Camelback Mountain - Echo Canyon Trail

Author's Comments

The mountain is a strange object in the middle of a city. From the freeway it reads as silhouette, the kneeling camel shape that gives the place its name, and from the summit at sunrise it reads as something else entirely - a vantage point above a grid of headlights and palm trees and distant ranges going pink in sequence. Echo Canyon is the harder side and the more rewarding one. The scramble sections are real, not metaphorical, and I have watched people turn around halfway up in good shoes and bad judgment. Start in the dark. The trailhead lot fills before the first light reaches the rim, and you want to be moving by then anyway, because the photograph here is a timing problem more than a composition problem. The summit faces every direction at once, which sounds like an advantage and is actually a complication. You have to choose. East for the sun coming up over the Superstitions, west for the city catching the warm side of the light, south for the long flat sprawl toward South Mountain. I shoot west. The reason is the Phoenix grid in winter, when the air is clearest and the low sun rakes across the buildings downtown and the whole valley turns the color of a struck match for about four minutes. A wide lens works. A longer lens works better if you want to compress the ranges behind the city into the layered blue stack they actually are. Bring more water than you think. Come down before the heat does. The mountain is generous at dawn and unforgiving by ten.

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