Cris Benton is a photographer, tinkerer, bay steward, model airplane hobbyist, kite flyer, and former chair of the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Architecture. This cluster of talents and interests has led to his stunning and captivating first book, Saltscapes: The Kite Aerial Photography of Cris Benton (Heyday, 2013). Benton has spent a decade hiking around the massive salt ponds of south San Francisco Bay, photographing both the active crystallizer beds of the Cargill Corporation and the ponds in the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge that are being converted back to wetlands by the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. Along with being beautiful (like stained glass windows or Mark Rothko paintings), his works have purpose: charting the colorful, high-salinity landscape before it fades back to its natural state.

On his rounds to areas where few have access, Benton holds a 300-foot kite line in one hand and a model-airplane-style radio controller to aim his aloft camera in the other. No monitor or cropping is used in the creation of his photos, leading to, as he writes, "entertaining negotiations between technical prowess and the vagaries of nature."  

San Francisco Bay water starts out at 2.5 percent salinity and—over the course of three to five years of evaporative travel between up to 10 ponds—ends up at 33 percent salinity, at which point the salt is ready to be harvested. The color of the ponds becomes more vibrant, and the microorganisms living in them more specialized, as the salinity increases: Lower-salinity ponds (such as shown in the right photo) are bright green; medium-salty ones shift from yellow to brown to orange and red; high-salt ones (left photo) have pink and purple hues.

It takes an extreme sort of creature to live in a salt-brine soup, and those creatures are the sodium-loving microorganisms called halophiles. "They have sort of a deal with the devil," Benton says of halophiles. "The've specialized themselves for these narrow bands of salinity. They don't perform very efficiently, but they're the only thing that's living there—they don't have to compete with anything."

An angled shot of the sun setting over the New Chicago Marsh gives a nice perspective of the salt marsh's curlicue channels—a favorite subject of Benton's. In 1890, a developer named P.H. (!) Wheeler started selling lots here (for $5 to $200), with the grand plan of turning the nearby port town of Alviso, where he built a watch factory, into a bustling new Chicago. Then his watch factory went underwater in the other sense of the word . . .

Benton discovered U.S. Coast Survey maps from the 1850s of these marsh channels at Berkeley’s Earth Sciences and Map Library, which, he writies, "align nicely with those visible in my aerial views."

Bringing to mind Paul McCartney's Höfner bass after particularly wild show, this image is actually a look at salt-transit history. The tracks, trestles, and berms of the narrow-gauge railway used to haul the salt harvest in the late 19th century still sculpt the landscape—as do the ruins of wharves from boating's heyday. More current tracks can be seen in the snowy piles of salt built as a ramp for equipment to travel between crystallizer beds. Those "frets" at the top are actually tension pieces holding the two wooden walls of the compact, earth-filled levy (the "neck") in place.  

Benton calls this photo "My Homage to Rothko." It's "painted" with bay water, mud, salt, and halophiles, and certainly wouldn’t be out of place at the Rothko Chapel. 

The South Bay wetlands have long been a favorite stopping ground for Canadian, Alaskan, and Siberian waterfowl—and those who hunt them. Duck hunting and salt production, Benton writes, "came to coexist, sometimes awkwardly." This muddied "traitorous decoy" won't be fooling any birds on the Pacific Flyway. 

Benton's book is a great guide to aerial archaeology. The vibrant vertical bands of infrastructure in this shot are, from left, a crystallizer bed, a levee with a road on top, a concrete streambed, a fence, and a railroad track.

What looks like a detail of a melting peace sign is actually a drege lock. Amazingly, the South Bay's 200 miles of levy have been built and maintained by a single, hardworking dredge from the 1930s, the Mallard II. "It does about 10 miles a year," Benton says—"just like painting the Golden Gate Bridge." The dredge builds a circular levy around itself before moving between ponds so the water doesn't drain out.

Cris Benton in action with one of the seven or so kites in his field kit, all suited to different wind conditions. He posts photos from his recent kite aerial photography sessions on his blog, Hidden Ecologies.

The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project is working to restore 15,100 acres of salt ponds to wetlands. A fascinating place to visit these wetlands, the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge (created in 1974 by Congressman Don Edwards and later renamed for him) offers a variety of free tours and talks. 

Heyday, a nonprofit publisher in Berkeley, California, has generously offered Sierra readers a 20 percent discount on Saltscapes: The Kite Aerial Photography of Cris Benton. Use coupon code SIESALT at checkout through December 31, 2014.