Superstition Mountains - Lost Dutchman State Park

Author's Comments

The Superstitions earn their name in the late afternoon. There is something about the way the western face holds light - the volcanic rock turning a color I have never quite been able to describe, somewhere between rust and rose, with shadows that deepen by the minute as the sun drops behind the range at your back. The Flat Iron is the obvious subject and it should be. That prow of stone rising nearly five thousand feet above the desert floor is one of the great silhouettes in Arizona, and from inside the park the angles change as you walk, the formation revealing and concealing itself behind ridges of saguaro and palo verde. I come here in March, in the years when the winter rains have been generous. Those are the years the desert floor goes wild with poppies and lupines and brittlebush, and the first mile of the Siphon Draw Trail becomes something close to overwhelming. Gold against green against that wall of red rock. It does not happen every spring. When it does, the window is brief - two or three weeks at most - and the photographs you make in those weeks will not look like photographs you make any other time of year. For the wide landscape, I work the lower trails in the last hour before sunset, when the mountain catches fire and the foreground is still soft enough to hold detail. For the intimate frames, I get down low and let a single poppy stand against the blurred mass of the range behind. Both are worth making. Both ask you to slow down and wait for the light to do what it is going to do.

Gallery