Camelback is the landmark everyone in the Valley navigates by. It rises straight out of the city rather than sitting at its edge, surrounded on all sides by Phoenix and Scottsdale, and from almost anywhere in the metro area you can find it on the skyline and know which way you are facing.

It is also climbed constantly. Two trails reach the summit, Echo Canyon from the north-west and Cholla from the east, and both are genuinely steep, more scramble than walk near the top, with handrails bolted into the rock on the worst sections. In high summer the city closes them during the hottest hours because people get into trouble on them every year. The reward is a summit a little over 2,700 feet, and a view down onto the grid of streets and golf courses that surround the mountain on every side.

The houses visible on the lower slopes are part of the story too. This is some of the most expensive land in Arizona, and the built line creeps up the base of the mountain until the slope defeats it. Where it stops is not a planning decision so much as a gradient.

On an evening like this one none of that matters much. The cloud deck runs the full width of the frame, textured all the way to the horizon, with pink and gold caught in the breaks, and the light on the rock is cool and flat. The weather is the subject. The mountain is there to tell you how big the weather is.