Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
Many of the granite boulders have thick lines running through them, sometimes extending across an entire hillside, a clue about the Sonoran Desert’s distant past. I’m not a geologist but I would guess it is from debris that rained down on the Earth after the destruction of Alderaan.
At first every view in Arizona was a bit unsettling because it was so unfamiliar. The chance to explore somewhere quite different than my beloved Northwest was one of the attractions of moving here and the undercurrent of unease dissipated with each passing day. It took longer on the trails as nearly everything in my view was new to me and I couldn’t even put names to most of what I saw. I hiked as often as I could and studied when I got home and the desert changed beneath my feet into my home.
One picture can’t encapsulate all that is the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, nor even the Brown’s Ranch area that I haunt the most, but this is a mix of much of what I see. The tall cactus you probably recognize as a saguaro, that one I could identify even before I arrived. Embracing the saguaro in the center is a crucifixion thorn (there are several plants with this name, this is the canotia). Scattered around are teddy bear cholla, buckhorn cholla, compass barrel cactus, foothill palo verde, and Engelmann prickly pear. And a bunch of plants I can’t yet identify.
In the background with the long scar running down its flank is Brown’s Mountain with Cone Mountain behind and to the left. From where I was standing Cholla Mountain was to my right, Granite Mountain behind me. Each of these hills has a distinctive look which made it easier to orient myself on the many interconnected trails.
As you hike through the desert you’ll sometimes cross a wash, an area that is normally dry but where water runs after a storm. I’ve not seen a wash run, it doesn’t take long for the water to stop flowing and the monsoons usually arrive in the evenings when I’m not on the trails due to the heat. I’ve seen the aftermath though in the scouring of the trails, I wonder if the roots of this foothill palo verde were recently exposed due to erosion after a summer storm. Most of the shallow roots have been stripped of earth and are angled downstream save for one still plugged into the surviving bank.
It may not look like it but this little tree has leafed out, the trees have tiny leaves that you can see along the thorns if you look at the top of the tree set against the darker green of the larger trees behind it. You can also see the green bark, the palo verde can photosynthesize its food from both the little leaves when they are present and from the green bark and thorns year round. I’m curious to see if it survives or if it will fade away now that its roots are exposed, and perhaps wash away in a future storm. But for now it is holding on, literally.
Soft green plants have sprung up in the desert, courtesy of the summer monsoons. This black-tailed jackrabbit focused on the green grass along the Cholla Mountain Loop Trail, I’m sure it was a welcome respite from what is normally on offer.
I was walking along the Chuckwagon Trail with the sun about to crest the horizon when the pattern recognition part of my brain thought it saw a distant deer hidden behind some plants. On second glance I was less sure and thought “There you go again, turning trees into deer.” I lifted the telephoto lens to my eye anyway and the tree was a deer, it walked out into the open as it ate soft plants as it strolled along its path, then did the little mule deer hop to move down the hillside.
My pattern recognition self was feeling pretty smug the rest of the hike, even when he was spotting marmots in the rocks though there are no marmots in Arizona. That will take a while to go away, after spending a summer in Florida it took years for me to stop thinking I saw alligators in the marshes of Oregon and Washington. I don’t mind, the successes are worth the failures, and if you don’t look you can’t see.
I love the little strawberry hedgehog cactus, a love best expressed at a distance.
Supporting the massive weight of a saguaro is a circular skeleton of woody ribs that sometimes remains standing after the cactus dies. I photographed this lovely example in the soft light before sunrise near the start of the Chuckwagon Trail in McDowell Sonoran Preserve. Hiking the Chuckwagon to the Watershed Trail and up to the Cholla Mountain Loop Trail to see The Amphitheater and Cathedral Rock has become one of my favorite desert hikes, although I’ll mix it up with the Latigo, Vaquero, and Maverick trails too.
Most of the branches have broken off this long-dead tree but still it reaches for the sky. In life it wouldn’t have approached the heights of the massive saguaros that dominate the landscape but it would have provided welcome shade for young plants trying to gain a foothold in the desert. In death it can provide some shade and shelter, every little bit helps as while the hills and vegetation behind me are providing some protection from the sun at this early hour, as the sun rises there will be little escaping its glare. Yet life flourishes in this desert, it is not the emptiness of sand and rock I imagined in my youth.
The rising sun, so easily blocked by hills and saguaros and even myself, does what I cannot, slip through the outstretched arms of a buckhorn cholla to embrace a cottontail as it feeds beside the Chuckwagon Trail. It is mine but to observe, to record, to be grateful.
Boolie 