Sonoran Desert Maps

Buffel Grass Removal from Tucson Mountain Park

"The Sonoran Desert Weedwackers started in 2000 as a small group of committed individuals whose objective was to remove non-native fountain grass and buffelgrass from the washes and roadsides of Tucson Mountain Park, a 27,000 acre Sonoran Desert natural preserve a few miles west of Tucson. Since that time, the Weedwackers have become well-known in the invasive weed management community for their successful removal of tons of invasive grasses from the Tucson Mountain Park. Areas where dense buffelgrass was removed in 2001 now support native grasses and wildflowers. "

http://www.aznps.org/invasives/weedwackers.html

The Sub-Tropical Sonoran Desert

My goal for the winter is to explore the extent of my home ecosystem:The Sonoran Desert and its six subdivisions.

Hiking Barefoot?

"The Barefoot Hiker" A Book About Bare Feet
by Richard Frazine, BD [Bachelor of Divinity?]
1993, Ten-Speed Press, ISBN: 0-89815-525-8
Read the book. Join the club.

This is an excellent and well-written book full of irreverent spunk and practical advice for hikers who habitually go barefoot. It is also an interesting addition to my "What would caveman do" bookshelf (see: Anopsology and my analysis). But, this book is written by Easterners, and I must humbly take exception to the application of their advice to the west, particularly Tucson.

The authors would sore regret hazarding a single barefoot footfall, let alone an entire cavalcade of such vulnerable events, in the Sonoran Desert, a Desert incomparably well-equipped to puncture the inflated expectations of innocent trespassers. The rapacious wit and perspicacious criticism embodied in the hard reality of the Sonoran desert would soon render the author's philosophy moot as he became a human dumpling skewered on the spines of cholla, saguaro, fish hook, and porcupine cactus, not to mention the infinitely small, sharp, and numerous "glochids" of the prickly pear.

The idea that humans are fit to live in the environment uncouth and unshod is an admirable one, an idea dating back perhaps to Genesis and the Garden of Eden. But the beauty of wilderness, especially Sonoran desert wilderness, bursts such hubristic bubbles and skewers such dainty pedagogy. Aristotle's peripatetic circumlocutions aside, this shit is sharp. To take humble pride in the profligate-armed Saguaro, to know that we are outmatched and vulnerable at his side, is to know the true reality of wilderness: not unadorned freedom to trample as we wish, but careful respect for all creatures great and sharp, and a willingness to adapt our footprint to the landscape we inhabit.

In Search of the Elusive Elephant Tree

The Elephant Tree (Bursera microphylla) is a rare member of the Sonoran scrub community, left behind in a few relictual populations after the ebbing of the last ice age. Our amateur expedition convened to verify its rumored existence with our own senses. Lacking professional expertise, we relied on a map of hearsay and riddles. Intoning these raw directions with varying emphasis, turning the map while squinting, convincing ourselves of our own speculation, falling back into self-doubt at the next turn in the road...by faith and blind reckoning we journeyed and when we couldn't drive any more we got out and walked.

The crunch of desert gravel, second-growth ironwoods twisted like deep time, patches of magically incongruous moss growing in the deep shadows, a butterfly (Hemiluca tricolor) warming to the January morning. It seemed nothing could hide in the glorious panopticon of brilliant Sonoran sunlight. But it was only the illusion of omniscience - we knew the elusive Elephant Tree lurked somewhere in the thick desert scrub, but we didn't know where.

We pushed on. Past abandoned mines, over barbed wire and barbed cacti. The steep and gutted tracks curved around a dry valley, attained the saddle, and continued up the south-facing slope of Mt. Silverbell. There, tucked in a cozy drainage of austere smooth rock waterfalls, clinging to unlikely toeholds on the sheer wall, were the Elephant Trees; the thick trunks peeling elegantly in the sparse shadows. Fragrant limbs and resinous (juniper-like) berries carried a pungent and uniquely fragrant odor, a benediction to the dry dust desert.

We watched the sun cross the sky from our perch among them, tucked away with them in cozy niches, waiting patiently or perhaps resigned to fate, relicts in a strange world. They are safe and comfortable raising small families in their isolated enclave. We thanked them for their time and magnanomous patience when posing for our photographs. None of us wanted to leave, but we have faith now that the elusive Elephant Trees can abide without us.

Endangered: Pima Pineapple Cactus

This expedition, led by Patrick Dockens of EcoPlan Associates, traveled beyond the mine tailings of Green Valley and skirted the variegated edge of the beautiful Sonoran Desert to map the homeland of the rare & Endangered Pima Pineapple Cactus (PPAC). The PPAC is named for its shape, not its taste, and is primarily threatened by the voracious appetite of development & accompanying habitat destruction.

This quite large mother is shown carrying a single "pup" (at bottom of photo), a vegetatively propagating bud. The really cool thing about these surveys is that they provide an excuse to thrash around in the prickly heart of the Sonoran desert. Unless science mandates straight-line transects for statistical rigor, few would dare to brave the physical rigors of the desert for days and weeks on end. This labor bore the fruit of knowledge: we located several isolated populations of the Pineapple, and since we had also observed many places without populations of the cactus we began to form an idea of the microclimate and plant associations that the Pima Pineapple Cactus favors. Although it is only a hunch or an intuition, I believe that the members of this field crew are probably now better able to find this cactus than are any other people on Earth.

I wonder if this intuition could be quantified....here is an effort to use non-hypothesis-based factor analysis to do just that in the Colorado Rockies.

Sky Island Alliance

"To my mind these live oak-dotted hills fat with side oats grama, these pine-clad mesas spangled with flowers, these lazy trout streams burbling along under great sycamores and cottonwoods, come near to being the cream of creation." Aldo Leopold (1937)


"This landscape that so enthralled Leopold was where the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Madre kiss, where the plants and animals of the Neotropics mingle with those of the Nearctic, where jaguar and grizzly hunted the same ridges, where elk and javelina browsed and rooted cheek to jowl, where northern goshawks took thick-billed parrots on the wing. Arizona, New Mexico, Chihuahua, and Sonora are landscapes of wonder, beauty, and wildness--and of mind-boggling biological diversity. Aldo Leopold saw this landscape as a single ecological region, as do we today. Sky Island Alliance (SIA) hopes to protect it and restore it to ecological health."
[paraphrased, Wild Earth Journal, 2000: The Wildlands Project.]

Sky Island Photos


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Earth Verse

Wide enough to keep you looking
Open enough to keep you moving
Dry enough to keep you honest
Prickly enough to make you tough
Green enough to go on living
Old enough to give you dreams
Gary Snyder