Fool Hollow Lake Recreation Area

Author's Comments

Six thousand three hundred feet is high enough that the air thins and the light goes clean, and Fool Hollow sits exactly there, in a pocket of ponderosa that smells like vanilla when the sun warms the bark. The lake itself is small by reservoir standards, which I count as a virtue. You can walk a good portion of the shoreline in a morning and feel like you have actually seen the place rather than skimmed it. January is when I find this lake most interesting. The bald eagles come down from wherever it is they come from and settle into the snags along the water, and if you arrive before the day-use gate sees much traffic, you can sit on the south shore with a long lens and wait. Most mornings you will not get the photograph you imagined. Some mornings you will get something better - an eagle lifting off a branch with the pines behind it going gold in the first horizontal light, the lake still as held breath underneath. In spring the herons take over. Their rookery is loud in the way only nesting colonies are, and the chaos of it against the quiet of the pines makes a kind of music I have not found at other Arizona lakes. The south shore at sunset is the postcard, and it earns the description. But I would tell you to come in winter, early, when the cold has pushed the casual visitors away and the lake belongs to whoever was willing to be there at the right hour.

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