Cattails

Typha latifolia L. is found in every state in the continent including all of the Canadian provinces. Here is the classification from the U.S.D.A.:

Kingdom	Plantae – Plants
Subkingdom	Tracheobionta – Vascular plants
Superdivision	Spermatophyta – Seed plants
Division	Magnoliophyta – Flowering plants
Class	Liliopsida – Monocotyledons
Subclass	Commelinidae
Order	Typhales
Family	Typhaceae – Cat-tail family
Genus	Typha L. – cattail
Species	Typha latifolia L. – broadleaf cattail

Here is a list of the various species from Wikipedia:

• Typha angustifolia - Lesser Bulrush or Narrow Leaf Cattail
• Typha domingensis - Southern Cattail
• Typha ×glauca (angustifolia × latifolia) - Hybrid or White Cattail
• Typha latifolia - Common Cattail
• Typha laxmannii - Laxman's Bulrush
• Typha minima - Dwarf Bulrush
• Typha muelleri - Raupo
• Typha orientalis - Raupo
• Typha shuttleworthii - Shuttleworth's Bulrush

This is another one of my favorite plants that turns out to be both invasive and a weed according to "authoritative sources" at the U.S.D. A. I guess my qualifications for a favorite does not include useful for anything. Contrary to the assessment of the U.S. Government, I do know that the rhizomes and underground stems are edible. Also, the base of the leaves can be eaten raw or cooked. Even though the current government classifies this plant as a weed, Native Americans not only ate the plant but used the leaves for weaving mats, baskets and a whole variety of useful products. According to real authorities, the leaves of a cattail can be folded around a stalk to make a doll for a child.

A few years ago we discovered an interesting fact about cattails. We gathered a few of the stalks when they were brown and still growing and put them in a vase. A few weeks later, when they had thoroughly dried, the cattails suddenly exploded into the soft cottony fluff. I think I knew this was what they did but didn't connect the theory with what actually happens with the plant. It is moderately difficult to get exploded cattail seeds out of your house.

On occasion, when finding a patch ready to explode, we have had a rather interesting time hitting the pods. It may not be as spectacular as fireworks, but it is very impressive none the less.

Nothing like Arizona grapefruit...

Yes, there are benefits to living in the desert after all, one of them is the taste of Arizona grapefruit aka citrus paradisi. None of this cardboard thin skinned sissified grapefruit from some other unnamed states, a real thick skinned grapefruit you can peel and eat off the tree just like an orange or a tangerine. Grapefruit and grapefruit trees have been permanent fixtures in my yard nearly all my life. As children, I don't think we really thought of them as food. We used them as ammunition to throw at each other. They were so common that they would drop off the trees and be thrown away. It seemed that no one person or family could eat all of the grapefruit from even one tree and our yard always had several. Now, crews of senior citizens scour the neighborhoods for all kinds of citrus to pick and take to local food banks.

Grapefruit are members of the citrus genus of the Rutaceae or Rue family. Here is the classification from the USDA:

Kingdom	Plantae – Plants
Subkingdom	Tracheobionta – Vascular plants
Superdivision	Spermatophyta – Seed plants
Division	Magnoliophyta – Flowering plants
Class	Magnoliopsida – Dicotyledons
Subclass	Rosidae
Order	Sapindales
Family	Rutaceae – Rue family
Genus	Citrus L. – citrus

I found it amazingly interesting that the United States Department of Agriculture shows only four states for the distribution of citrus and Arizona is not one of them. One of the few things I remember from grade school was the 5 C's of Arizona and citrus is one of them. Of course, citrus trees do not originally come from the American continents but originated in the tropical islands of the Caribbean. Purdue University has a very interesting summary of the history of grapefruit but ignores Arizona other than to note that it was commercially grown in 1910. It is true, despite the 5 C's, Arizona's production of grapefruit is a very small percentage of that grown in other states (unnamed). But, if you even get a chance to eat a real Arizona grapefruit, you will never by one of the cardboard substitutes again.

The Inner Gorge

In a land where rivers come at a premium, the Colorado is locked away in a granite prison. A prison of creosote and cactus. Although the rim of the canyon lies in the Canadian and Hudsonian life zones, the desert heart of the Canyon is pure Lower Sonoran desert. All that is missing are a few saguaro cactus to make me feel right at home. The walls of this desert prison are made of Vishnu Schist. Well, calling the rocks a "schist" is just a snobbish term for any metamorphic rock that can be split into thin layers. Vishnu Schist sounds so much more mysterious and romantic than blue slate, which is what it is. Above the Vishnu Schist lie the Brahma and Rama Schists. It really sounds like the early geologists had overly active imaginations.

Not even walking in Arizona -- Flying and really neat flying at that

This is from the Google Commons and it is a really neat video. I always wanted to fly planes, it turned out that my eyes were bad, I got airsick and I was pretty uncoodinated, all reasons I probably spend more time on computers and never learned to fly a plane. But, you can still dream and especially when you see really neat stuff like this.

The delightful Cynara cardunculus

Cynara cardunculus or Globe Artichoke is a treat to eat. Artichokes are one of those vegetables that most people, including me while growing up, could not imagine eating. Fortunately, I married into a food family and learned to love eating them. Just in case you don't know, the scales (it is a bud) have a very tasty portion at the bottom where they attach. You boil the artichoke and then peal off the scales and scrape off the edible part with your lower front teeth. It also tastes good to dip them in mayonnaise or Miracle Whip. The inner portion of the bud is called the "artichoke heart." The heart is the best part. Sometimes artichoke heart is pickled. I like them better fresh however.

We also grow them in our home garden occasionally. However, they are one of those plants that take a lot of room and only produce a few edible bulbs. They are usually grown commercially as a field crop. They grow really well in the lower Arizona desert areas, but require quite a bit of water. A winter frost will kill the plants.

The picture above is an artichoke growing in the Herb Garden of the Desert Botanical Gardens, in Phoenix, Arizona.

The Cagou of New Caledonia

OK, occasionally, I get outside of Arizona. This is a 360 degree panorama of the jungle in New Caledonia. The bird is real and is called a Kagu or Cagou (in French).


Cagou New Caledonia in New Caledonia

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about the bird:

The Kagu (French: Cagou), Rhynochetos jubatus, is a long-legged blue-greyish bird endemic to the dense mountain forests of New Caledonia. It is the only surviving member of the family Rhynochetidae, although a second, larger species of the genus Rhynochetos, the Lowland Kagu Rhynochetos orarius, has been described from Holocene subfossil remains. It is almost flightless, and builds a ground nest of sticks, laying a single egg. It has proved vulnerable to introduced predators, and is threatened with extinction. The remote habitat and rarity of this species mean that little is known of its habits.

By the way, the one "walking Arizona" is me and I think about a lot of things including birds in New Caledonia.

Virtually inaccessible Navajo Mountain

On the border between Arizona and Utah, just south of Lake Powell, Navajo Mountain is one of the most prominent landmarks on the high plateau. Actually, almost the entire mountain lies just across the state line in Utah, but access from the Utah side, because of Lake Powell and total lack of roads, is very, very difficult. Geologically speaking, Navajo Mountain is a laccolith, a dome-shaped body of igneous rock that has intruded into the overlaying of sedimentary rock. Wikipedia. The mountain is slightly over 10,000 feet which explains its noticeable visibility when the average elevation of the Colorado Plateau is around 6000 feet. To the Navajo people, it is known as Naatsis’áán "Earth Head" or "Pollen Mountain." Access to Navajo Mountain is still regulated by the sovereign Navajo Nation, and a permit is required to hike in the region. The Navajos consider Navajo Mountain and others in Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico to be sacred.

And hike you must, the closest highway is Indian Route 22 far to the south. There is a small village/trading post called, appropriately, Navajo Mountain, on the east side. The village of Navajo Mountain is 90 miles from Tuba City, Arizona, the closest town.

The amazing saguaro

This is a picture of the inside of a Carnegiea gigantea (Engelm.) Britton & Rose commonly known as a saguaro cactus. Here is the classification from the United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service's Plants Database:

Kingdom	Plantae – Plants
Subkingdom	Tracheobionta – Vascular plants
Superdivision	Spermatophyta – Seed plants
Division	Magnoliophyta – Flowering plants
Class	Magnoliopsida – Dicotyledons
Subclass	Caryophyllidae
Order	Caryophyllales
Family	Cactaceae – Cactus family
Genus	Carnegiea Britton & Rose – saguaro
Species	Carnegiea gigantea (Engelm.) Britton & Rose – saguaro

The saguaro has a flexible structure that allows it to expand and contract depending on the amount of water available for storage. The central stiff ribs are accordion-like and give strength to the plant allowing it expand to store thousands of pounds of water for use when there is little or no rainfall. Large saguaro cactus plants can weigh more than six tons, made up almost entirely of water. The plants grow very slowly. We planted a very small saguaro when it was only about 3 or 4 inches high. Over the years we have kept the plant growing, even moving it with us when we moved. After about twenty years, the saguaro is now only about four feet high. See Saguaro National Park.

From the outside, the layers you can see in the picture are the epidermis (the green exterior), the cortex or pulp, the ribs, and the pith inside the ribs.

There is a legend in Arizona about a man who supposedly shot a saguaro with a shotgun. The shot cut the cactus which fell on him and killed him. OK, so checking with Snopes.com, it turns out that the story is true. It happened in 1982. But that analysis doesn't agree with the story I know from my teenage years. Guess what, more than one person may have died shooting a saguaro.

A most amazing cactus

This is an Echinocereus coccineus Engelm. var. coccineus or scarlet hedgehog cactus. The flowers are like beacons in the desert. You can read about all of the plants in North America on United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service's Plants Database. Here is the classification for the scarlet hedgehog cactus from the USDA:

Kingdom	Plantae – Plants
Subkingdom	Tracheobionta – Vascular plants
Superdivision	Spermatophyta – Seed plants
Division	Magnoliophyta – Flowering plants
Class	Magnoliopsida – Dicotyledons
Subclass	Caryophyllidae
Order	Caryophyllales
Family	Cactaceae – Cactus family
Genus	Echinocereus Engelm. – hedgehog cactus
Species	Echinocereus coccineus Engelm. – scarlet hedgehog cactus
Variety	Echinocereus coccineus Engelm. var. coccineus – scarlet hedgehog cactus

The USDA National Plant Data Center, for example, has a site for identifying the grasses of Arizona. The site uses a list of 268 distinguishing features to identify all of the species of grasses growing in the state.

I image the world would be a drab and lonely place without knowing the scientific name of all of the plants, or at least, the common name, but most people couldn't tell a saguaro from Bermuda Grass. Even if you don't know all the names, you should at least know that everything has a name and you could look it up if you wanted to do so.

You can also impress your friends and acquaintances by throwing words like "andropogon glomeratus" or "arrhenatherum elatius" into your daily speech. But, I suspect that if you do, you will shortly have no friends or acquaintances to impress.

The picture above was taken on a memorable day at the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix, Arizona. One of the most spectacular places to visit in Phoenix, not that there is that much else to see anyway.

Hati imagery layer now avaiable in Google Maps and Google Earth

If you would like a high resolution bird's eye view of the destruction in Haiti, try both Google Maps and Google Earth. See the announcement at Google Lat Long Blog.

The images are really sharp and very graphic.

Roosevelt Lake -- a retrospective

Officially named Theodore Roosevelt Lake, it is the oldest and largest of six large reservoirs constructed and operated by the Salt River Project. Wikipedia.

Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory, using data obtained courtesy of the University of Maryland’s Global Land Cover Facility.

The aerial photo shows both Roosevelt Lake and Apache Lake to the south. The Salt River enters the lake from the east and the Tonto Creek comes in from the northwest. Also visible are the outlines of three wilderness areas; the Superstition Wilderness, the Four Peaks Wilderness and the Salome Wilderness. Next to the lake, on the south, is the Tonto National Monument, a preserved complex of cliff dwellings. All of these lie within the Tonto National Forest.

Roosevelt Lake and the others in the Salt River Project are used extensively for fishing, boating, water skiing, sailing and other water related activities. All of the lakes have boat ramps and other facilities. Roosevelt Lake has an extensive complex of campgrounds.

At the time of the aerial photo, Roosevelt Lake was very low, as shown by the extensive areas of light colored land around the lake. Because these are desert lakes, their level depends entirely on rainfall amounts. Every few years, the lakes fill from inflow from the rivers and then they drain down as water is used for domestic and irrigation purposes in the Salt River Valley. Because the level of the lakes fluctuates from year to year, in some years the campgrounds are almost a half a mile from the lake, in other years they are on the lake shore. The boat ramps and docks are constructed to rise and fall with the level of the lake. In extremely dry years, the boat docks are left high up on the shore and access to the lakes is extremely limited.

I grew up thinking all lakes were reservoirs. I remember being amazed that there was a lake that didn't have a dam associated with it. I always wondered how they kept the water in the lake and why it didn't all run out.

Mystical? Religious? or just doodling?

Click for enlarged image

Even though this rock art is found in Hieroglyphic Canyon, they are not hieroglyphic writing, they are actually called petroglyphs (literally "rock writing") or pictographs. Pictographs are usually dated to the time when other physical remains, i.e. pottery, implements etc., are found in the area. A variety of rocks are used as a substrate, but they all have certain things in common, the surviving pictographs are in protected or semi-protected areas of the rock. That is, they are in niches or on slabs that are protected from the elements either through overhangs or orientation. The pictographs are made by scratching through the darker weathered coating of the rock to show the lighter underlying areas. During some of my future posts, I will show a large variety of pictographs from areas throughout the American Southwest.

The dark coating on the rocks comes from a fairly simple chemical reaction, manganese an element, becomes manganese oxide. There are several fomulations of manganese oxide, however the most basic is MnO, a simple combination with oxygen. Manganese in its pure form, is a light grey to white powder that resembles iron. It is used with iron and other elements, to make steel. It is sometimes found dissolved in water as a trace element. In the dessert areas of the world, over time, these traces of manganese are deposited on the surface of the rocks and is sometimes called desert varnish. From personal experience, we have used manganese as a trace element for fertilization of palm trees and if any of the water with manganese gets on any surface, it will permanently stain the surface.

Unfortunately, most archaeologists (at least in the U.S.) have a tendency to see either mysticism or religion in everything associated with ancient cultures. Although some of the symbols used do have religious connotations, it is impossible to attribute a religious significance to them without imposing cultural norms from unrelated cultures. As a matter of fact, the pictographs may have been produced out of simple boredom. There are many locations throughout the western part of the U.S. where early pioneers wrote their names on the rocks also. I guess some archaeologist in the distant future, unable to read our handwriting, would probably deem those markings religious also.

The color of lightning

Click to view image at full size

Arizona's clear air and wide horizons lend themselves to spectacular lightning displays. The picture above isn't one of them. This was a rather ordinary thunderstorm but what is significant are the colors generated by the lightning. In this case, the color was light lavender, but sometimes the skies turn green or other colors. To quote an article from Answers.com:

Lightning comes in every color of the rainbow (Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Violet, to name a few). It's almost always white, but often it's tinged with another color around the edges. The three most common colors (aside from white) are electric blue, electric yellow, and "Voltage Violet." The color of the bolt depends on how hot it is; the hotter the lightning, the closer the color will be to the end of the spectrum. Infrared, (red) which is the coolest to ultraviolet (violet), thus hottest.

The shot above is of some very hot lightning.

What makes a cactus a cactus?

Click to enlarge image

Some people think that any spiney plant is a cactus. Real cactus in the Cactaceae family are only found in North and South America. There is one lone native species of cactus in Africa the Rhipsalis baccifera, but it is assumed that it is a transplant. All of the cactus in the Middle East and elsewhere are non-native species. The plant above looks rather spiney. Is it a cactus?

Look closely at the base of the spines near the green skin. This fuzzy white area is the areole. In some species of cactus the areoles have developed into small, detachable stickers called glochids that are very sharp and painful to the skin. No areoles, no cactus, simple.

Although this cactus looks fierce, it is rather easy to avoid since it is a variety of Carnegiea gigantea, aka saguaro. Although saguaro cactus have become synonymous with desert, they are actually only found in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Mexico and in an extremely small part of California.

The old and the new

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One of the things about living in Phoenix compared to most other cities, is that everything is relatively new. We have new streets, new buildings and mostly newer homes. The older sections of town are the usual run down with abandoned buildings and other urban blight, but by and large we live in a new city in the desert. What passes for a downtown area is relatively uncrowded mostly because only the people who work there have any reason to go there. Some of the older cities of the world can boast of hundreds of years of history, most of the history of Phoenix has happened during my lifetime.

The new veneer of Phoenix is haunted by memories of a dim and hardly known past. People have lived and prospered in this desert valley for thousands of years. The picture, taken from the top of the ruin, above is a composite panorama of the museum and visitors' center for Pueblo Grande, one of the largest remaining and visible Indian ruins. Now almost completely obscured by roads and buildings, the past is seldom mentioned or even acknowledged. If you look closely at the background, visible over the trees, on the left, you can just see the control tower for Sky Harbor Airport. On the right, you can see one of the high rise buildings to the west and north of Pueblo Grande.

The larger tree next to the building is a palo verde. The two trees by the canopies are probably mesquite. The planting in the center of the photo contains yucca, two juvenile saguaros, an ocotillo, some creosote bushes and several agaves. There is a large sage brush plant behind the yuccas. There is a bike rider on the canal bank behind the canopies.

The mighty Superstition Mountains

In 1960 actor Walter Brennan had a hit song called "Dutchman's Gold." (See Wikipedia) The song was pretty terrible even though it was a hit. In the song, Brennan makes reference to "the mighty Superstition Mountain, standing high and all alone." Well, you might call that poetic license, but perhaps he had just never seen the Superstitions up close. The Superstition Mountains stretch eastward, just from the edge of the city of Apache Junction, and include an ill-defined area to the north and east. Most people consider the Superstitions to be contiguous with the Superstition Wilderness Area.

Looking from the west towards the mountains, the main Superstition Mountain is one of the eastern Salt River Valley's most prominent features. The mountains are primarily extrusive igneous rocks created as a result of volcanic action. The rocks themselves are mainly dacite, andesite, rhyolite, tuff and breccias. Contrary to legend, the actual wilderness area has never shown any degree of mineralization. There has been extensive core drilling for minerals and no major mineral discoveries have ever been made. Hence, the possibility that there is a lost mine in the Superstition Wilderness Area is almost zero. However, there is extensive mineralization to the east, north and west of the mountains.

The view above is taken from the south, looking towards the northwest. The prominent mountain highlighted in the background is known as the Flatiron. It is most prominent in pictures taken from the western slopes of the mountains and from the east valley. One of the more common theories about the origin of the mountains involves volcanic activity and several overlapping calderas. The terrain is extremely rugged and the deep canyons run in a variety of directions leading to the confusion of hikers in the area. The main peak of the Flatiron group is around 5057 feet high depending on your source, but the Flatiron itself is around 4800 feet.

The edges of the Superstitions are one of the most visited locations in Arizona. But if you spend a little while hiking you will soon reach areas that are hardly ever visited. Hiking to Hieroglyphic Canyon on a cool weekend day may seem closer to a stroll though the Mall, but other parts of the Wilderness area are extremely isolated due primarily to the rugged terrain and lack of water.

A little balance in our lives

Many types of locations throughout the world have their own balanced rocks. It is obvious that they are mostly created when softer rocks are weathered away leaving a harder rock layer. The undercutting can be spectacular in some cases. Here is an interesting online collection of pictures. Another rather obvious conclusion is that balanced rocks are not usually found in seismically active areas.

Arizona has more than its share of balanced rocks, but the one shown above is particularly spectacular because of its location on a high ridge line. It is visible from most of the canyon floor. It is located in Hieroglyphic Canyon, on the south side of the Superstition Mountain range, just east of the Salt River Valley.

I have always been fascinated by balanced rocks and have often thought about publishing a book of pictures of them from Arizona. I am aware of many dozens of them throughout the state.

Very little physical evidence

Even though the Salt River Valley was relatively heavily populated during hundreds of years, by the late 1400s the ancient inhabitants had disappeared almost entirely. The vast agricultural community that built hundreds of miles of canals, vanished, almost without a trace, leaving endless speculation for generations of scientists and historians. The remains of the inhabitants' material culture are almost completely obscured by time and subsequent occupation by the modern inhabitants. A remarkably few of the villages and towns remain, preserved in a very small number of parks and monuments. Almost without exception, the canals, the major achievement of their culture, have also vanished, to be replaced by modern cement lined watercourses.

Here and there, if you are really observant, you can still see evidence of the ancient ones. The hills around the Salt River Valley are full of petroglyphs. In the photo above, you can see another almost permanent reminder of the people who lived in the desert before the night sky was full of light. The holes in the rock are places where the Indians ground seeds, plants and corn. Imagine how long it took with a stone pestle to grind those holes into the solid rock!

There is nothing particularly special about the location of the rock that makes it any different than millions of others in the general vicinity. How did the ancients chose just this rock? Why here and not a few feet further up the canyon or down?

This rock is located in Hieroglyphic Canyon in the Superstition Wilderness Area, just at the eastern edge of the huge Salt River Valley.

Superstition Mountains Desert Panorama

Click on the above image to see the panorama

The Superstition Mountains had a real good Publicity Representative. Without the name, this range of hills east of the Salt River Valley would likely be much less visited. The area also has the unfortunate and inaccurate association with various goldmine legends, including the famous Lost Dutchman Mine. I may go into the gold mine story business some day, but right now, I am more interested in cactus and the mountains themselves.

The panoramic photo shows the south side of the Superstition Wilderness Area. The Wilderness is administered by the Tonto National Forest. Here is what they have to say about it:

This Wilderness was designated in 1939, and was expanded to its present size in 1984. It now contains approximately 160,200 acres. There is a well-developed trail system, and the western end of the wilderness receives heavy use during the cooler times of the year. Trail conditions vary from fair to very poor. Several trails are unsuitable for horses.

The Superstition Wilderness Area has the distinction of having a wilderness boundary right next to suburban subdivisions and commercial establishments. The picture above was taken from the Hieroglyphic Trail, looking north. If I had completed the picture around to the south, you would see houses and roads and the east end of the huge Salt River Valley which contains the Phoenix/Mesa Metroplex. Phoenix is currently the fifth largest city in the United States.

The picture shows the impressive variety of plant life in the Arizona/Sonora Desert, including the prominent saguaro cactus. The other prominent cactus are Teddy-bear cholla. Most of the bushes visible are creosote. There are a large number of palo verde trees which are mostly shorter and bush-like rather than looking like trees.

I am sure I will have more comments about the desert.

We live on the remains of the dead

Large areas of the huge Phoenix/Mesa Metroplex are built on the ruins of the ancient inhabitants. It is not well known today, but many of the strip centers and houses that make up this huge city are literally built on Hohokam towns and villages. The vast canal system of the Salt River Valley has its origins in canals built by wood and stone tools hundreds of years ago. There are still places in the Valley you can see traces of the original canals and even see some of the ruins.

The picture above is the corner of one of the largest remaining Hohokam structures in Phoenix. It is maintained as part of Pueblo Grande, a Museum and Archaeological Park by the City of Phoenix.

No one really knows what the ancient inhabitants of the Southwest called themselves. The names we use like Hohokam, Sinagua and Anazasi, are merely convenient terms used by archaeologists and borrowed from other American Indian languages or Spanish. The term Hohokam was borrowed from the Akimel O'odham, and is used to define an archaeological culture that existed from the beginning of the current era to about the middle of the 15^th century AD. Wikipedia.

We have been visiting Pueblo Grande from time to time for many years. The present park and museum are really well done. The ruins now lie next to a freeway and just north of the Salt River where airplanes make their landing run into Sky Harbour Airport. It is really difficult to imagine the isolation and quietness that must have existed when these structures were inhabited. The City of Phoenix gets its name from the legend of the Phoenix bird that arose from its own ashes. Early settlers realized that the valley had once been densely populated and that the town they were building was rising literally on the ashes of the vanished civilization.

Campylorhynchus brunneicapillus

The Arizona State bird is an active and very evident denizen of the lower deserts. I think it deserves the designation just because it can actually sit on the cactus plants without getting stabbed to death. If you have ever tried sitting on a cactus plant, and I know a few people who have, you would probably vote for Campylorhynchus brunneicapillus or the cactus wren as your state bird also.

The cactus wren is also the largest of the North American wrens. The bird eats insects, including ants, beetles, grasshoppers and wasps, which makes it my friend any day. By the way, if my name were Campylorhynchus brunneicapillus, I would probably change my name to cactus wren too.

Cholla Cactus

Commonly called Cylindropuntia bigelovii but locally known as the Teddy-bear Cholla or Jumping Cactus, this is one of the most prominent features of the mid-level Arizona/Sonoran Desert. This cactus has the annoying characteristic of leaving its easily detached stems all over the ground. The slightest touch of a shoe or pant leg is enough to have this fuzz ball attach. The spines are vicious, possibly the worst in the plant kingdom. After instantly penetrating the skin, the barbs curl like fishhooks when they hit the moisture under the skin. This curled barb is very difficult to remove and may require a strong pair of pliers. The plant actually reproduces from these dropped stems and makes almost no seeds.

A close relative, also called Jumping Cactus, is the Cylindropuntia fulgida or chain cholla or chain fruit cholla. This plant makes long strings of green fruit, hence the name chain cholla. Like the Teddy-bear cholla, this plant also propagates from the stems that fall to the ground.

It is a learned skill to walk through the desert and avoid stepping on cactus. As you are walking, the cactus, if stepped on, will attach to the heel or bottom of the shoe and with the next step will lodge in the side of the opposite leg. I used to carry a pair of pliers on hikes with the Scouts because it was inevitable that one of the Scouts would step on a cholla. Avoiding cactus is a lesson that one learns rather quickly or the decision is made to never step foot in the wild desert again.

The dead stems of the cholla are very distinctive and used to be used for decorative lamps and other tourist trade type objects. For a long time I had a box of the stems with the intent of making one of those decorative objects, but I think the box finally got dumped when I moved a few years ago.

There are some parts of the desert, especially along the mountain skirts of the upper desert, where cholla grows in huge forests. The plants are incredibly large and fierce looking. It is not a good idea to try to walk through these areas without a great deal of caution.

I think cholla are beautiful and love to use the pictures on my computer desktop.

Mesa Arizona Temple Christmas Lights

Every year from the day after Thanksgiving until New Years Day, the Mesa, Arizona Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a huge Christmas light display. I am well aware of the time and effort that goes into this gorgeous display, because for five years, right after the lights first were displayed, I was in charge of putting up, maintaining and taking down the lights. The entire grounds of the Temple had to be rewired a number of times to accommodate the huge display. The past few years, the crowds of viewers have grown so much that special attention has been paid to restroom facilities and all other aspects of the experience. Every night during the season, there is a live musical presentation in the area between the Visitors Center and the Temple. Back then, we were not so fortunate.

During the years we helped with the Temple lights, we got to be experts at fixing light bulbs in strings of lights. We also had some really interesting experiences putting the lights up. To get the lights into the palm trees, it requires a rather high cherry picker lift. One night, the wind was blowing hard enough to sway the trees, but we were up in the cherry picker, thirty or so feet off the ground, putting up lights and fixing those that had blown loose. We did that for about three or four hours straight without a stop.

Another night, one of the huge Italian Cypress trees, about 60 feet tall, blew over in a huge storm. Miraculously, the tree fell exactly in a spot where there were no lights and no lights were damaged at all.

The main problem, early on, with doing the lights, was the lack of outlets. We ran dozens of extension cords and were constantly blowing fuses and having to re-adjust the lights.

One good experience was that my children got to turn on the lights every year for the official turn on ceremony. At the time, there was no central way to control the lights and they had to be turned on at seven or eight different locations. even though we had a person who officially turned on the lights, it really took all of the children and others to get them operating.

For those five years, from October to January, the Christmas lights took most of our time and effort. It was an interesting experience and far different from today's organized effort.