Saguaro National Park

I wanted to talk a little about a few things I got to see while in Arizona, other than the marathon. I had Monday and Tuesday (January 14 and 15) to myself, and took advantage of this short time to see a few new sights.

The first of these was Saguaro National Park:

http://www.nps.gov/sagu/

While I’d been in Arizona before, it was in Northern Arizona at the Grand Canyon. Seeing the saguaros was amazing and so different. After a late breakfast Monday, January 14 with some of my teammates, I went out to the Phoenix airport and picked up a rental car. I got on the road, heading for Tucson, which was a couple of hours south. My goal was to see some desert landscapes and saguaro cacti before the end of the day.

Saguaros are just incredible. If you were told to think of a cactus, this is the one that would come to mind. From an almost unimaginably small seed grows a huge cactus. After five years, the cactus is only about the size of a thimble. It takes up to 75 years to grow a single arm, and they can live up to 200 years or more. They were and still are very important in the culture of the Tohono O’odham Indian tribe. Because of poaching for suburban developments, this giant symbol of the Sonora Desert is at some risk for reduced numbers.

Once I got to the park, I went to the visitor center and quickly learned that I should have spent at least a couple of more days in southern Arizona – there was so much to see and the place is huge. But I only had a few hours left on Monday, and all of Tuesday, so I got busy. Saguaro National Park has two separate units, each many miles apart. I got to see the western unit. My legs were too sore for a lot of hiking, even though I was tempted. 26.2 miles takes a lot out of you, I’ll say that. So I did a lot of driving through various parts of the park, and a few short hikes. None of these was longer than about ¾ mile. The rest of the post will be some selected photos from my afternoon at the park, as well as an hour or so on Tuesday on the way to my destination that day, the Sonora Desert Museum.

I used the arm of this huge saguro on a nature trail to frame the distant mountains:

Many of the saguaros had incredible shapes, with many arms:

Large saguaros actually have a woody skeleton, as you can see in this photo. Note too that there is a variety of other plants besides saguaros here. The western unit of the park has, believe it or not, 1,162 species of plants. Who says that deserts are barren?


This big guy either is descended from Gumby or is some kind of a traffic cop:

One area of the park, with only a short hike, had these incredible petroglyphs carved in rocks by ancient Indian tribes. Here are representations of various desert animals.

Here are some more animals, a sun, and some other depictions. It was amazing to see this, and to think of people so long ago doing these drawings in the rocks.

Although quite different from Eastern forests, there are indeed forests in the park. Note this cacti forest that I found quite striking:

As the sun went down, and the air cooled, I knew that it was time to head into civilization and find a room for the night. My afternoon in Saguaro National Park had passed all too quickly.