Escudilla Mountain and Lookout Tower

Author's Comments

The third-highest peak in Arizona, and most days you will have it to yourself. That tells you something about how people sort their attention in this state, which is mostly toward the red rock and the canyons and away from the high green country in the east. Escudilla is high green country. The trail leaves Terry Flat and climbs through spruce-fir forest that feels imported from somewhere a thousand miles north, and the air at ten thousand feet does the thing it does, which is to make every sound smaller and every shadow sharper. I come here in late September, when the aspen pockets along the lower trail begin to turn and the spruce stays dark behind them. Morning is the time. The light comes in low and lateral through the trees, and by the time you reach the lookout tower at the summit the whole of eastern Arizona is laid out below you with that particular high-altitude clarity that flattens distance into something almost abstract. The tower itself is the kind of structure that photographs better than it sounds on paper. Weathered wood, iron stairs, the small square cab perched against an enormous sky. I tend to make the wide landscape first, because that is what the summit asks for, and then I work the details on the way back down - the bark of the spruce, the way the trail cuts through meadow, the small things that get missed when the view is doing all the talking. Aldo Leopold wrote about this mountain. It is worth reading him before you go.

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