Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument
I was roughly 45 freeway-minutes outside downtown Phoenix and I considered visiting the city on Saturday but abandoned the idea when I learned the NFC finals were taking place there on Sunday. I suppose I had once known that Arizona had an NFL team, but it was obviously something I’d filed away. Football in this environment struck me as highly incongruous.

Instead, I headed off to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a huge park - 330,000 acres - running along 30 miles of the Arizona-Mexican border.  Over half the park was off-limits to visitors since increased drug and human smuggling culminated in the murder by smugglers of a National Park ranger in 2002. Judging from the practiced evasions I got to my questions about safety I surmised that the area was closed not so much to protect visitors as to give Border Patrol a freer hand out in the field. Anyone who is out there is not supposed to be.

Time would suggest I was maybe half-right. In September 2014, close to six years after my visit, the park service reopened most of Organ Pipe to visitors. The federal government had installed  a 30-mile vehicle barrier fence and a 5.2-mile pedestrian fence; increased the number of NPS security rangers from 5 to 20; upped the Ajo District’s border patrol from 25 agents to over 500; increased the agents at the point of entry from 12 to 32; and installed towers with radio and imaging technology to help track and apprehend illegal smugglers, among other potential evil-doers.

Organ Pipe is as safe as any other park that size, its superintendant concluded, and the previously closed parts were no less safe than the open parts. Border Patrol said it understood and supported the NPS decision. The new plan was to educate the visitors as to the risks and let them decide where to go. I can't wait to go back.

My campsite was at the southern edge of the campground, so I could turn my chair away and see nothing but wipe open (green) desert, particularly nice in the early mornings and late afternoons. Once dark, though, the idyll was somewhat diminished by a horizon of light that appeared to be a city skyline, except no city was down there. It was the lights of the border fence, five miles away.

organ pipe cactus

On Sunday I hiked to Mount Ajo, the highest peak in the monument at 4808 feet. A gorgeous day. The first half of the hike was on a maintained trail but then it became a use trail, built by walking feet. The Park warned of route-finding difficulties but I hike trails like that all the time and had no problem. With the route, that is; the vegetation was another story. 75% of the plants in the desert WANT to hurt you. Now down along the lowlands on the paths or the washes it’s pretty easy to avoid touching them or coming too close and luring an attack. But hiking in the mountains is something else. Like most use trails, this one was alternately narrow or steep or slippery or required some hopping around. And since no one trims the vegetation, the risk of slipping into or grabbing onto or stepping back against a sharp spike were astoundingly high. In the northwest we instinctively grab onto plants for stability while hiking, but this instinct does not serve well in the desert. Plants you don't even see have spikes that will poke a hole in you.  Even when their immediate puncture doesn’t hurt too badly, it often develops into a bruise. I already had a big welt from getting punctured by a dead cactus.

The gauntlet

Still, it was an absolutely brilliant day and a very good hike. Three people from Phoenix plus some communication equipment - part of the Homeland Security apparatus? - were up top.  Views were expansive and included no cities, just endless miles of Sonoran mountain landscape, including the vast reservation of the Tohono O'odham tribe and on into Mexico - no border in sight. I returned via Estes Canyon which was beautiful and a little eerie, as many of the cacti were damaged and looking somewhat deformed. The hike took all day, and after a long slow twilight drive I was back to the campground with that nice hiker feeling: tired and sore and maybe a little beaten up. A great day!

The next day I relaxed around the campsite reading in summery weather that for some reason elicited memories of Tuolumne Meadows. I believe it must have been the possibility of wearing shorts, though here there was no lake to jump into. The campground hosts reported a low the night before of 60 F, and I was pretty sure I hadn’t had a night that warm since August in the Owens Valley. I took a short drive down to the border town of Lukeville to buy some beer. The store was adjacent to the border crossing, the closest I'd come to that phenomenon, though this one seemed sedate.

In late afternoon I went out for a meander along the nature trail leading from the campground. The light was beautiful, the flora was lush, and I was relaxed and taking pictures when at some point, for some reason I can't remember, I decided I needed to go "over there" and started off - in haste. Thawuphhh! I heard it before I felt it, but I felt it soon enough. Two Teddy Bear cholla joints had imbedded in my calf. They hurt - a lot. I tried to pull them out with my hands, and those spines not already in my leg quickly lanced my fingers so now they were bleeding. I subsequently read that pliers are an essential when hiking in cholla country, but I was on the campground nature trail for Pete's sake. I had a camera. So I took a picture of the chunk of cholla in my leg and then limped the half mile or so back to the campground along rugged uneven surface, each step seeming to drive the spines in deeper.





I couldn't find the campground hosts who I figured probably had some experience with this, and the other RV campers were backing away with a "Good luck with that" response. In their defense, I was looking a little dirty and ragged, five miles from a high-security border, with National Park brochures warning of drug traffickers and against helping desperate looking people in need. So I went to the tent section where the first guy I approached said it had happened to him the day before and off he went to get his pliers. Coward that I am I asked him to yank it for me and he did. It hurt only like pulling off a bandage. He then loaned me the pliers so I could pick out the remaining spines, and when I was done I had some two dozen bleeding puncture holes in my left calf. I retuned his knife and gave him a beer. (He was heading out the next morning to watch Obama’s inauguration.)