Windy Point Vista

Author's Comments

The drive up Mount Lemmon does something to your sense of scale, and Windy Point is where it lands. You climb out of the saguaros, through the oak and juniper, and at six thousand feet the road bends and the world opens to your right. Tucson sits below in a basin that goes on for what looks like a hundred miles, and the granite at the edge of the pullout looks like it was stacked by someone with a sense of humor about gravity. I come here in November and I come for the last forty minutes of light. The boulders catch warm tone on their west faces while the basin below cools into blue, and that separation is the photograph. A wide lens will give you the sweep, but I have made my better images with something closer to a fifty, isolating one hoodoo against the haze of the city and letting the distance do the work. The foreground is half the reason to be here. Use it. The wind is real and the name is not decorative. I have watched a tripod skid two feet across granite in a gust, so weight your rig or shoot handheld and accept the trade. Stay through blue hour if you can. The city lights come on gradually, the sky holds color longer than you expect at elevation, and the boulders go to silhouette in a way that feels almost lunar. That is the frame I keep driving back up the mountain for.

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