Cactus Blog

Since we’re on about what to do in Texas this weekend, here’s another suggestion – a walk into Big Bend National Park. That’s about 10 hours away from Dallas. I know, since I had to hurry off when I was visiting the park a few years ago to pick up my sister at the airport in Dallas. We visited the Book Depository 6th floor museum, and then made our way to the birthplace of Elvis Presley in Tupelo, Mississippi.

Anyway, back to Big Bend…

Lost Mine Peak Trail, Big Bend National Park, Panther Junction (West Texas)

This walk is much more of a hike than a walk, but it is one of the best in Texas. This 4.8-mile round-trip trek is not for those who are out of shape, but if you walk regularly, it should be no problem since much of the path consists of switchbacks. Just go at a pace that’s comfortable. The rewards are phenomenal. First, you have the walk itself, through thick forest and by cactus and ocotillo and agave. Second is the panoramic view at the top that will take your breath away — guaranteed — if the walk itself hasn’t already done that. It’s the most strenuous walk listed here, since it begins at about a mile high and ascends for an additional 2,000 feet. Getting to the top is part of the fun, since the trail takes you through two very different ecosystems as you gain elevation. At the end of the trail is the supreme reward, where you can relax on one of the rocks and gaze out over what seems to be the entire world below your feet. On a clear day you can see for more than 100 miles. If you get lucky, you might even spy an eagle soaring below. The trail also has a self-guided brochure available at the trailhead to identify all the plants and trees you will pass along the way.

Big Bend is one of my favorite parks, and I hope to make it back.

From the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, we find out where to find blooming cactus in Wyoming.

That would be the Medicine Bow-Routte National Forests and Thunder Basin National Grassland.

Blue Columbine Holmes Miller/Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
Viewers will be treated to a number of wildflowers such as Indian Paintbrush, Kitten Tails and Simpson’s Ball Cactus.

I wonder what Simpson’s Ball Cactus looks like? From the USDA Forest Service’s Coloring pages for kids, we find it looks something like this:

Click to enlarge, and then please print out and give to your local children so they can color the cactus, and then you’ll find out what color the flowers are. Or you can click through here to see a picture of one in bloom in Washington. I don’t know if the Washington and Wyoming populations look the same.

Hike along the Douglas Spring Trail to Bridal Wreath Falls, Saguaro National Park. Kurt Repanshek photos.

Besides cactus, the author also came upon snakes. And in a national park, no less!

The wildflowers are in bloom at Organ Pipe NM in southern Arizona.

I see chollas and organ pipes amongst the poppies.

I’ve never made it all the way down to Organ Pipe NM. Add it to the list of places I need to visit…

And the San Diego Union-Tribune takes you into the heart of the wildflowers.

The heavy rainfall this winter has given us an outstanding wildflower bloom in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park…

Nothing is as exciting to me as the bright fuchsia blooms of the beavertail, and they’re sticking out all over now. Besides the barrel cactus, you’ll also see the blooms on the fishhook cactus, as well as the cholla.

Among the amazing discoveries in a spring desert wildflower season are the tiny blooms that cover the sandy desert floor. You have to look closely for these little wonders. See if you can spot the yellow and pink sand verbena, the bright yellow gold poppies, and the tiny white rock daisies.

What? No pictures? I’ll find some for you.

From the State of California, no help from the SD Union-Tribune, we have a brand new wildflower map (pdf)! Now that is awesome.

And they have pictures too.

I must say I haven’t appreciated the State as much as I should. I went looking for wildflower photos and the private enterprises, like the local newspapers in San Diego, failed me. But the State came through. Good stuff.

DesertUSA also has good wildflower updates, right up to the minute.

Water When Dry is also a good place to find out about what’s blooming in the cultivated deserts of Arizona. Todays blooms include Mammillaria and Baileya.

in Joshua Tree, they’ve got a good amount of wildflowers this year, what with a wet winter and all. Plus they’ve found the first cactus blooms of the year.

Ample winter rains and gradually warming temperatures are stimulating the annual desert wildflowers at Joshua Tree National Park, naturalist Joe Zarki reports.

While the great carpets of wildflowers seen in 2005 and 2008 have yet to develop, concentrations of up to 50 species are starting to appear in some park locations, Zarki stated in a news release….

The season’s first cactus blossom in the park, the lovely orange-red Mojave mound cactus, was found in the Lost Horse Valley area.

Wish I could get out there, but not this year. It’s still a little early for us, though the buds are forming…

From Tripadvisor, we find this mystery rock formation that looks a lot like this crazy little succulent:

Pleiospilos bolussi

Coincidence? I think not.

Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge

In 2002, there were only about 21 Sonoran pronghorn left in the United States. But their numbers are rising as researchers have collaborated to carve out a home on a wildlife refuge, expand the herd with a captive-breeding program and help the animals reclaim their range….

in 2002, their entire range went dry… Pronghorn can also eat cactus to survive, researchers have found. They will eat chain-fruit cholla, which is 85 percent water, Hervert said, but it doesn’t provide a lot of nutrition.

In 2002, biologists watched as the last of the herd was reduced to eating cholla, slowly starving to death and more than likely within a few weeks of dying, Hervert said. “It was hard to watch.”

When rains finally came, the herd stabilized, but the agencies watching the animals knew that something had to be done.

Since we’re going to be having some big storm fronts moving in over the next day/weeks I thought I would feature this spectacular photo of the Painted Hills in Oregon under a rainbow.

Painted Hills Rainbow
National Geographic Photo of the Day
© 1996-2010 National Geographic Society.

Photograph by Larry Andreasen

Taken at the Painted Hills National Monument in Central Oregon near sunset. Having been here numerous times before in the summer months, seeing a rainbow on a 100-degree day was the last thing I expected … usually the skies are clear on hot days.

Kids ride bikes in the desert, Newspaper takes notice.

Rider Cassie, 11, negotiates the Cactus Forest Trail during a Trips for Kids Southern Arizona group ride through Saguaro National Park East.
Photos by Greg Bryan / Arizona Daily Star

Fortunately, nobody fell into a cactus, so all’s well that ends well.

It’s eight months in federal prison for a man who stole saguaros from a national park in Tucson….

Tillman and McKee took two of the giant cacti from Saguaro National Park West in January 2007.

From the current issue of National Geographic,

A city of limestone towers rises in western Madagascar…. Unexplored passages shelter some of the island’s—and the world’s—strangest species, from the ghostly Decken’s sifaka, a lemur, to a host of reptiles, insects, and plants….

Photograph by Stephen Alvarez

Spiny, drought-tolerant Pachypodium plants… thrive in… Tsingy de Bemaraha national park and reserve in western Madagascar.

Succulent gardens on Alcatraz are blooming.

Today, thanks to dozens of green-thumbed volunteers and Garden Conservancy staff, Alcatraz is blooming again. (Provided by the Garden Conservancy)

Here’s my photo of the leading edge of the island covered by Agave americanas, many of them in bloom.

Closer… (more…)

Saguaro National Park makes the news every ten years or so.

Saguaro National Park counts its saguaro cactus population every decade.

Good to know.

“In the past, we had more of the very tall ones, the older saguaros,” Swann said.  “But a lot of those older saguaros have died over the years.”

That can’t be good.

“The population seems to be coming back,” Swann said.

Yay!

(I)t will take time… ”A saguaro that’s about an inch tall, is about seven years old,” Swann explained.

Indeed that is so. Sooooo slooooowwww….

When people used to regularly take saguaros out of the desert to put in their yard, they actually took a whole generation of medium-sized plants out. That’s why with the oldest saguaros dying, they’re not being replaced with new giants yet. It will take years for the newly protected babies to fill in behind that lost generation.

Claretcup Cactus Blossoms
Photo Credit: Elizabeth R. Rose

Earlier this year I was hiking at Navajo National Monument near Kayenta in the Four Corners area and found… an amazing Claret cup cactus flower.

That is a very nice picture indeed. Cactus are pretty…

Have you ever been to Navajo NM? It’s got amazing cliff dwellings. As are many of the extant cliff dwellings, it’s near the Four Corners part of the country, or so they tell me. No, wait, actually I’ve been there, so I can tell you this myself. Interesting name since there aren’t any corners there at all, unless you’re looking at a map.

Did You Know?
Hisatsinom is the Hopi name for their ancestors that lived in the Four Corners region of the Southwest.

Well, no I did not know this before today, but now I do.

High desert among the grasslands of Colorado? Pawnee National Grasslands are a bonanza for walking and birdwatching and flower spotting too. This is a long excerpt, but there’s even more if you click through. More pictures, more interesting descriptions. It makes me want to go visit, you know.

This spring brought downpour after downpour of rain, making the prairie burst into bloom. The pioneers who came here in the 1880s learned that plowing the sod in the arid high desert shouldn’t have been done and when the Dust Bowl hit in the 1930s, the farms were abandoned.

After the people gave up on their dreams and forfeited their land, it reverted back to its natural state. Remnants of homesteads, windmills and cemeteries can be seen from the trails near the Buttes…

Whenever we’d see a photo opportunity, I’d say, “Stop!” Wild flowers were everywhere we looked, a sea of lavender, Vetch, Yellow Evening Primrose, Ball Cactus, Prickly Pear Cactus, Sand Lilies, bright pink Locoweed, Penstemon, lavender, Fleabane, and yellow sweet clover.

Just watch where you step, OK?

Kniphofia rooperi

Big shaggy leaves, but really it’s all about the blooms, as it is with all these aloe relatives. What sets this one apart is that the flowers are a fairly dense pyramid, unlike the regular red hot pokers you see everywhere. And they have both the yellow and the red together, in one fell swoop.

Also, they are from the East Cape unlike the red hots, which are not from the East Cape.

I wonder what East Cape it is they’re talking about? I’ve been to the east side of Cape Cod, but it’s not usually called the East Cape there, it’s usually called the Outer Cape, or the National Seashore. Really, they’re my favorite beaches in the whole world, those easterly beaches of Cape Cod, but then I’ve never seen any of these kniph’s over there, so it must be another East Cape they mean.

Probably not this one either.

Maybe this one.

From the Arizona Republic.

A stiff wind blows out of Alamo Canyon on a sunny day. It whistles past organ-pipe-cactus needles and sends ripples across pools of water in a rocky wash below.

What with the new President coming in and all (soon…), the Senate has passed a bill to expand wilderness areas, including a larger Joshua Tree National Park:

In California, Joshua Tree National Park (above) would expand under the legislation along with two other areas in the state. (Gabriel Bouys / AFP/Getty Images)

Nice picture of yuccas. Any cactus being saved too? Indeed!

Joshua Tree National Park cactus garden is one of many wonders in the high desert. (Gabriel Bouys / AFP/Getty Images)

But is there anything the SF Chronicle can tell us to go along with these pretty pictures? Why, but of course!

This bill would designate as wilderness some 190,000 acres of scenic and ecologically sensitive desert land in the mountains of Riverside County adjacent to Palm Springs, including large chunks of Joshua Tree National Park….

The designation of 80,000 acres of additional wilderness in Joshua Tree National Park would protect the high, moist Mojave desert habitat, which supports Joshua trees, and the lower, warmer Colorado desert ecosystem, where Cholla cactus is prevalent.

Epiphyllum species hanging off a tree in Carara National Park, Costa Rica