Cathy, enjoying her SDSU semester break, and finished with all the holiday busyness, implored for a getaway to somewhere, and Lord love her, was wanting to get there via the Cirrus time machine.  We settled on SE Arizona, with the fly-in aerodrome being Libby Army Airfield at Fort Huachuca, where I was stationed for six months before deploying to Viet Nam in the mid sixties.  I hadn’t been back since, and this seemed a perfect destination—high desert, pleasant daytime temperatures with chilly evenings, good hiking and nature emersion, plus generally clear skies for capturing nighttime time-lapse sequences.

Our lodging was a two-bedroom cabin surrounded by tall prairie grass on the western flank of Biscuit Mountain, part of the Whetstone range, some ten miles from equally rural Sonoita, and Elgin, Arizona.  

Thunder Mountain Lane gate

Terminator twilight at Biscuit Mountain

Days were spent hiking and exploring the environs, including trails in the Santa Rita mountains with views back towards the Whetstone and Huachuca ranges.

Whetstones & Huachucas

Bear Spring in the Santa Rita mountains

Come the end of the day, and it was time to set up the camera for nighttime time-lapse sequences, using the prairie adjoining our cabin as foreground for the vast panoply of sky.

Sundown—the camera waiting for night time-lapse

A setting moon in a star-filled Arizona sky

At dawn, the stars rapidly hiding from the sun’s first light, it is worth turning one’s attention to the sunrise of yet another new day’s beauty.

Dawn and our prairie cabin