As I bent forward to look at a strange bit of Saguaro skeleton I felt a sharp sensation that quickly flashed me back to my earliest memory. I had to be less than 2 years old and my walking skills must have been mighty wobbly because as I was stumbling around outside our mobile home in the Mojave desert I promptly sat into a prickly pear cactus. My mom spent an hour plucking the needles out of my rear. This time around I only gave Rachael 10 minutes because we needed to come out from behind the mesquite tree and rejoin our fellow volunteers. Most deserts have a variety of foliage that endeavor to stab you, a successful defense mechanism for plants growing in a harsh environment with scarce food sources. The Sonoran desert however is greener and has more biomass than you’d expect for such a hot and dry place. This is largely the result of having two wet seasons; saturating winter rains and dramatic summer monsoon downpours. This doesn’t mean a lot of water but in a place where life waits out the dry in order to flourish with the wet the Sonoran in known for a higher variety and density of life. Life that is more than happy to fill my unobservant butt with barbed spines.

The good thing is we were here to get in close contact with the land and we were fortunate enough to find a drop in volunteer opportunity at Saguaro National Park. Though unfamiliar to us Californians, buffelgrass has become a widespread invasive plant in the deserts and rangelands of the Southwest an all to common example of a plant introduced as cattle feed that got out of hand. A fiend for water it can cheat the locals, tapping the scarce resource before it ever gets an inch into the soil. Removing exotic plants can appear futile. They come back with the repetitiveness of a bad horror movie villain. However native plants are intimately adapted to their environments and I’ve seen first hand that given a chance they can hold their own. This committed group of volunteers is trying to give the park that chance. By focusing on specific areas and with persistent effort the hope is to remove the invader and allow the native plant community to keep it at bay.

Hemmed in by suburban Tucson, Saguaro National Park has a lot of folks who spend time there on a regular basis. A number of the people we worked with had literally, while hiking or riding bikes through the park, stumbled upon the chance give back to a place they care about. After being mostly to ourselves in the desert for several days I think Rachael and I were in need of some social interaction and camaraderie. Getting a bit sweaty and dusty with these good folks was just what we needed. I don’t even hold any resentment toward my prickly pear friend. It was a good reminder to pay attention and be present in the moment.

Volunteers at Saguaro N.P.

Would you visit a National Monument if the most foreign thing you saw was people on ladders painting the flowers with pollen?

On our recent visit to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument we could not help to be taken aback at just how lush, green and full of life this desert forest is. As most know, or think of, the desert as a dry dusty place where there is abundant sun, little rain and is short on bio-diversity. The Sonoran is the exception, especially within the park. In just a short walk we saw saguaro, organ pipe, hedgehog, and coleville’s cactus, desert ironwood, palo verde trees, quail, flickers, gila woodpeckers, cactus wren, jack rabbits, cottontails and much to my surprise deer! This is a desert rich in variety. One can only imagine that this continues to the south since this park is at the northern range of many of these plants and trees.

After only spending a couple of days there it seemed incredible that this little pocket has even survived all that has been thrown at it over the last 200 years. At a time when ranching was just about the only way to make a living in the west a few tough souls attempted to do just that however failed due to lack of year round water sources. Not surprisingly the cattle severely damaged the natural eco system. Over the years since grazing the desert has had a nice bounce back. Driving in from the north west we passed a large mine outside of the town of Ajo, AZ. This mine was so large the tailings create their own mountain plateau. Shortly after passing the mine driving towards Why, AZ you start to pass signs for the Barry Goldwater air force bombing range. The American military bombs the desert because there is “nothing out there”. It was not unusual to hear the jets flying past the park even in just our short visit. To the south, about 7 miles from the entrance to the park, is the Mexican/American border. I’m not going to cover the politics here but, due to several factors this means that the open desert is an opportunistic place for those seeking better pay or good money trafficking into America. Human and vehicle traffic through the park created roads and damaged the eco system in several places. Fairly recently the park put in a 30 mile stretch of vehicle barricades that still allows for animals, including the endangered Sonoran Pronghorn to still pass through. Due to these immigration attempts and trafficking the presence of border patrol is to be expected. Within the park there is border patrol unit with horses, ATVs, drones and a helicopter to patrol the park itself. All of this is just to give you an idea of what this little plot of land is up against.

It’s easy to put all that out of your mind when you look at this beautiful place, especially the pictures of the desert in full bloom. A majority of the plants take the monsoon rains of the summer to blossom. This includes the namesake Organ Pipe Cactus. These cacti can live up to 150 years and their first blossom shows up at around 35 years of age. This has been an interesting fact to mull over because I myself am 35 years old. The organ pipe cactus has white flowers and blooms only at night giving off a sweet scent. Come mid morning the next day and the flower is closing up its pollen shop. The lesser long nose bat uses this time in the summer to travel north to have and grow their babies at a roost in the park. Feeding on the pollen and fruit of both the Saguaro and the Organ Pipe cactus while cross pollinating the plants. There is an excellent graph showing this relationship found in the park newspaper here: http://www.nps.gov/orpi/planyourvisit/upload/http___imrcms-nps-doi-net_orpi_planyourvisit_loader.pdf .  The Organ Pipe is not listed as endangered but the bat is. Like the good and wise John Muir is quoted “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”. If there is no bat to do the heavy lifting of pollinating the cactus how long will it take the cactus to die off? I heard a story about an apple growing region in China where they use such toxic pesticides it killed all the bees. No bees, no apples? Nope, instead there are people who are now employed to take to the trees with cups filled with pollen and paint brushes to do the pollinating the bees did for free. In true Chinese diligence they pollinate all the flowers of every tree. The human pollination process is said to have increased the production of apples by 30%. Can the trees sustain that heavy of production? What if there are subtleties that the bees and bats can smell that makes them skip over less ideal flowers? Just like a female bird selects for health and vitality in her male suitors perhaps the bats select the best flowers. The fact is that these plants and bats co evolved and most likely need each other to survive. Human interference might temporarily improve upon nature but, will alter it in ways that we cannot foresee. This is a common story throughout the world and this is only one example. However, I can’t help feel that my take away from this particular story is the connection between our bombing practice just north and the desperation of our neighbors to the south. It’s hard for me to decide who causes more damage to this sensitive desert eco-system. It’s important to remember that nature is not something that happens “over there” while we lives our lives “over here”. Our tax dollars both own the open land of the federal government and the military that is tasked to protect it. Americans have bought the gift that is large tracks of land set aside for our enjoyment but, nature does not begin and end at their borders.