Entering his sixth decade of practice in the 1990s, and despite the decline and demolition of some earlier projects, Halprin was still looking forward. In 2005, he completed three major commissions in California: Sigmund Stern Grove in Pine Lake Park and the Letterman Digital Arts Studio at The Presidio, both in San Francisco; and the Yosemite Falls Corridor in Yosemite National Park. He was 89.

These final projects marked a departure from the Modernist and Postmodernist works. Here Halprin returned to nature, wilderness, and his love of the High Sierras. In Yosemite and Stern Grove, Halprin aimed to leave nature alone, so that, as he said: “the park finally appears like something organic, that no person had designed, and that it was a result of nature making its own statement about things.”