I’ve just arrived home from Arizona following a 5-day photo safari on the way back to Alberta. I traveled with Howard Dingle, friend and photographer who flew down to Phoenix to join me for the drive home. In the course of the first 4 days we visited four national parks and a couple of more exciting photography sites. On Day 5 we made a beeline for home, a 12 hour drive! We declared the trip a great success. The weather was great, we scored a couple of sunrises and sunsets and came home with many memorable photographs.
I’ll share some of my favourites in a series of upcoming posts that I hope you will enjoy. Today I’m going to feature a couple of pictures from our first day when we traveled from Scottsdale to Kayenta, AZ near Monument Valley.
This first picture was a last look at the Sonoran desert, shortly after sunrise. We were travelling along highway 87 north of Scottsdale when we stopped to take a couple of pictures.
This shot captures many of the familiar elements of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. To the left is the iconic Saguaro Cactus and if you look closely atop the cactus on the far left you’ll see its flower. The desert is very lush this year and you can see the abundant shrubbery. In the centre is the colourfully flowered Ocotillo cactus. The desert is quite mountainous in this area as we drove north. We soon left the desert, entering the Ponderosa forests characteristic of many parts of northern Arizona.
We continued on to our first national park, the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert National Park. We drove through the park and were able to get a number of good shots. This following picture was taken in the Blue Mesa area of the park.
This park is located in the desert that covers the northern third of Arizona, a plateau at significantly higher altitudes than the lower desert, and has an appreciably cooler climate. This picture features a wash (a dry stream bread) winding down to the lower plateau below the mesa.
My last picture for today is a sunset scene near our destination for the day, Kayenta. You can see the mesas and buttes of Monument Valley in the background and Church Rock in the foreground.
My next blog post will feature Canyon de Chelly, where we spent most of the first day of our voyage.
Sunset scene is a great picture.