Windy Point Vista

Author's Comments

The road up Mount Lemmon is its own kind of education. You leave the saguaros behind almost immediately, and by the time you reach Windy Point at six thousand feet, you are in a different country entirely. The boulders here are the photograph. Not the city below, though Tucson stretches out across the basin in a way that genuinely surprises me every time, but the granite itself, weathered into shapes that look almost deliberate, almost sculpted. They catch golden hour light better than almost anything in southern Arizona. I prefer late winter. The air is clean, the desert below has not yet gone hazy with summer heat, and the low sun rakes across the rock faces and pulls every texture forward. There is a particular hoodoo just south of the main pullout that frames the city perfectly if you crouch low and shoot through the gap. I have made that photograph a dozen times and I am still not tired of it. The wind is real. The name is not decorative. I have had a tripod walk itself a foot to the left in a gust, and I have watched a lens cap go off the edge and disappear into the canyon below, never to be recovered. Weight your gear. Bring a jacket even when Tucson is in the eighties, because at this elevation in February the temperature drops fast once the sun goes. Stay for blue hour. The city lights come up while there is still color in the western sky, and the boulders go from warm to cool in about fifteen minutes. That is the window. That is why you came.

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