Scenes from the desert

Thursday
Today, we returned to the western part of the National Park. We had thought of climbing up to the ridge, and maybe up to Wasson Peak, but Jen had read that there was a wind advisory starting later in the morning, and it wasn’t going to be overly warm anyway, so we decided to leave that for another day. Instead we started from the Cam-boh trailhead toward the north of the park, and did a loop comprising the Prophecy Wash trail, Picture Rocks Wash trail, Ironwood Forest trail and finally along the Cam-boh trail. This trail is used quite a bit by horses, as is evident from their droppings. Besides the impressive saguaro cacti, there are of course many other kinds of cacti, particularly different varieties of cholla cactus, prickly pear cactus and hedgehog cactus, shown in the lower centre image. The orange red flower in the lower right is the bloom of the Ocatillo plant, which is indigenous to the Sonoran desert and Chihuahuan desert in the southwestern US and northern Mexico. While semi succulent and a desert plant, it is actually more closely related to tea and blueberries than cacti. Much of the year the plant appears to be an arrangement of long spiky dead sticks. However, with rainfall, the plant quickly becomes covered with small leaves which may remain for weeks or months. The bright red flowers form at the very end of the tall stems. Most of the ones we saw today did not have leaves, but still had some of the distinctive flowers. The bird life was rather elusive today, heard but not seen! Whilst the original Prophecy Wash was quite wide, and a bit of a trudge through loose gravel, the final Wash we went along was more interesting, narrower, deeper and with rocky outcrops at the side. The total hike was 8.6 miles with about 1000 feet elevation gain. It was mid to late afternoon by the time we’d finished, and we decided we’d earned an ice cream, and so picked out an ice cream place from our phone, and headed there. By this time, the skies had totally clouded over, it was cooling down and the wind, as predicted had picked up, so it wasn’t ideal ice cream weather, but we still enjoyed it!

Step count for today: 21,201