Gates Pass

Author's Comments

The pass earns its reputation honestly. Drive up the winding road an hour before sunset on a clear March evening and you will find the parking pullouts already half full, tripods being set, people staking out the rocks above the road. I do not begrudge them. The view westward over the Avra Valley is one of the great desert horizons in the Southwest, and Kitt Peak sits on the far skyline like a punctuation mark. What most people photograph is the sun itself dropping toward the valley floor, and that frame is worth making once. But the photograph I keep returning for happens twenty minutes later, when the sun is gone and the saguaros on the foreground hillside go fully black against a sky that turns through every warm color in sequence. The silhouettes are what matter here. A saguaro with its arms reading clean against the afterglow is the image, and the desert gives you maybe ten minutes of that light before it cools to blue. Climb above the road if you can. The pullouts put everyone at the same elevation, which means everyone makes roughly the same photograph. A short scramble up the rocks to the south opens a foreground that almost no one bothers with - a ridgeline of cactus tilting down toward the valley, layered in a way that the standard overlook flattens. A long exposure after blue hour will pull the lights of distant Tucson out of the eastern darkness if you turn around. Most people have left by then. That is usually when I make my last frame and walk back to the car alone.

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