Sometimes you need to get a few hundred feet off the ground to remember just how beautiful the Bay Area actually is.

Local photographer Daniel Winterowd has been capturing aerial shots of the Tri-Valley this spring, and the results are the kind of thing that makes you want to close your laptop and go outside. Rolling green hills, golden light spilling across vineyards, iconic windmills standing guard over Altamont Pass — it's a visual reminder that not everything about living in the Bay Area involves $7 lattes and BART delays.

The Tri-Valley — encompassing Pleasanton, Livermore, Dublin, and the surrounding hills — doesn't always get the love it deserves in the broader Bay Area conversation. San Francisco hogs the spotlight, the Peninsula flexes its tech money, and the East Bay hills quietly do their thing. But every spring, when the rains turn everything impossibly green and the wildflowers pop, the Tri-Valley is arguably the most photogenic stretch of Northern California.

As one Bay Area resident put it: "I love my town so much. You really captured the spring color — I hope you get the golden summer this year too." Another local had a more relatable reaction: "Be still my itchy eyes and nose." Fair. Beauty has its costs.

Here's the thing worth noting: this landscape isn't an accident. The Tri-Valley's open space protections and agricultural preservation have kept sprawl from swallowing these hills whole. It's a case where reasonable land-use policy — not heavy-handed regulation, but smart conservation — actually worked. Property owners, local trusts, and communities made deliberate choices to keep windmill-dotted ridgelines looking like windmill-dotted ridgelines instead of another tract housing development.

Spring in the Bay Area is fleeting. The hills will be golden brown by July. If you haven't driven out to the Tri-Valley recently, now's the time. Just bring the Claritin.