Saguaro National Park
Tucson, AZ
I have now visited the second most glorious place on earth. Saguaro National Park offers an experience all its own, and in its strange beauty is incredibly compelling.
It helped that the day was incredibly balmy and sunny. We shucked our sweaters, rolled down the windows and drove the loop trail through the park. Imagine this: Every ten feet, in every direction for miles and miles, a majestic cactus reaching for the sky, some of them two and three stories tall. Saguaros can weigh as much as 4000 pounds. They can live two hundred years. Even the little ones that just reached my knee are at least three years old.
I kept taking pictures, hoping to capture the grand panorama of, perhaps, millions of cacti dotting the mountains and desert below. I got a lot of pictures, but I guess you just have to be there.
The park abounds in desert life. We did see some quail, a woodpecker making yet another hole in the cactus, some tiny scurrying things, but missed the diamond-back rattlesnakes and javelina, a really mean-looking wild pig-ish thug of an animal. The last two are why we drove instead of hiked. Not in my little gold flats, which I must have been brain-dead to wear. Except that they looked cute with my jeans.
To be truthful, I could have had ear-high boots and I still wouldn’t have walked among the snakes. Some experiences I'll save for my next life, when I come back as a lady park ranger with long grey braids, well-developed legs, a hearty laugh, gentle eyes and a slight mustache.
Betty
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