Moominmama's Adventures: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

 

In which Moominmama visits Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and nearly gets startled off the side of a mountain...

Unlike hiking in Saguaro National Park or Tucson Mountain Regional Park, Organ Pipe feels much more remote. Moominmama can hike up a ridge and see desert all around. And it's a long drive north before you get to the first gas station!

There are beautiful canyons with towering red walls of volcanic rock that channel any water downward, creating unusually lush, birdsong-filled gorges, sometimes even with a small stream. These are some of Moominmama's favorite hiking trails.

But the remoteness is an illusion. 

The southern edge of the park, which is also a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, is divided by Trump's border wall with Mexico. Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is known as the northernmost area for the rare organ pipe and senita cactuses, but it is also protected because of rare species such as the Senoyta mud turtle and the Sonoran desert pronghorn, the fastest land mammal in North America (and more closely related to giraffe than deer). They are skittish and difficult to find, the rangers say. And I know exactly why they are skittish!

To the north of the park is the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range, which is used for air-to-ground bombing practice. One afternoon while toiling up a steep, rocky section near Ajo Mountain, someone dropped a bomb at the range. Moominmama nearly fell off her perch as the noise penetrated her pores and shook her concentration. I'll even confess to a startled squawk as I grabbed a rock to steady myself.

I had heard the bombs a few times from the campground, but that's down in a valley. Here I was up at least a thousand feet, and I felt it more than I heard it. If I was a pronghorn, not knowing when these explosions would disrupt my peace, I'd be skittish too.

But to get as far away from the bombing as possible inside the park means heading south. A visit to the Quitobaquito oasis, a natural spring used for thousands of years, means driving along 15 miles of that darn fence, seen from the distance here.

It immediately made Moominmama sad. Not because I have all the answers to our immigration challenges, but because I'm the daughter of an immigrant who came here for a better life. And found it.

I'm also aware, I could easily cross that border with my passport and my wallet. And that border crossings for me are different than for those who are poor and brown. 

When you look at the wall, you see the unfairness manifest. Immigrants come here to make a better life for themselves and their families, and I see only that they make our life better in the process (shout out to Bhawani & Damanta, and Asif and their families!). 

But I also believe there are things we can do as a nation so that immigrants have opportunities in their own countries. Because too many feel like they have no other choice than to come for jobs or to escape gang or cartel violence. You look at this rusty monstrosity of a wall, and you can't help but feel there's got to be a better way!

The bright lights that shine along its length at night and the Border Service trucks that constantly run up and down also impact the wildlife. The National Park Service rangers said they tried to get included small openings (the size of a sheet of notebook paper) every half-mile so some of the animals could travel through their bisected ecosystem. The wall builders would only provide this small opening every two miles, which is a long haul for a fist-sized Senoyta mud turtle. And it's not like this was some unmanageable expense since driving along the wall, there are a variety of human-sized, truck-sized and even one tank-sized door bolted and rigged with alarms! 

And if the wall was effective, I'd like to know why theses signs are all over the park along hiking trails? And why the Visitor Center here is named for a young park ranger who was killed when he confronted a drug smuggler?

It's at moments like these that Moominmama prefers to consider the natural world, especially as she writes this, the windows of the Ajo public library just shook from another bomb!

So back to the organ pipe cactus. Unlike the saguaro, this cactus does not invite birds to nest inside. Instead of the circle of pole-like supports inside a saguaro, the organ pipe contains a single hollow pipe that doesn't leave room for a nest. 

Which doesn't mean that birds don't find a way. Here's a nest I stumbled on atop a cholla cactus. It's a tube of dried grass and might have once housed a cactus wren or curved-bill thrasher family, sheltering it from the night cold, I'm told.

Meanwhile, the organ pipe waits to bloom in the heat of the summer like the saguaro, after which it will create an edible fruit. But interesting fact, this cactus is pollinated not by bees or birds, but by bats. An organ pipe bloom opens only at night and closes by day.  

Climate change, however, is changing the relationship between bat and cactus. The organ pipe and saguaro blooms are coming earlier in the year now, before all the bats have migrated up from Mexico. 

As a result the window for bats to get nectar and for cacti to pollinate is shorter, endangering both. That is one of the reasons the park service here protects bat habitat, using old human structures -- the many defunct mines all over this area. They are blocked off in ways that bats can enter and exit and humans cannot, as in the photo to the right.

Speaking of mining, the town of Ajo in whose library I sit, is a company town built around a large copper mine. Billions of dollars of copper was extracted, while the ground-up rock pulled out of the earth formed mountains south of town. But the copper ran out, and the mine closed in 1985. Ajo is left to recreate itself as a tourist town. Moominmama will go spend some money in a local coffee shop shortly!

In the meantime, I leave you with a picture of a desert sunrise. There is beauty here regardless of the challenges. And I promise next time, as a change of pace, to lead with photos of some of the incredible desert flowers!