Saguaro National Park West - Signal Hill Petroglyphs

Author's Comments

Most people drive past Signal Hill on their way to somewhere they think is more important. The picnic area is small, the trail is half a mile, and the hill itself looks unremarkable from the parking lot. That is part of why I love it. The petroglyphs are over eight hundred years old. The Hohokam pecked them into the desert varnish on the boulders at the top of the hill - spirals, deer, geometric patterns I do not pretend to understand. In flat midday light they nearly disappear into the rock. You walk past them without seeing them. But in the last hour before sunset, when the light comes in low and sideways, the carvings emerge from the stone as if they have been waiting all day to be noticed. The shallow grooves cast their own small shadows. The whole hill begins to speak. I come in February when the air is clean and the saguaros around the hill stand sharp against the western sky. The wide shot is the obvious one - rock art in the foreground, cacti on the slope, the Tucson Mountains going pink behind. It is a real photograph and worth making. But the photographs I keep are the close ones. A single spiral. The way a thousand-year-old line catches the same light my hand catches when I reach toward it. There is something about being alone on this small hill at golden hour with marks made by people who watched this same sun set from this same rock that does not translate to any image I have made of it. I keep trying anyway.

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