Deserts bewilder the senses, cacti of all varieties sprout copiously in many areas. From the minor evidence of rock transforming before your very eyes life springs out from where there seems to be nothing. They all have marvelous qualities they have learned and developed, evolving over time, to combat the intense heat, the stark opposite nights in cold, and the lack of water save the trickles of the last rainy season. The Creosote bush secretes a substance which prevents anything from growing within a particular radius around them – protecting themselves and making sure that their species will forever dominate. Allowing them to grow they will terrorize all the other plants much like Sumac in the northeast - that is all you have; fields and fields.
Even in ground down and blasted
rock, rolling up an down contour lines on 7 minute maps, rows and rows of
bushes pop up like planned communities, leave the land be for a moment, and you
get the sense that all in the world will remain just so, if we would only let it
be.
Other, more famous, desert plants
use stinger to prevent would-be predators from stealing their precious
commodity – water – that they have meticulously stored for those searing hot
days and dry barren nights. In the end it is all about survival. One species
wipes out another then draws itself inner and closer to protect what they have
adapted for.
Take the cholla cactus for
example: Come upon them in the desert you tuck in your clothes, change your
shoes, and tip toe past – not wanting to disturb them at all. Pointed
dagger-like stingers jump out as you pass!
Cholla have cylindrical rather
than flat stem segments. They actually seem to jump out at you from their ball
like extension, jabbing like you stole something that belongs to them,
injecting their own protective solution into your skin. Stung only once and you
will never want to be stung again and if you remember you will be able to steer
clear from disturbing their desert existence..
The
stingers can even pierce the bottom of your boots.
Arrayed across vast stretches of
a once wet desert, sucked dry to quench LA’s thirst as it grew and expanded,
are thousands of these cholla cactus’s. They clump together in patches called
Cholla Gardens.
This is also good climbing
country. And although the rock looks smooth nooks jab and stick all day long.
Climbers have to keep their hands well protected for nothing will save you from
drawing blood on these quartz monzonite faces. Faces that draw thousands of
visitors each year.
Others take to the mountains and
walk to find what it means to let out primal screams in the land of the
primordial. They come to connect themselves with Creation.
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