Sky Island Photography at Dusk

Sky Island Parkway - Tucson, Arizona
Sky Island Parkway – Tucson, Arizona

Tail lights descend Mount Lemmon, a week ago, and snake their way to Windy Point along Sky Island Parkway.  TUCSON, ARIZONA – There were sporadic flashes of lighting happening in the distance. I was hoping one would enter the frame during this thirty second exposure but, alas, no such luck this time around.

While making my way up the mountain around two o’clock in the afternoon, I couldn’t understand why I was seeing lines of cars already headed down the mountain. Don’t those folks know, late afternoon into evening is when the real fun and natural beauty of Mount Lemmon and the Santa Catalina Mountains begins?

I experienced a cooling rain up there, around 3pm, dropping the temperature to a refreshing 67 degrees. It made it back to the high seventies, when the sun returned. Combine that with a soft wind blowing through the trees and you’ve got yourself a little slice of heaven! BTW: My cars thermometer read 112 degrees in the valley before I began my accent. But, hey that’s still cooler than Phoenix!

Author: Paul Van Helden

Paul Van Helden is a professional headshot, portraits, event, nature, still life and landscape photographer, based in Tucson Arizona. Some of his published credits include The Valley Wedding Pages and Sierra Club. Paul has worked professionally for over thirty years. Biologist and nature photographer Fred Dodd Jr. first introduced him to photography in 1982. Later, Paul studied photography at Dean College and began to photograph weddings under the tutelage of Craig Roberts of Franklin, Massachusetts. After working as a freelance wedding specialist for five years, he started his own photography business in Bellingham, Massachusetts in 1995. In December of 2004, he moved to the American Southwest, a part of the country he fell in love with, when he first visited the region in 1984.

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