Arizona, Land of All Seasons

The passing of all seasons is a parade of color, a parade of mood, a miraculous achievement of Nature no artist has equalled because the very changing of the seasons is such a fragile, delicate and sensitive thing it escapes the magic of even the most inspired palette. You might look at your calendar and say now summer ends and fall begins, or that dreary winter is gone and tomorrow we will welcome spring. That might be true in other lands where the weather is harsher, but here where we live the passing of the seasons is gentle, so gentle as to be hardly noticeable, but once you become familiar with the outward signs you will know Nature's parade of color and mood has gripped the land and all is well in God's great universe and all is well in our world!

We have heard it said by many newcomers to the desert areas of our state that what they miss most is the definite demarcations of seasonal changes. No! The changes in desert seasons are not violent, tempestuous or full of braggadocio. The seasons pass gradually, but the marks of their journey are there if you look around. There are the lush flowers of spring after winter rains; there are the golden cottonwoods and sycamores in desert foothill canyons and the long shadows and cool air of evening and morning proclaiming fall, the great cloudscapes of summer, the zest of winter's bracing air under skies of infinite blue by day, vividly star-clustered by night. Yes! The desert, too, knows all seasons! All you can do is enjoy them at their best.

"When Winter Arrives in High Country" DARWIN VAN CAMPEN

As these words are being written, we see summer is still with us. The sun is glaringly bright. The temperature is pushing one hundred degrees, and you thank the talents and skills of those who have provided you with refrigeration for your home or office. It is not an unusual summer day in Phoenix in late September. Desert dwellers, if they are honest, will tell you summer does not follow a calendar, but is subject to her own whims and fancies. She probably will linger on to mid-October. We know, though, looking out our window this late-September day, that autumn will soon be here. If at this particular minute, we had the time, which we do not have, or the inclination, which we do have, we could in a short day's drive be up on the Kaibab, north of Grand Canyon, and find autumn waiting there to greet us, or that in a few hours drive to the Mogollon Rim area around Payson the smell and feel of autumn would be in the air, zesty and invigorating, so different from our desert world it would seem that if we had left one world and entered another. When we speak of Arizona as the "Land of All Seasons" we are not indulging in imaginative flight of exaggeration. Our land is so big Arizonans, depending on elevation, can have as many as two or three seasons beckoning to them at once. Crazy but mixed up and wonderful is this wonderful land of ours!

notes FOR photographers