Saguaros in Tucson, Arizona

After our stay in Sierra Vista, we moved about an hour north to Tucson, Arizona.  This is the home of Saguaro National Park, and we have come to love these majestic cacti.  The big one pictured to the right is at the visitor's center, so it has been monitored closely in its life-time.  When it was 50 years old (in 1966), it was 15 feet tall.  Now another 50 years later, it has grown three arms and is well over 20 feet tall.  The small armless saguaro beside Denisa looks like a baby, but is probably 20 years old.  For those of you keeping track, that means the young one would be almost as old as Denisa.

As slowly as they grow, the giant ones must be very old.  But occasionally we would find a skeleton of a dead saguaro.  It's a chance to see the inside of one of these giants.  Once the green outer layer has dried up, you can see that the skeletons are made of tubes of wood-like structures.

We went on several hikes through the National Park, really enjoying the saguaro.  Some of them are huge!  And all of them seem to sprout interesting appendages at very random angles.  So while we recount our Tucson adventures, just expect more Saguaro cactus pictures because we took way too many pictures to not use some of them in the blog.

Doesn't it look like these two saguaro cacti have their arms poised in a running stance?  Denisa thinks it looks like they are racing each other.


We did other things besides hiking through the desert.  We also went to a Farmer's Market on Saturday morning.  Our only purchase was a large bag of kettle corn.  We're still trying to rationalize that anything with the word "corn" in it must count as a vegetable.

We had read that saguaro usually bloom in May, so we were thrilled to find some blooming already in April.  It's hard to take a good picture of a bloom that is 20 feet in the air.  They start blooming at night and will shrivel by the next afternoon's heat.  But the birds and bees love them for that day.












Some of those bees were living in a hive right off our trail.  Now that Denisa has developed a healthy fear of bees, she wasn't interested in a picture.  But brave Mark took a picture to share.  Just imagine a very loud "Buzzzzzz!" and you'll feel like you were there too.





Saguaros are the trees of the desert, and so they provide nesting for the local birds.  All those holes are apartments for families of birds.







We also went shopping for a backpack for our Grand Canyon hike.  Our nephew Brian is lending us a big one that Mark will carry.  But we need a smaller one for Denisa.  We tried on around 20 different backpacks, walking around with 15 pound weights inside to see how bad each backpack felt.  After all that shopping we bought a Walmart backpack--and then it took 3 different Walmarts to find that one in stock again.  Not every day in the life of retired vacationers can be glamorous.  But this allowed for more narrative and we could sneak in more pictures of saguaro cactus.

Another interesting fact about saguaro is that they grow very slowly, and a very small percentage of plants survive.  The seed's best chance to grow to adulthood is if it germinates under the protection of a desert plant like this palo verde.  Denisa's sister, Connie, was a third grade teacher whose students read a book each year about the nurse plant that protects the saguaro.  So if you've read this far, Connie,  that picture is for you!

Some of the areas look like saguaro forests.  We have found in our travels that we are most amazed at those things that we don't have back home in Oklahoma.  But now that we live every where we wonder if our level of amazement will diminish?




We've been in the desert now long enough that all the ocotillo are blooming.  We feel like real desert locals now that we have watched them go from little buds to flaming blooms.


Since you have suffered through the entire blog of cactus pictures, you deserve a good reptile picture.  While we were driving through the 8-mile loop of the national park, eagle-eye Mark spotted this Gila monster sauntering into the brush beside the road.  He put the car in park, jumped out, and got this picture.  Score--another venomous reptile!

 That deserves another picture of ocotillo and an entire hillside of saguaro--double score!