Tucson

Tucson is one of those cities that you kind of have to be a local to really know all the cool and interesting things to do here. After driving around for 2 days exploring by primarily seeing, I decided to start asking people about things to do.

I figured the easiest place to make a conversation was with someone whom you just bought something from. I went to the local shopping center and bought a few key chains and other souvenir for friends and family. I quickly noticed that the older people didn’t really care much to help out and make a conversation.

So I decided to try with the younger crowd. After asking the 5th person, I realized that there was only 1 place to go, A1 mountain. Everyone had told me the exact same thing. I decided to go the next day for the sunset.

After getting an early dinner, I headed to the mountain. It seems to be right in the middle of several neighborhoods. To get up the small mountain you have to wind up around it in your car. It’s a bit sketch with people riding bikes and there not being any rails to prevent cars from rolling off the cliffs.

As you get to the top, there's plenty of parking. You can either go to this little gazebo, stay by the parking lot or hike up the rest of the mountain. It’s a 10 minute hike that is only difficult because of all the rocks.

I made up with plenty of time to kill before the sunset so I decided to take some photos of the area around with the 300mm lens. Zooming into certain things gave them such a different look. Specially with the sunlight bouncing off all the dust in the atmosphere.

I took some self portraits with the mountains behind me.

Once the sun started setting I thought I’d point the camera towards Mexico and see what I’d capture. But just then I realized the moon was popping out from the mountains.

Lucky me.

I was able to capture the full moon. It was pretty amazing. It looked so huge out here. It seemed like the light pollution from the city wasn’t as strong as you’d expect. This made it super easy to get some good shots of the moon.

Once the moon was high and small focused on taking photos of the city. The glow from the street lights was truly unique. It seemed as though it only lit up a small area around each light and then it would quickly fall to darkness. I have never seen anything like this before. That's how dark this city is.

I took a few time lapse videos too.

Then I pointed the camera towards the Mexican skies and took some images of the moon. I was happy with these too.

I packed my gear and headed back down. It was so dark that I could barely see a few feet I from of me. After hitting the parking lot, I decided to take photos of the gazebo. They came out ok.

Drove back down the sketchy ass road in pitch darkness now. Made it home safely.

I explored the city a bit more the next days but there really wasn’t much to see.