Catalina Highway Biome Drive

Author's Comments

The drive is the photograph. I have come to understand this slowly. There are good single overlooks along the Catalina Highway, but the real subject is the gradient itself, the way the saguaros thin and then disappear somewhere around four thousand feet and how the oaks take over for a while before the pines arrive in their own time. You are climbing through latitudes, not just elevation. Mexico to Canada in twenty-seven miles. I shoot it in two directions on the same morning when I can. Up at first light, when the desert at the base is still cool and the saguaros throw long shadows across the alluvial fans, then back down through the upper biomes as the sun gets higher and the conifers start to glow. November is my favorite month for this. The air is clean, the haze that builds through summer is gone, and the aspens in the upper reaches still have some color before the snow comes in. Stop more than you think you should. Each pullout is a different ecosystem and the temptation is to push for the summit, but the middle elevations are where the transitions happen and where the photographs hide. Watch for the moment the vegetation changes underfoot at a single pullout - desert grasses giving way to manzanita, manzanita to oak. A detail lens earns as much here as a wide one. The story is in the shift. Bring the recreation pass. Check the road in winter. And give yourself the whole morning rather than an hour.

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