Hayden Butte (A Mountain)

Author's Comments

I almost did not include Hayden Butte in my notes because it does not feel hidden in the usual sense. It sits in the middle of Tempe with a stadium on one side and a light rail on the other and a giant gold A bolted to its flank. But the petroglyphs are what changed my mind. They are right there, low on the rocks beside the trail, and most people climb past them without looking. Hohokam marks, hundreds of years older than anything around them, weathered into stone that predates the city by an order of magnitude none of us quite reckon with. I climb in November, late afternoon, when the gravel is not yet radiating heat back up through my boots. The trail is short and steep enough to make you feel it. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty if you stop the way I do. At the top the city unrolls in a way that surprised me the first time - Tempe Town Lake catching the last of the light, the Phoenix skyline pale and distant to the west, the campus in geometric grids below. Golden hour here is brief and decisive. The desert does not soften light the way wetter places do. It just lowers it, sharpens it, and then it is gone. Stay for the blue hour after. The city begins to glow from inside itself, and the petroglyphs on the way down are still there, quiet, waiting out another century.

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