If you read my previous post (Black Bottles, Boots, and Borders) you might be a bit dismayed or even scared by my harping on border issues at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. So I want to give equal time to natural beauty of the Monument, because that is what you should really expect here.

Being the Centennial year of the National Park Service, quite a few promotions are going on.  All 410 units of the NPS have been holding occasional free entry days, and there’s a new program to give every fourth grader (and their family) a free pass to the parks for a year.  Some extra funding has been going to improve the parks, too.

Emma always does the Junior Ranger program, but this park also has a “Desert Ranger” program for older kids and adults, and the park offers a special pin to anyone who hikes five miles in the park.  We decided to go for all of it.  Participating in things like this just gives you a better appreciation and enjoyment of a national park, so why not?

Having to study the exhibits in the Visitor Center in order to fill out the Desert Ranger booklet is why now we all know the correct term for a cactus that has this sort of mutation. It’s called “crestate,” and I’ve been told that it’s the result of suppressed genes from the long-ago days when cacti evolved from ancient ferns. (Not sure if that latter part is true.)

We’ve seen many saguaro cactus in Arizona with crestate shapes, but this was the first time we’d spotted it on an Organ Pipe Cactus. Even some rangers didn’t know that was possible.

We spotted that one on the hike to the Milton Mine, about half a mile down the trail on the left, in case you want to check it out for yourself.

There’s not a lot left at the mine locations now. You have to use your imagination, building up from the concrete foundations and a few other things that have survived a hundred years in the desert.

When we visit such places I’m always struck by the difficulty early prospectors would have experienced to get out here, and survive for even a few days.  There’s no natural source of water except a small seep several miles away. To a non-native’s eye there’s no food either, so the miners would undoubtedly pack in supplies as evidenced by the rusted steel cans abandoned in a heap nearby.

From the look of the ore in the tailings pile I assume they were hunting copper (although I’m sure a little silver or gold would have been welcome too). You can see the greenish spots on the rocks, from oxidized copper. Ultimately the mine was unsuccessful. The big commercial successes came later with the advent of open pit mining.

(The town of Ajo north of the park, was a company town for a big mining operation, but the mines there have been idled for years, awaiting a rise in copper prices that would make it profitable to dig again. It’s now a town of Border Patrol agents and their families, housing 550 agents at present.)

We found the best bird watching was right at our campsite.  The sites are well landscaped with all kinds of native plants and cacti, and so visits from Cactus Wrens, Bullock’s Oriole, Gambel’s Quail, and the couple pictured below (species I haven’t identified) were common and easy to photograph.  Bert used his Zip Dee awning and Solar Shade as a sort of contrived “photo blind” and got some nice shots for his collection.

The one creature nobody expects to see in the desert is a fish, but here they are.  Surviving somehow in shallow, hot, sometimes low-oxygen pools and springs, these little devils are a reminder of how life endures even in the most inhospitable spots on the planet.  They’re like little mascots for desert parks: spunky, ancient, and surprising.  In the photo you can see the iridescent blue of an adult male Desert Pupfish, and if you look closely you’ll see several brown females or juveniles as well. They live at Quitobaquito, but you can see them in an exhibit at the Visitor Center.

Now we are home again, and we’ve got our various badges and patches for having completed the Junior Ranger and Desert Ranger books and a 5-mile hike, and we’ve got a fresh ink stamp in our National Parks Passport.  It was a great weekend.

This won’t be our last visit.  I expect we’ll be back with our Airstream many more times. The southwestern desert is a strange and wonderful place, and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is one of the places you can see it best.