January, 2011

Driving home from a friend’s house in Troon, I pulled over to catch this gorgeous sight, looking Southwest from Happy Valley Road and the intersection with Alma School Rd:

I decided to drive around and see if I could find any majestic Saguaros that would provide a good ‘subject’ for the great sunset that was developing. I soon found a veritable forest of Saguaros on Pinnacle Peak Rd between Scottsdale Rd and Tatum Blvd:

A couple of weeks later I drove to the same general vicinity on Pinnacle Peak Rd and captured this sunset; quite different this time:

One lazy afternoon I decided to drive to Tucson to get a first look at the roads that wind through the foothills. I took Highway 60 from Phoenix, past Gold Canyon and Queen Valley, towards Globe. Once I reached Superior, I headed south on highway 177, which then joins up with highway 77 and leads into Tucson from the North East.

Highway 177 was great – virtually no traffic, and rolling through Saguaro-laden hills. Along the way, you also get to see some very large open-cast copper mines – not exactly pretty, but interesting to see. Here’s a video I took of a small segment of the drive (and here’s part 2), partly as an experiment to see how good the video feature of my camera is.

Typical view of the road itself:

View towards the south-west:

Approaching Tucson on highway 77, you see the Santa Catalina mountains on the east side:

Looking west from the Phoenix Mountain trailhead (Squaw Peak Rd), you can see the tall buildings that make up Phoenix Mid-Town.

While shopping in downtown Scottsdale, I saw what looked like a decent sunset brewing, so drove out to the Fountain Hills border (on Shea) to capture this one.