Saguaro National Park East - Cactus Forest Drive

Author's Comments

The Rincon side of Saguaro is the quieter half. Most visitors point their cars west toward the more famous district, and the Cactus Forest Drive on the east side rewards them for not coming. Eight miles, paved, slow. You could finish the loop in twenty minutes if you wanted to, and you would have seen almost nothing. What I have learned is to drive it once at speed and then again at a crawl, stopping wherever the spacing of the saguaros looks right. The density here is the thing. Thousands of them, some twenty feet tall and older than anyone alive, standing in loose formation across the bajada with the Rincons rising behind. In March the ocotillo flames red at the tips. In late October the light angles in lower and the shadows the saguaros throw get long and architectural. Golden hour is when the park resolves itself. The west-facing slopes catch warm light first, and the saguaros go from green to a kind of lit bronze for about twenty minutes before the sun drops behind the Tucson Mountains across the valley. I usually park at one of the pullouts on the back half of the loop and walk in fifty yards. The compositions you want are almost never from the road itself. They are from a few steps off it, where you can find a single saguaro against a clean ridge or a stand of three that arrange themselves the way you would have arranged them if you could. Forty-five minutes before sunset is the minimum. An hour is better. Stay through the blue that follows.

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