Buckeye, Arizona.

In November 2020, on one of our first Arizona hikes for the 2020-21 hiking season, our group was hiking in Skyline Park on the Granite Falls Trail. For me, it was the first hike of the season. We took it easy to “break-in” these old hiking legs.

The hike on the Turnbuckle Trail to the Granite Falls trailhead, then to the Chuckwalla trailhead is about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) and is relatively level at about 160 feet (49 m) in elevation. Once we reached that junction, we simply turned around and returned to the parking area giving us a total of 3.2 miles (5.1 km).

About the photo: Along the way, we passed this aging saguaro that is all but dead on the ground. The skin of the once-mighty cactus is falling away and giving us a view of the supporting skeleton. The “face” that remains could be the subject of nightmares. I couldn’t resist taking out the cellphone camera, my Samsung S20U, to capture the ghost of a century passed. The image was captured at f/1.8, 1/500 sec., ISO-16. As usual, I imported it into Adobe Lightroom and from there to Luminar 4 for processing.

John Steiner