnesota Valley’s lands. The area comprises 14 “units” of land acquired over time. Connecting all the units is a multi-use state trail for hiking, skiing, and cycling.
In 2025, Donald Trump issued numerous executive orders (EOs) in the first 90 days of his administration. These were all previously proposed within the Project 2025 document created and distributed by the conservative “think tank” the Heritage Foundation. This right-wing document places ideology, isolationism and profiteering above environmental concerns. Under the guise of national defence, Trump’s EOs mandate removing protections on land resources and the aggressive exploitation of mineral and other natural resources. These attacks impact Minnesota in many ways. Certain areas are named explicitly for development, including copper mining, deforestation through logging, and the desire to sell federal lands to enable housing development. None of these policies will genuinely protect the USA. Instead, they are short-term ways for corporate crony interests to profit from unsustainably exploiting natural resources without considering the consequences. The EOs specifically remove the need to consider the environmental or social implications of the resources’ exploitation.
The local government and state lawmakers are vigorously attempting to defend these lands from shortsighted exploitation and greed. However, the FWS has recently had massive layoffs because Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency determined that the FWS’s mission did not align with that of the Trump Regime. The National Park Service’s mission has similarly been assaulted with layoffs, some so extreme that the Trump regime had to backpedal and reinstate workers. All these changes in policy and federal funding threaten the protections the Minnesota Wildlife Refuge enjoys.
This project intends to capture the beauty of the refuge, documenting views along the hiking trails within the units, so people will appreciate its environmental significance and, thus, elevate its value. Then, perhaps, they will become more vocal about protecting their homeland from Trump’s regime’s policies.
These photographs were submitted as a project for my Master of Arts in Photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
All photographs were made using Ilford Delta 100 Professional film on an Intrepid Black Edition 4×5” view camera with a vintage Nikon 135mm f/5.6 lens. The film was developed using Ilford DD-X. The negatives were scanned using a Nikon Z7ii and a Nikkor Z MC 50mm f/2.8 lens. The scans were converted using Negative Lab Pro v3 and edited in Nik 7 Silver Efex.
