Saguaro sunrise

I got up a bit earlier than normal to go check out the west unit of the Saguaro National Park for a sunrise - the east unit (closer to where we stayed) was tucked up pretty tight against the Rincon Mountains, I knew it would be a challenge to get direct light early enough. 

Sadly, no one wanted to come with me. It was a nice little trip from the hotel, 30-40 minutes along a twisty road. The photo above and the one below are just a couple of feet from each other, but pointed in the opposite direction. Since we had basically a full moon, I tried to capture that between the arms of a saguaro cactus. The light to the east was also very pretty!

I drove the remainder of the loop after the first two photos. Earlier on the sun was quite low, so it produced some great backlighting effects.

It didn't take too long for the sun to climb high enough to make the light uninteresting on the close-up scale, but I found this little hill overlooking the road that I thought turned out pretty nice.

We just finished dinner at Flagstaff. The mountains still have snow here, it should dip well below freezing tonight. We'll do some local exploring - I had thought about going to Sedona, but we got detoured today and dealing with traffic does not appeal...NM might have ruined me!

Cheers,

Marc