Chance Meeting

Today, the high temperature in Phoenix was just 76 degrees. That was WAY cool for mid-May – so to speak.

Anyway, it was such a nice day, I figured I’d climb Camelback Mountain instead.

At the Cholla Trailhead.

I feel the need to write a few words about these photos. Some of you that might be checking here are photographers, but some are family and friends. The Piestewa climb in the 35 Minutes entry and the images with this entry were made on my wife’s old compact Nikon digital camera. We just bought her a little Canon digital SLR (little – with more megapixels than my camera), so she is generously letting me use her old camera.

It has an interval timer feature. I have been setting the camera up to shoot an image every 30 seconds as I climb. On today’s climb, I had a much better feel for when the shot was actually going to be made. That means today’s shots are sort of aimed at something, although I am not looking at an LCD screen or through a viewfinder. The pictures are of whatever I happen to be next to, every 30 seconds or so. As such, there is a large degree of chance involved.


At any rate, there were 100 shots in 49 1/2 minutes, and that’s approximately how long it took me to get to the top of Camelback.

I’ve been walking with a GPS device. It said that the Cholla Trail was almost 1.9 miles from the trailhead to the summit. From where I parked on Invergordon Road, however, the walk was almost 2.5 miles. The elevation gain on the trail itself is about 1285 feet. It is not as consistently steep as Piestewa, but because of the length, the time in the sun and the scrambling required at the top, I’ve always felt Camelback is the more difficult climb.



Today’s story is about a picture I didn’t make. On the way down, I was walking near a man in a Kansas Jayhawks T-shirt. A couple on the way up, seeing an approaching dark cloud, asked him if there was rain on the other side. He said no, but as we walked on he asked me if I thought it might rain on us. I told him I thought we’d be down before it got close enough, but if I was that couple, I’d be more worried about lightning.

He laughed and said now I have two things to worry about.

So then I see a nun in her habit, also climbing up. I smiled and said hello, and she had a large, friendly smile and said hi back. It’s a beautiful day, and I see a pretty smile in the desert wearing a symbol of God, with the potential for the dark cloud in the distance. I didn’t ask for a picture.

I’ll just say that I don’t like accosting total strangers for an image.

But I did think to tell the Jayhawk T-shirt guy, “She doesn’t have to worry about being struck by lightning.”