Piestewa Peak

Author's Comments

The trail is busy. There is no version of this hike where you have it to yourself, and I have stopped wishing for one. Piestewa is a city peak in the truest sense, woven into the lives of the people who live around it, and on any given morning before sunrise you will find a steady line of headlamps already moving up the ridge. I come for the moment just before the sun clears the eastern horizon, when Phoenix is still in blue shadow and the desert below holds a flatness of color that the light will erase within minutes. The summit faces every direction at once, which is its great gift and its compositional problem. You have to choose. I tend to turn west, where the McDowells and the distant Estrellas catch the first warm light while the city in between is still waking. The grid of streets reads almost geological from up here, and the saguaros along the upper ridge throw shadows longer than they have any right to. Winter is the season. The air is cleaner, the light at golden hour holds longer, and the temperature actually allows you to stand still and wait. In summer this mountain becomes genuinely dangerous by seven in the morning, and the photograph is not worth the risk. Bring a wide lens for the cityscape and something a little longer for the layered ranges to the north and east. The rock at the summit is rough and warm-toned and worth including in the foreground. It anchors the frame in a way that pure horizon shots from up here tend to lack.

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