I was hoping for a sunset. I am an inspector of sunsets much like Henry David Thoreau was an unofficial inspector of snow storms around Walden Pond. He wanted to explore well the area around him in Concord New Hampshire and I want to explore well the land around me in. San Tan Valley Arizona. The sunset was mostly a dud. It is impossible to predict when a great sunset will be produced by Mother Nature. The one essential, besides the sun, is clouds. But those clouds have to be just the right amount—not too much and not to sparse—and they must be like that at the right time. You need a Goldilocks moment.  And, of course, clouds move and shift in shape. To finding a classic sunset is more luck than brains.  Or perhaps someone with a lot more brains than I can be better at it than I am.

I wanted to photograph the sunset of course, but the most important part was the experience. If you are tired of sunsets, you are tired of life. John D. MacDonald that great writer of pulp fiction, now deceased, once said, that if sunsets occurred only once a year, we would be forced to declare a national holiday on that day.

This year I had a second reason to look for sunsets. I thought sunsets were a symbol of one of the things I wanted to learn about on this trip. I wanted to learn about western civilization, particularly in America and Canada, in decline. Are we in the sunset years of that civilization? Sometimes it seems that way. In fact, to me it seems that way more often than it used to. In fact, on this trip I found some shocking news about exactly that. I intend to blog about that. It amazed me how prescient my theme was.

I did capture a couple of images that pleased me. They showed the clouds reflecting the pink light.  Clouds reflecting the colour of the sun obscured by cloud in part but not completely, was the image I was after. I am a sucker for the blaze of colours in a sunset. And no two sunsets are the same.

Sometimes the light in the eastern sky is more interesting than the western sky. Sometimes the light is reflected back to the west where the sun is dropping. Today was like that. Again, sometimes the best sunset shows only the after glow in the eastern sky. Look around, you might be surprised. I was this sunset that I nearly passed by.

Finally, a true inspector of sunsets, like me, must always remember not to give up on sunsets too soon. Persistence is essential in the pursuit of sunsets. The best sunset is revealed after the sun is gone. You might be surprised. I was surprised today!