Survival Damage is a series of vignettes titled from the perspective of the plants, rocks and landscape along the 16.5-mile Buckskin Gulch Trail in southern Utah. The series begins at the Upper Buckskin Trailhead and continues south past Wire Pass through Buckskin Gulch which is considered the longest slot canyon in the world, ending at the Paria River. The trail has no cell service, limited GPS access, freezing nighttime temperatures, quicksand, no reliable water supply, and the potential for deadly flash floods. All of which make this an extremely challenging area to photograph.
This project is currently a work in progress. Due to permit availability, weather and scheduling Koster is only able to make one trip each year into the canyons of southern Utah.
The images in this portion of Survival Damage are not yet titled but represent the final seven miles of the trail, where the slot canyon meets the Paria River.
To create these images Koster undertook a seven-mile hike down Paria Canyon to reach the eastern end of the Buckskin Trail. For safety reasons, camping is not permitted in the gulch so Koster established a base camp at the Buckskin-Paria confluence. Each morning, every mile into the gulch meant that many miles back out to his camp in the evening. The end of each day became a race against the vanishing light; at sundown the gulch becomes darker than the night sky. 
Koster continues his theme of the conceptual landscape, first introduced in Land Speak of the John Muir Trail, and takes his treatment of the clouds and sky one step further by removing them completely. The removal of the sky creates a graphic quality that contrasts with the organic subjects, resulting in an altered environment that appears to lack the element of time and where the possibility exists for rocks and plants to express human-like thoughts and feelings. Koster also expands his image-stitching process to include even more of the scene he is capturing but, the most notable addition is his introduction of the vertical panorama to accommodate the narrow slot canyon. Some sections are narrow enough to touch both canyon walls at the same time and some canyon walls are as hight as 500 feet.
Rather than presenting Buckskin Gulch as a fixed landscape, Survival Damage considers the canyon as a collection of intersecting narratives. Each image is a small story, imagined from the perspective of its subject. Collectively, they reveal a larger history etched through erosion and time. The series suggests that the history of the gulch is not defined by a single event but by the accumulation of these voices, each contributing to the enduring memory of the landscape.