Catalina Highway Biome Drive

Author's Comments

I have driven this road maybe thirty times and I still cannot photograph it the way it deserves. The trouble is that the subject is the gradient itself, and a gradient does not fit cleanly in a single frame. You start in saguaro at the base, the desert still warm even in October, and forty minutes later you are stepping out of the car into pine duff and forty degrees cooler air. The drive is the photograph. The photograph is hard to make. What I have learned to do instead is shoot the seams. The places where one community is giving way to the next - where the saguaros thin out and the oaks begin, where the oaks surrender to ponderosa, where the ponderosa darkens into fir near the top. These transitions read at human scale in a way the whole gradient never quite does. Windy Point in late afternoon is the obvious stop and worth it, the granite hoodoos catching warm light against a valley already in shadow. But the smaller pullouts between mile six and mile twelve are where I have made the photographs I actually keep. Go in the morning, early. The light climbs the mountain with you, and there is a window roughly an hour after sunrise where the desert below is already bright but the upper elevations are still cool and blue. That contrast, when you can see it from a single overlook, is the closest I have come to photographing the idea of the drive. Bring a longer lens than feels necessary. The compression flattens the elevation into stacked bands of color, and that is when the geography finally cooperates.

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