Archive All Issues February 2011

ON A DARK DESERT HIGHWAY...

Historic Route 66, Speedway Boulevard, Carefree Highway ... those are among the state’s most famous thoroughfares. Pinal Pioneer Parkway is a road that few have ever heard of. Jack Dykinga is one of the few. He spent a year driving up and down the desert highway, and fortunately, he had his camera along for the ride.

Featured in the February 2011 Issue of Arizona Highways

BY: Jack Dykinga (A Portfolio)

Evening sunlight adds a glow to a desert hillside bursting with blooming brittlebushes, red-spined staghorn chollas and chain fruit chollas.

During midspring, bright pink flowers of strawberry hedgehog cactuses mingle with Coulter’s lupines on the Sonoran Desert’s rocky flats and hillsides.

A dense stand of soaring saguaro cactuses catch a blazing sunrise as the full moon begins to descend below the horizon.

Sunrise helps create a luminous landscape filled with backlit chain fruit chollas along Pinal Pioneer Parkway.

A scarlet sunset lights up dark monsoon clouds above saguaro silhouettes along the road between Florence and Oracle Junction.

Soaptree yucca blooms attract nocturnal pollinators, such as bats, beneath a moonlit, starry sky along Pinal Pioneer Parkway.