McDowell Sonoran Preserve - Tom's Thumb Trail

Author's Comments

The granite up here does something I have not quite seen elsewhere in the valley. It comes in pale, weathered boulders the size of small houses, stacked at angles that suggest some long-ago violence and then a very long pause. Tom's Thumb itself is the headline, the spire visible from the freeway thirty miles away, but I find the walk up more interesting than the destination. The trail climbs through saguaro that have arranged themselves on the hillside as if for a photograph, and the eastern views toward Four Peaks open gradually as you gain elevation. Come in February. Come at first light. The trailhead parking fills by eight on weekends, and the trail itself has no shade to speak of, which means the photographs you want are the ones made before the sun is fully up. In that first hour the granite goes warm, the saguaro cast long shadows downhill, and the air still has the cold edge that desert mornings keep until surprisingly late in winter. The wide shots are the obvious work, and they are real. But I have come to prefer the detail frames here. The way lichen patterns the granite. The base of a saguaro where it meets stone. The particular green of a palo verde against pale rock. Tom's Thumb itself photographs better from a distance than from its base, where the scale collapses and the spire becomes just another large rock. Make the climb anyway. The view east at the top is worth the thousand feet, and the walk down in the still-low morning light is where I have made my best frames on this trail.

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