Piestewa Peak

Author's Comments

The trail goes up and it does not waste your time getting there. Twelve hundred feet of elevation in just over a mile, mostly on rock that has been polished by the soles of every Phoenician who has ever needed to clear their head before work. By the time you reach the summit you have earned the view, and the view is the whole argument. What I find interesting about Piestewa is not the panorama itself, which is honest but not extraordinary, but the relationship between the peak and the city below. From the top in late November, around seven in the morning, the grid of Phoenix appears as a soft pattern of streetlights still burning in the half-dark, and the desert mountains in the distance go from black silhouette to layered blue as the sun comes up behind you. The light moves fast here. You have maybe twenty minutes of the good stuff before it flattens out into ordinary daylight. I would not call this a photograph that requires patience. It requires being there at the right hour, which on a weekend means leaving your car in the lot before the sky has any color in it at all. By six thirty the trail is busy. By eight it is a procession. A wide lens does most of the work. The composition I keep returning to is not the city itself but the moment when the warm light hits the saguaros on the upper ridge while the valley below is still cold and blue. That contrast, brief as it is, is the photograph worth climbing for.

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