[TRANSCRIPT]

0:00:00 - (Alicia Pike): 90 Miles from Needles is brought to you by generous support from people just like you.

0:00:05 - (Chris Clarke): You can join their ranks by going to 90MilesfromNeedles.com/Donate

0:00:10 - (Alicia Pike):, are we going far? Should I bring my camelback?

0:00:15 - (Chris Clarke): I don't really have much intention to go far.

0:00:19 - (Alicia Pike): So that means pack five gallons.

0:00:21 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, right.

0:00:23 - (Alicia Pike): Chris doesn't have much intention of going very far.

0:00:42 - (Alicia Pike): It's time for 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast with your hosts, Chris Clarke and Alicia Pike.

0:00:57 - (Newsreel Announcer): The giant sahwara monarch of the cactus family and.

0:01:00 - (Newsreel Announcer): Trademark of the Southwest.

0:01:03 - (Newsreel Announcer): Believe me, this is where the poet and a man comes out.

0:01:07 - (Newsreel Announcer): A warm sun, the tang of sagebrush and grease wood. A weird sahwara cactus embracing air. I wonder what folks back home are.

0:01:17 - (Newsreel Announcer): Doing shoveling snow or putting on tire chains. New York, Arizona. Pretty coeds from the University of Arizona, take a riding lesson through the world's largest cactus forest near the city. The government has made this picturesque stretch of desert land a national monument to save the giant cacti for future generations. Some of the saguaro are a thousand years old. It's a great place to learn how to ride, for it's a choice between the comforts of a saddle or landing on a lot of little cacti.

0:01:47 - (Alicia Pike): Hey, thanks for joining us here at 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host, Alicia Pike.

0:01:55 - (Chris Clarke): And I'm your host, Chris Clarke. And we are talking today about the giant cactus of Arizona, celebrated in song and story and corporate logo, the saguaro. Now, I should say that despite what you just heard in that newsreel, it's unlikely in the extreme that any Saguaro has ever lived for a thousand years. That's a bit of folklore, but it's really unsurprising that a plant as striking as the Saguaro has generated some folklore around it.

0:02:22 - (Alicia Pike): In today's episode, we'll be talking a little bit about that folklore, along with some science and cultural affection for the saguaro. This is the first of a two parter. Part two will involve talking to indigenous people about their relationship with the Saguaro. That'll be coming your way in a few weeks, so stay tuned.

0:02:42 - (Chris Clarke): For now, let's hop in the old crosstrek and head to Brenda, Arizona, on a very hot day to visit some of those iconic critters we call saguaros.

0:02:54 - (Chris Clarke): All right, so we are outside of Brenda, Arizona, and we are in a bit of BLM land. There are a lot of saguaros and ironwoods palo verdes. Okatillos. Sparse creosote that is not looking all that healthy. And the saguaros are definitely showing signs of wear and injury.

0:03:18 - (Alicia Pike): Behemoth so big.

0:03:21 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, yeah.

0:03:23 - (Audrey Scheere): Okay.

0:03:23 - (Alicia Pike): Shall we stroll?

0:03:25 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, let's check this stuff out around within a short stone's throw of this fence and then maybe check out on the other side of the road there's a very dead Saguaro.

0:03:37 - (Alicia Pike): Oh, so these are the ribs.

0:03:40 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:03:41 - (Alicia Pike): I've read these are used for building materials. They feel very strong.

0:03:51 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it's got to hold up several tons of water.

0:03:54 - (Alicia Pike): I love how this is a combination of woody and fibrous instead of just a sponge. It's like a stick house version of a cactus.

0:04:03 - (Chris Clarke): And among the last things to survive intact are the spines.

0:04:08 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, piles of them.

0:04:10 - (Chris Clarke): Got just the aureoles all over.

0:04:13 - (Alicia Pike): Cactus areolas it's a tidy pile.

0:04:17 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. Well, it looks like the really interesting ones to look at are over here. Many, many armed mature. Saguaros we're walking through a creosote flat that is absolutely thick with desiccated cow shit.

0:04:34 - (Alicia Pike): Look at this trail. This looks like the cow trail. Yeah, they all come in on this. I'm going to take this way. It looks like there's another one. Yeah, you can go in front. Sorry to start trail bossing.

0:04:51 - (Chris Clarke): No, it's totally fine.

0:04:53 - (Alicia Pike): I know I'm not supposed to break away from you or anyone I'm hiking with in the desert, but still making rookie moves after all these years.

0:05:02 - (Chris Clarke): Hey, breaking away and walking 5ft in a different direction, I think.

0:05:06 - (Alicia Pike): Have you not watched enough Westerns gone wrong? Where? Yeah, dude takes a left, dude takes a right. Dude who took a right at the junction. Never done, seen or heard from him again. Yep, he just vanished.

0:05:19 - (Chris Clarke): Separation rapid all over.

0:05:21 - (Alicia Pike): Certainly know that's an episode of Bonanza.

0:05:24 - (Chris Clarke): Hey, somebody's been camping here by this ironwood little fire ring. That's nice. Go take a look at these many arm guys. Man. There's a lot of hilo woodpecker poles that are probably on occasion resided in by elf owls, at least like to think that. So even this new chute on this side, which might be only, I don't know, 50 years old, it's definitely seen better days split open. It's got cavities, bunch of dead flower buds.

0:06:03 - (Alicia Pike): All right, let's have a look around for owl pellets. See who really lives in those holes.

0:06:09 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, there is a spent fruit. So they're getting pollinated a little, at least.

0:06:14 - (Alicia Pike): Oh, we got a nice pack rat midden going over here.

0:06:17 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, there you go. Look at that.

0:06:19 - (Alicia Pike): Man, there's some severe paraderm damage. I don't know if that's what you'd call it on a Saguaros, but yeah, the critters have done chewed through to the wood and it's still standing strong. Of course, it gets windy as soon as we start recording. Not seeing any owl pellets of any kind. The pack rats have been busy, though.

0:06:42 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, this is a really impressive Saguaro right here. Got maybe nine good sized arms on it.

0:06:50 - (Alicia Pike): And it's taking nursery from the nursery to the nursing home. Yeah, it's using two different branches on either side of it to create a structure. And it's actually sandwiched. You can see a little bit of strain here. You can see the abrasion where it's been moving and growing. That's something. Those are chunky arms. Yes. There's ten, nine and ten.

0:07:22 - (Chris Clarke): Okay. Yeah, I would be thrilled to have any of these arms as a single plant in my yard.

0:07:28 - (Alicia Pike): Right. Oh, here's a baby over here hiding in the shade of the nursery.

0:07:35 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, that's great.

0:07:37 - (Alicia Pike): Just maybe up to my belly button. So about a yard, I'd say. Some nice cottony growth at the Crown looks real happy.

0:07:48 - (Chris Clarke): So let's just walk over to that little clump and then glass.

0:07:52 - (Alicia Pike): At. Chris wants to walk deeper into the desert when it's above 105, but we.

0:07:58 - (Chris Clarke): Are going to turn around and head back to the car after this clump.

0:08:01 - (Alicia Pike): Alicia's shirt is still moist. The timer is not up yet. Onward, ho.

0:08:09 - (Chris Clarke): What'd you call me?

0:08:11 - (Henry Brean): Ow. Oh, prickles.

0:08:14 - (Alicia Pike): They got me.

0:08:15 - (Chris Clarke): Sorry about that. Could have warned you.

0:08:17 - (Alicia Pike): Walked right into it.

0:08:18 - (Chris Clarke): I could have warned you.

0:08:19 - (Alicia Pike): My bad. You don't need to warn me. I got eyes. I know what it is.

0:08:24 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, I think these are the selfie saguaros right here.

0:08:27 - (Henry Brean): Oh.

0:08:27 - (Alicia Pike): Chris Selfie Saguaros.

0:08:31 - (Chris Clarke): Yep.

0:08:32 - (Alicia Pike): Listen to you.

0:08:33 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, these are looking okay. Healthy enough.

0:08:36 - (Alicia Pike): Not a lot of holes. No damage at the trunk base where it's all woody. Some exposed root from the water flow action of where it's living, but it seems fine with that. Very fine with that. The ribs are so pronounced.

0:08:54 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it could use a drink for sure, but it's not in danger yet. Still got a fair amount of moisture inside there. They will get very accordiony.

0:09:05 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, the wrinkling, the way it buckles and wrinkles under the weight of the arm.

0:09:12 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, that one is really dehydrated. You can see, like, the folds are almost touching each other. Yeah, this is, like, the perfect illustration of the nursery.

0:09:23 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah. Let's grab a photo.

0:09:25 - (Chris Clarke): Saguaro with three arms, and it's a good 20ft tall, and it's surrounded by a palo verde. And the palo verde has probably given it shelter for its entire life.

0:09:37 - (Alicia Pike): Oh, they're growing right next to each other. Friends for life. That looks real thirsty, though. You mentioned the ribs on the other one. These ribs are not only nearly touching, but they're dehydrated deflated. They look thin.

0:09:55 - (Chris Clarke): So the Saguaro is saying to the palo Verde, chris, why didn't you bring enough water?

0:10:01 - (Alicia Pike): Sharing is caring, don't you know? Do you want to check out that last green one in the ironwood? Because it looks so good. And then we'll stop finding out what's around the next creek bend.

0:10:13 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, that's nifty.

0:10:15 - (Alicia Pike): This one's got a unique looking growing formation here. Yeah, like, segmented. And the segments are growing segments that.

0:10:24 - (Chris Clarke): Has had some damage done to it over the decades, and it just keeps living and growing pieces of itself back, and that's awesome.

0:10:37 - (Alicia Pike): Well, they certainly are impressive. The tallest cacti in the United States, right?

0:10:43 - (Chris Clarke): Yep.

0:10:43 - (Alicia Pike): What is wrong with you, going out to stand in the sun? You're a true desert rat, I tell you. The shade of the ironwood is so inviting.

0:10:54 - (Chris Clarke): It is really nice. Yeah.

0:10:56 - (Alicia Pike): To see you standing out there in the full sun is, like… very tidy area, very browsed. There's clearly a lot of activity around here. I wonder if it's I mean, there's cattle poop, but what else is cruising around here? You got those rascally coyotes.

0:11:19 - (Chris Clarke): Coyotes definitely pack rats, almost certainly rabbits and jackrabbits.

0:11:26 - (Alicia Pike): I love how there just keeps seeming to be another tree and another tree that has a really great cluster of saguaros growing in it. It's the total nurse tree symbiosis going on out here. Yeah, there's a lot of standalones, but pretty clear. Look at how many there are in that tree. Like one, two, three, at least four individuals, not more.

0:11:49 - (Chris Clarke): Just really loves being in a place where there are saguaros with many arms off in the distance, and you're just like, looking at them and thinking about how long they've stood there and what different kinds of stuff they've seen.

0:12:03 - (Alicia Pike): There's a very tall, dead one with no arms next to a very tall, alive one with no arms, and I'm going to do everything in my power.

0:12:12 - (Alicia Pike): To not suggest that we go over there.

0:13:28 - (Alicia Pike): We're not alone in thinking it's too hot. For the last month or so, lots of stories have been hitting the news about mature saguaros across the state of Arizona dropping dead because of the heat.

0:13:39 - (Chris Clarke): Though it makes for attractive headlines, the heat wave that we're presently enduring and its toll on Saguaros is just one of the problems saguaros face in the 21st century. As far back as the early 1940s, scientists worried whether Saguaros might be on the decline, especially in what was then the newly established Saguaro National Monument. In among the stories on dying saguaros, this past few weeks, we saw news of a long term study on the cacti in Saguaro National Park and the retirement of a couple of scientists, tom Orem and Nancy Ferguson, who for the last 40 years had been continuing a study of the national parks cacti begun in the 1940s.

0:14:18 - (Alicia Pike): The reporter who wrote that story, henry Breen of the Arizona Daily Star, sat down with Chris to chat about Tom and Nancy and their study, which may well be the longest-term study of a native plant species on record. Let's listen.

0:14:34 - (Henry Brean): My name is Henry Brean. I'm a reporter with the Arizona Daily Star newspaper down here in Tucson, Arizona. Before that, I was in Las Vegas for about 20 OD years, working for the Las Vegas Review journal, where I covered water and the environment.

0:14:49 - (Chris Clarke): And we definitely appreciated your work there. So what attracted you to the story of Tom Oram and Nancy Ferguson?

0:14:57 - (Henry Brean): Oh, wow. Where to start? For one thing, I hadn't actually met them before, and I wish I had gotten connect with them before they stopped doing this survey, the Saguaro survey that they did for decades. They stopped actually doing it a year ago, so I didn't actually get to see them in action. But I heard they'd been given an award by the park service for their scientific lifetime achievement. So I was introduced to them that way.

0:15:20 - (Henry Brean): But Tom and Nancy are both devoted scientists, but they're also this adorable married couple who finish each other's sentences and riff on each other. Tom and Nancy spent about a little over 40 years doing an annual survey of all the Saguaro cactuses on 610 acre plots in Saguaro National Park. These were survey plots that were set up in the early forty s. And they picked up and carried on this annual study.

0:15:46 - (Henry Brean): They would go out there every year and they would count every sorrow, they would log Saguaro deaths, they would add new baby saguaros to their survey and they would go look at every single cactus once a year and just chart how it was doing.

0:15:59 - (Chris Clarke): And when did they start doing this? Sounds like it was roughly the 80s.

0:16:04 - (Henry Brean): Yeah. So Tom did his first, I believe in 1978 or 79 and then Nancy joined him in the field a couple of years later. They were married in 1980. So she joined him a couple of years after that. He started doing it with a guy named Stan Alcorn, another researcher who did it for 40 years himself. They overlapped. They did it together until 1999 when he passed away and then they took it over for him and did it for another 20 years after that.

0:16:32 - (Chris Clarke): So as I understand it, the origins of the study happened in a kind of different context than we're facing now. Something that I've read about before. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what the study was originally intended to work out.

0:16:44 - (Henry Brean): Yeah, the early 40s were a pretty desperate time back then. It was Saguaro National Monument. It wasn't a national park yet and it only included the Eastern District of the park as it stands now, which is over on the eastern side of Tucson and the Rincon Mountains or at the base of the Rincon Mountains. And so this national monument was established, I think in 1933 on that patch of land. And one of the first things that researchers discovered out there was it appeared to be a bunch of adult Saguaros and no recruitment, no babies coming along.

0:17:12 - (Henry Brean): And they started to worry that they just established a Saguaro National Monument on a patch of land where the Saguaros were going to go extinct. So there was a panic mode to try and find out whether there was going to be a future for Saguaros on this new national monument. So they launched this study and they did some just crazy Hail Mary, world War II style stuff out there. There's a bacterial rot that Saguaros get and they were noticing that in some of the saguaros out there and they were worried that it was like Dutch elm disease.

0:17:42 - (Chris Clarke): Right.

0:17:42 - (Henry Brean): So they decided to try and see if they could put a stop to it. They picked out, I think it was like a 320-acre plot sorrows. And they went in and they cut down every single saguaro with signs of bacterial rot and bulldozed them into trenches and burned them with kerosene, something you probably wouldn't see in a national park these days.

0:18:00 - (Chris Clarke): No.

0:18:00 - (Henry Brean): And there was just this desperate effort to try and halt this horrible disease. Turned out they were wrong about what it was, thankfully. But that was the sort of thing that's a backdrop for why they started doing these surveys and bringing in people to try and keep track of what was going on with the Saguaros on an annual basis. That's where this survey began, was with that sort of thing.

0:18:18 - (Chris Clarke): Presumably that bacterial rot stopped being as much of a factor in the population dynamics at Saguaro.

0:18:24 - (Henry Brean): It's still a factor from what Tom and Nancy and other actress have told me, but it's more akin to something that happens late in life with Saguaros. In large part, the data as they've collected has shown that if saguaros live past a certain point, they tend to live a long time, and then obviously, mortality swoops up as the older they get. Essentially, it's something that happens to them in old age. A lot of the time they'll get this bacterial rot near the end of their lives, and it'll finish them off.

0:18:52 - (Chris Clarke): So like pneumonia? Pretty much.

0:18:54 - (Henry Brean): Sure, like that. Yeah.

0:18:57 - (Chris Clarke): I've taken a look at one of the papers that Tom and Nancy published, but I wonder if there's a coherent trend that they noticed as they were doing this 40 years project of documenting the lives of these Saguaros, which it sounds like they got to know really well. I mean, 60 acres over 40 years. That's some deep familiarity with a piece of landscape.

0:19:16 - (Henry Brean): Absolutely. And they got almost personally acquainted with individual plants to the point where they didn't use GPS devices. They would go out and they'd find their plots by recognizing individual plants and saying, okay, we're here. And they knew them by their numbers. And Nancy even joked that there's different size classes for Saguaros that they move up through, and when they get to be, I think it's over 6ft tall, they graduate to the next size class.

0:19:40 - (Henry Brean): So for a while there, they were actually taking graduation photos of some of the saguaros on their plots. She said they stopped doing that, but they did that for a while. They would take what she called graduation photos. But, yeah, they got personally acquainted with some of these plants. That's one of the things that I find so amazing about Saguaros. I grew up in the Sonoran Desert, so I've been around Saguaros my whole life, and it's because they look like maybe a human figure.

0:20:02 - (Henry Brean): They have personality and they have an individual identity to an extent. But yeah, so over the long term, like I said, they started the study when things were looking pretty bleak for recruitment of Saguaros in the park and that went on in the early days of the study. They don't want him for decades, the poor guy who they took a study over for, I think, 20 years, he would go out and he would almost never find a baby saguaro the whole time he would be out there.

0:20:27 - (Henry Brean): It was really bleak looking. Eventually they began to see that trend reverse itself to a bit. I think when they started in 1942, they counted 1500 saguaros on these 60 acres. Since then, in the decade since, they've been replaced by 600 sorrows. So obviously there's a pretty big decline. And one of the things that's interesting to me about this is that there's still so much about the saguaro that they're still learning.

0:20:53 - (Henry Brean): And I think one of the conclusions they've come to is that part of this might just be how saguaros operate. That for desert plants, one of the ways you survive is by living a long time so that you can make it through these bad spots of long dry spells and still reproduce. A swirl cactus has a reproductive life that might go 100 years. So you figure you can live through a few droughts and reproduce successfully if you live long enough.

0:21:19 - (Henry Brean): So that's one of the things that they came to believe. I think we're probably also seeing some feedback from longer droughts, more extreme weather events that we're causing because of climate change. So I think teasing some of that stuff out is what they'll need to do. The people who take on this survey in the future will need to do as we move forward with this thing. But we're probably seeing some of that too. I think there was a couple of ten year periods during the time they'd been doing the survey that were among the driest in centuries in the Sonoran Desert.

0:21:47 - (Henry Brean): That's maybe what we have to look forward to. Saguaros having to live in through some of these longer, dry spells, it strikes.

0:21:54 - (Chris Clarke): Me as something very similar to what we're looking at out here, though obviously some of the particulars are very different. But with the Western Joshua Tree, which we've covered a bunch, the attempts in California to protect it, we're very much looking at likely long decline and actually potential extirpation from Joshua Tree National Park. And it's just interesting that a lot of the threats that are identified drought, a wildfire issue, et cetera, just seems like there's a lot of parallels there. I've often thought of Saguaros and Joshua Trees as sort of spiritually related to each other.

0:22:31 - (Henry Brean): Sure. Yeah. And in my career, I've had the pleasure of being able to live in both the Sonoran and the Mojave Desert and develop a relationship with both the Saguaro and the Joshua Tree that I found really rewarding. You mentioned the fire issue and things. Something else I think that's interesting about what they've studied is that when they first started studying the Saguaros in this area, the monument had been established. And some of the external threats, human cause external threats, began to be eliminated. Things like coming into the forest and cutting down nurse trees for firewood or grazing cattle and then ranchers. This one I wasn't familiar with, but ranchers killing predators to protect their herds, which led to an explosion of rodents that weren't being controlled by predators, and the rodents were eating the baby sugaros.

0:23:20 - (Henry Brean): So some of those threats have been eliminated now that the land is protected within a park. Something else Tom and Nancy documented. You could really begin to see that those early threats have been eliminated. So now what they're seeing in subsequent decades is more related to things like drought. And it's a little easier to get some of the feedback, some of the background noise out of what they're seeing.

0:23:41 - (Chris Clarke): I think the big thing that struck me about this story is that it seems like the kind of labor of love that you should see a lot throughout the desert in various different places, whether it's Tucson or St. George or whatever, and you just don't see that. It's one of the things that startled me the more I learn about the desert over the last 15 or 20 years is that we really don't know what's out there. A lot of the time.

0:24:03 - (Chris Clarke): That's changing somewhat because the desert is getting more interesting for people that are doing, like, graduate work. But an 80 year long longitudinal study, they don't happen. Right. It's fascinating to me that it's essentially people's commitment and determination and strength of will that makes this happen.

0:24:21 - (Henry Brean): And we're talking here about a plant that is so charismatic and so iconic to the Sonoran Desert that it's got a national park established in its name and for its protection. And it still takes this retired couple researchers to carry on a study like this because the National Park Service has limited resources and they've done some science work and they're doing some science work out there. But, yeah, even the plants that we've established parks for, like the Joshua Tree and the Sawara, we're still learning about it. I think that's interesting. If it was a plant that we had some sort of commercial or industrial use for, we'd know a lot more about it. If it was something we cultivated, we'd know a lot more about it. But, yeah, this is new to science, is to study something just for the sake of studying it. Right.

0:25:06 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. I noticed that when I first got into this line of work. There's a whole lot of peer reviewed literature on Mojave yuccas. And that's apparently because cattle like to eat them. And so you can find discussions of the nutritive value and whether or not there's any kind of pharmacological effect and how you can get them to grow faster and all this kind of stuff. And that's the one species that I can think of that people have really paid attention to in the desert for any length of time.

0:25:36 - (Chris Clarke): Saguaros and Joshua trees are good for attracting tourists and not much else. You mentioned one of the issues that occupies a lot of time in my work life, which is funding for the Park Service. This study is being taken up by Park Service botanists. What do you see as the forecast for this being able to continue for another five or ten or 20 years?

0:25:54 - (Henry Brean): I think that the prognosis is probably, at least in the near term, it's in very good hands. One of the people that's taking it over is a longtime park biologist by the name of Don Swan, who's been at Saguaro for decades and worked fairly closely with Tom and Nancy and is a natural guy to take it over. I think he's getting ready to retire, but I suspect he'll probably continue. And he's got a younger researcher who he's established as the lead for the study.

0:26:20 - (Henry Brean): I think it's got some momentum now, and I think the fact that it's now got this sort of reputation, this prestige of being this maybe longest running study of its kind in the Park Service will help it to continue its momentum. I think it got the staying power now. I'm hopeful that they'll keep it going. It would be just a tragedy to let a data set that's been kept this long fade away. One of the really interesting things that Nancy told me, and I hope they at least do this much, is that in spite of the fact they've been doing this for 80 years, they still don't have the entire lifespan of a single plant, full lifespan of a single, because these things live so long. But if they keep going for another 50, 80 years or whatever it's going to take, they could literally follow one from establishment to its full life and its death and get a real clear picture in one year increments of the entire lifespan of a single saguaro, which would be kind of an amazing thing to do. And she's hopeful that it'll happen, and I think I am too.

0:27:19 - (Chris Clarke): That's great. And maybe we'll be able to wrangle a spot in the van as the park biologist goes out and surveys next time somebody's out there.

0:27:27 - (Henry Brean): Yeah, I'll bet they would be happy to have you out there. Good road trip and a good time of year to be down here.

0:27:32 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, for sure. Henry, thank you for joining us on a weekend when I know you have a pressing deadline. Really appreciate the few minutes of your time to talk about this. And please keep writing. We will. Keep reading.

0:27:44 - (Henry Brean): Yeah, I appreciate.

0:27:49 - (Chris Clarke): Like, it's not just about the Saguaro, it's about the Saguaro and its relationship with all these other plants. Ironwoods, palo verdes, mesquites. Probably smoke trees in some places.

0:28:02 - (Alicia Pike): Time to start walking back.

0:28:04 - (Chris Clarke): Yes.

0:28:04 - (Alicia Pike): My shirt is dry and my water is hot. Or I can at least moisten my shirt if we want to go look at more Saguaros, get my cold water bottle.

0:28:16 - (Chris Clarke): Here's a Saguaro using a creosote as a nurse plant.

0:28:20 - (Alicia Pike): They're so tall.

0:28:22 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it's so awesome.

0:28:25 - (Chris Clarke): I just really like them.

0:28:27 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah. Photos really do not do it justice. To stand next to one of these behemoths is just you got to crank that neck all the way back.

0:28:37 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, look at that.

0:28:40 - (Alicia Pike): Kit fox, maybe possible.

0:28:43 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:28:43 - (Alicia Pike): Badger, maybe.

0:28:45 - (Chris Clarke): Badger. Rabbit. Kit foxes would tend to be a little bit narrower, but I don't think that that's not qualified.

0:28:54 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, it's a little short, but even for a hair, I don't know. Always so much conjecture on desert hills.

0:29:06 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from Needles. The desert protection podcast. We don't know. Could be. We don't know.

0:29:13 - (Alicia Pike): Could be.

0:29:15 - (Chris Clarke): Okay, let's keep recording.

0:29:16 - (Chris Clarke): But head up that way in the car a little bit.

0:29:19 - (Alicia Pike): Okay.

0:29:20 - (Alicia Pike): All right, crank that AC up.

0:29:25 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, air conditioning is so nice when it is 107 degrees out.

0:29:30 - (Alicia Pike): Oh, that feels much better. Such a beautiful scene. Ocotillos and the rocky outcropping cross the highway, scrub land all around.

0:29:46 - (Chris Clarke): It's gorgeous.

0:29:48 - (Alicia Pike): Gorgeous, darling. Just gorgeous. Ten years to grow its first inch, I think, is what I read.

0:29:56 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:29:57 - (Alicia Pike): What a slog. You got desert tortoise who are on a similar track where they can't mate or do their life's purpose until they're eight to ten years old. The lesson we've got to take from nature is log is the journey takes a long time to get to where you're going.

0:30:22 - (Chris Clarke): Something about the mountains in Arizona, in southwestern Arizona especially. I mean, they're just sublimely, forbidding looking, majestic and difficult.

0:30:36 - (Alicia Pike): Same time.

0:30:37 - (Chris Clarke): That's me.

0:30:39 - (Alicia Pike): All right. Looking at some of these saguaros that are growing in the trees, and they're all damaged, and they don't look beautiful like the classic . But does that make them any less of a cactus? No, they're still doing their job. They're still contributing. They're still a part of this planet. God, this hillside is fucking gorgeous.

0:31:04 - (Chris Clarke): Cafe with a saguaro logo with a.

0:31:07 - (Alicia Pike): Saguaros growing through the roof. Did you see that?

0:31:11 - (Chris Clarke): I didn't.

0:31:11 - (Alicia Pike): They cut a hole in the roof for a Saguaros growing on the corner. Got to turn around for that. But to get a second view of this rocky hill amazing. It looks like an MC escher in nature.

0:31:24 - (Chris Clarke): Oh, look at that. You are right.

0:31:25 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, look at that. It's right there on the corner.

0:31:30 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, just a vent. That's fantastic.

0:31:36 - (Alicia Pike): Nobody can argue with this place calling themselves Black Rock Village.

0:31:40 - (Chris Clarke): Seriously?

0:31:41 - (Alicia Pike): Black rock.

0:31:41 - (Alicia Pike): Everything is built out of black rock. The volcanic rock from across the street, or non volcanic rock. We're not saying what it is because we don't know.

0:31:51 - (Chris Clarke): We don't know.

0:31:52 - (Alicia Pike): We're not going to say we know. Not today. Oh, there's a helicopter landing pad. This place is fancy.

0:31:59 - (Chris Clarke): Glamping.

0:32:00 - (Alicia Pike): Helipad Glamping, says the Bitter Desert Defender overburdened with Glamping projects, SWAT down like whack a mole.

0:32:13 - (Chris Clarke): Why don't. People decide that Brenda, Arizona is the cool spot. I mean, Joshua Tree is nice and all, but this place has saguaros and spooky looking BlackRock constructed mountains.

0:32:26 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, there's a lot going on here. Is it hotter here? Longer?

0:32:33 - (Chris Clarke): The heat might be a little hotter, yeah. See? What is our altitude here? 1570ft.

0:32:41 - (Alicia Pike): Okay. And some of these guys are just chewed the fuck up.

0:32:45 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. And I have the feeling that some of them that are closer to the road are chewed up by shotgun like David Grundman.

0:32:57 - (Alicia Pike): I don't know what that means.

0:32:58 - (Chris Clarke): Obnoxious little twerp.

0:33:00 - (Alicia Pike): I don't know what that means.

0:33:02 - (Chris Clarke): Play saguaro by the Austin Lounge lizards.

0:33:04 - (Alicia Pike): Oh, you're quoting that song you sent me. Okay.

0:33:08 (Siri): Now playing Saguaro by Austin Lounge Lizards on Apple Music.

0:33:11 - (Austin Lounge Lizards): The daylight was slipping through the mountains to the east. He grabbed his guns and he mounted up. He was off to say the least. He drove along in silence. The chill was in the air. The monsters had to be cut down as they'd soon be everywhere. His name was David Grundman. A noxious little twerp saw the giant plants as the Clanton gang and himself is Wyatt Earth. So he drove out to the desert. They wouldn't come to town.

0:33:48 - (Austin Lounge Lizards): in Maricopa County. He vowed to shoot them down. Saguaro a menace to the west.

0:34:04 - (Alicia Pike): Is that just a made-up story?

0:34:06 - (Chris Clarke): No, absolutely based on a true story, including the guy's name.

0:34:12 - (Alicia Pike): Wow. What a douchebag.

0:34:20 - (Alicia Pike): This is a little hard to admit for us Mojave desert rats with our love for Joshua trees. But if there's a single plant that symbolizes the southwestern deserts, it would have to be the Saguaro no contest.

0:34:34 - (Chris Clarke): And if you were looking for the epicenter of Saguaro love in the desert, well, this is a biased opinion because it's one of my favorite places, but Tucson would have to be the epicenter for me.

0:34:45 - (Alicia Pike): We sat down with our friend Audrey Scheereto talk saguaros in Tucson. Audrey's instagram account, Old Pueblo Curiosities, is basically a love letter to Tucson, and we were stoked to hear what she had to say about America's tallest cactus.

0:35:01 - (Chris Clarke): Audrey, thank you for joining us.

0:35:03 - (Audrey Scheere): Thank you so much for having me.

0:35:05 - (Chris Clarke): What brought you to turn this into an instagram feed?

0:35:08 - (Audrey Scheere): It was a pandemic hobby. I was just kind of looking for ways to connect and get involved with the community. I had worked from home for quite a long time, and I just found that telling stories about local businesses was one way to do it. And then the more questions I asked, the more curious I got. And it's been fascinating. It's been about three years. And right at the beginning is where I actually came across you, Chris. I was asking, what are the difference between all the yuccas in my neighborhood?

0:35:35 - (Audrey Scheere): And I couldn't figure it out. I was searching everywhere on the Internet. What is the alada? What is the brevifolia? And then I thought I found a Rostrada, which I had no idea, and nothing on the Internet was being clear. And then I found your name. I found one of your blogs, and I thought, hey, why don't I just go straight to the expert? And I was just astonished that you replied. So, thank you. I will remember that. And I've been learning from you ever since.

0:35:56 - (Chris Clarke): I certainly have been enjoying the treatments you give to different local entrepreneurs and businesses and social services and things like that in Tucson, which is one of my favorite places. Is there a particular business that stands out to you as especially emblematic of Tucson that you've covered and no fair saying Tumerico because I've already eaten there. I already know about that.

0:36:20 - (Audrey Scheere): Love Tumerico. Emblematic of Tucson. I think what you would find with most visitors and people that live here, they just love the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. It's just that slice of the ecology, the art, the play place. They have a pack rat playhouse for kids. They can play on playground, pretend they're a pack rat. That's what first comes to mind as somewhere everyone has been or will visit when they come.

0:36:44 - (Alicia Pike): That sounds amazing. I want to play in that pack rat exhibit.

0:36:49 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. As somebody that's been going to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum for about 30 years at this point, it's definitely an opinion I share, and it's totally on brand for this podcast, so that's great.

0:37:01 - (Audrey Scheere): Right.

0:37:01 - (Chris Clarke): We had talked about having the Joshua tree versus Saguaro SmackDown as to which plant is more emblematic of the desert, and I think that's probably futile.

0:37:14 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah, I think we all know who the icon is of the American Southwest.

0:37:18 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. We don't find cactus-oriented bars in South Dakota with neon Joshua trees on their sign. They're always saguaros.

0:37:27 - (Audrey Scheere): You know, what else you don’t have is Joshua tree cell towers? As far as I know. We do have Saguaro cell towers here that are cartoonishly large and slightly shaped. I don't know. puffily.

0:37:40 - (Alicia Pike): Wow. We are going to have to locate one of those on our next road trip.

0:37:44 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, for sure.

0:37:46 - (Audrey Scheere): They're about 30 to 45ft, I think I read. So smaller than the pine tree cell towers you'd see on the East Coast and around, but right about the right size for a saguaro. Let's see one that is not yet 200 years old but about to grow its first arm.

0:38:01 - (Alicia Pike): East of here in Wonder Valley, there's a giant pine tree cell tower, and I'm pretty sure it has two palm tree cell towers with it. I think a Saguaro needs to join. That would be funny.

0:38:17 - (Chris Clarke): Are you a Tucson native, or did you show up there from somewhere else?

0:38:21 - (Audrey Scheere): I'm a transplant from the east coast. I have been here for about 15 years. I left for the Peace Corps, came back. So I've been here, and it wasn't until a few years ago I really started digging in. It completely grows on you. If you're someone who is a transplant, people find all the time, they leave, they come back. It just holds a place in your heart. So we're here to talk about saguaros I did bring you a list of facts. Some of them are fun facts.

0:38:49 - (Audrey Scheere): One that did come up since I'm saying I'm a transplant. Someone had mentioned that whenever people arrive, and this happened to me, too, they didn't realize just how tall Saguaros really are. You picture them, see them in movies, even living here now, I kind of think of them as human sized, 8ft tall, maybe just a little bit taller than us. But do you all know just how tall they get?

0:39:15 - (Alicia Pike): 70Ft, I believe. Didn't I read something crazy?

0:39:19 - (Chris Clarke): That sounds about right, yeah.

0:39:20 - (Audrey Scheere): And I do have a lot of sources here. So. Alicia the National Park Service said the tallest saguaro measured was 78ft tall. Yeah, right on.

0:39:29 - (Chris Clarke): Nice. So the reason I was asking, are you a Tucson native or transplant? Was going to pave the way for do you remember when you saw your first saguaro?

0:39:39 - (Audrey Scheere): I don't, but I remember driving in I was actually coming in from El Paso, where my family was living at the time, driving in, and you start to see them pop up, and it's majestic. It's like another land. And then the other memory I think many people have is the first time they drive west on Speedway, kind of out of town, over the hill into Gates Pass, which is it looks like another planet. It's just thousands and thousands of saguaros out in Saguaro National Park.

0:40:09 - (Audrey Scheere): It's mind blowing.

0:40:11 - (Chris Clarke): That's a favorite spot. Yeah, it's pretty striking. I think it was about 430 in the morning when I saw my first ones just a little way northwest of Wickenburg. And my then girlfriend had just driven off the road and scared the shit out of all of us. And the sun was coming up, and there were saguaros, and there was a coyote laughing at us. It was just really amazing. And we didn't die, so that was good.

0:40:36 - (Alicia Pike): Is this where we all share our Saguaros stories? Saguaro stories gather around, I think, both of you, you said you transplanted from the East Coast, so I'm born in the American Southwest. Born and raised. So I feel like I grew up with palm trees and Saguaros and creosote bush, and I don't even have a memorable first-time story that I can think of. But I do remember as a kid, my mom took us to one of those know, there's so many caverns across the American Southwest. I'm not sure which one it was, but I remember the road was just up and down those super intense hills.

0:41:15 - (Alicia Pike): They're not like that here. Arizona seems to have a lot of these backcountry roads where it's like going over the hogbacks, and you can get the roller coaster effect, where you kind of lose your tummy when you're coming down the hill. And yeah, the forest of Saguaros just all around was what really caught my attention. I was just a little kid riding this roller coaster. Like, whoa, this road is so much fun. But whoa, look at all these amazing cactus. You don't see dense cactus forests very often, and that was a really exemplary moment in my childhood. I can still see it clear as day in my mind's eye.

0:41:50 - (Chris Clarke): But our listeners can listen to us talk anytime they want, and we have you here for this special interview.

0:41:56 - (Audrey Scheere): Let me in, Coach!

0:41:57 - (Chris Clarke): Where should we start?

0:41:59 - (Audrey Scheere): I would love to start with this quote I found, because Alicia just mentioned the saguaro forest. Like, you don't see this cactus forest. And this one really spoke to me. I think we can talk about it for a second. This was from Arizona Highways. Lawrence Cheek had a little article, a thing or two about saguaros. So here's the quote. The Souaro forest seems eerie, not because these are strange plants, but because they don't read like plants at all.

0:42:24 - (Audrey Scheere): They seem individualistic and expressive in a way. Plants cannot be an alien race of sentient beings. I read that. Totally agreed. It reminded me of back, I think it was in 2016. One of the local theaters here did a three part event of dancing with Saguaros. It was standing with Saguaros. Folks were out in the forest doing this art and kind of communing with the Saguaros in a beautiful way. And you can still find videos of that online.

0:42:53 - (Audrey Scheere): But what do you all think? Sentient beings?

0:42:56 - (Alicia Pike): Absolutely.

0:42:57 - (Chris Clarke): I have been working with plants long enough that I don't see a real clear boundary between plants and sentient beings. But I definitely get what the quote is referring to, because it's a weird feeling.

0:43:09 - (Alicia Pike): Something that I learned in the process of researching for this episode was how the Native tribes that live in the American Southwest often view these larger figurehead plants as ancestors, as their own rightful sentient beings that were humanized, in a way with such great reverence and respect. And I wish we felt that way about plants a little bit more. Seems like the ruthless destruction we see in a capitalist society can be so disheartening. But to look at every tree as a living relative of yours is a really beautiful thing.

0:43:51 - (Audrey Scheere): And the reverse, seeing people as trees.

0:43:53 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah. Let's go down this rabbit hole.

0:43:57 - (Audrey Scheere): Let's go.

0:44:01 - (Chris Clarke): You're hitting all my buttons. Do you have more facts that had to do with Native people's relationships with the Saguaro?

0:44:07 - (Audrey Scheere): I thought it was important to talk about, so I brought a large paragraph I kind of wanted to read directly from the Desert Museum as well, but I just wanted to say that Saguaros are respected and celebrated by all Tucsonins. If something happens to a know, if someone graffiti's it, shoots it, whatever. We just wish every bad thing on them. But I do think, as Alicia was saying, it's important to note the Zawaro's vital relationship with indigenous people of the area in the Sonoran Desert.

0:44:39 - (Audrey Scheere): So I just pulled a quote from some educational materials just for anyone who was listening who doesn't understand the relationship and just wanted the quick overview of just how important it is. But here you go. And you can find this on the Desert Museum's website. The saguaro cactus is an important source of food and shelter for many indigenous people in the Sonoran Desert. For tribes such as the Tohono O’odham who use saguaro ribs for constructing shade, ramadas fences, animal traps and other implements, many still gather saguaro fruits, as their ancestors have for hundreds of years.

0:45:10 - (Audrey Scheere): For generations, the Tohono O’odham people have harvested saguaro fruits with long poles made of saguaro ribs. They eat the juicy fruit raw or cook it down into sweet nutritious syrup. The dried seeds, rich in proteins and fats, can be ground into flour. The Saguaro provides an abundant and important source of nutrients at a time otherwise scarce in desert food. The harvest tradition includes the fermentation of saguaro syrup to make a ceremonial wine used to herald in the monsoon rains to the autumn.

0:45:40 - (Audrey Scheere): The saguaro is such an integral part of their world, it is regarded with the same respect given to people. So I wanted to put that out there, and then you can learn more directly from the Tohono O’odham nation. They have a cultural center and museum you can visit.

0:45:53 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, there's a wonderful passage by Gary Nabhan about the ceremonial wine drinking and ushering in the monsoons. It's the most beautifully written essay about vomiting that I have ever read in my life. And even if it wasn't for the vomiting part, it was still really cool. It's just a loving and respectful take on this annual tradition. It's definitely a good read. And we do have our bookstore set up.

0:46:22 - (Chris Clarke): I need to make sure that Gathering the Desert is prominently in there. You mentioned that Tucsonans revere the Saguaro, and that's not at all surprising to me. I think we probably have a similar relationship with Joshua Trees. Here in the vicinity of Joshua Tree, you have people coming out to shoot their music videos and hang things off Joshua Trees or spray paint them, and they immediately become persona non grata.

0:46:46 - (Audrey Scheere): Beheaded.

0:46:47 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. Or at least denied breakfast for.

0:46:50 - (Audrey Scheere): Right, right.

0:46:51 - (Chris Clarke): But Tucson is one of those southwestern cities that is growing, and that necessarily means displacing Saguaros from time to time. How do people in your town react to that kind of thing? Is that sort of business as usual, or is that increasingly unpopular?

0:47:08 - (Audrey Scheere): Yeah, I think it's always sad to remove one because the danger is that they won't take to a new location. I have a couple of stories about this recently. It was earlier this year, a local golf course was being made, which is already somewhat negative in our minds. And the folks working on it chopped down two Saguaros side by side without a permit and someone caught it on camera. They were using a chainsaw and there was this huge uproar. It was on all the local news.

0:47:43 - (News Reporter): The Arizona Department of Agriculture investigating after video shows a construction crew right here at a golf course in Tucson cutting down a pair of saguaros with chainsaws. Jerry Parker says he saw the iconic Saguaros taken down firsthand.

0:48:00 - (Jerry Parker): I was just taken. I couldn't believe it happened.

0:48:03 - (News Reporter): The video upsetting neighbors in the community.

0:48:06 - (Jerry Parker): To see them cut down for basically a three day golf tournament. And those guys after three days, are going to pack up their things and be gone. And these saguaros will be in a dumpster somewhere. And I didn't like that. And I hope the people in this community don't put up with it.

0:48:21 - (Audrey Scheere): And then on the other side of that, I greatly respect a group called the Tucson Cactus and Succulent Society. And they are a great resource for relocating cacti that need to be moved. They maintain a park called Pima Prickly Park where it's free. You can go see all the types of cacti that they've transplanted and that they're growing. They've rescued over 123,000 native plants and saved them or provided new homes to them. And their volunteers have put in over 46,000 hours. So anyway, if you do have a cactus on your property that needs help, you should definitely look into the Tucson Cactus and Succulent Society.

0:49:03 - (Chris Clarke): And we'll definitely link to them.

0:49:05 - (Audrey Scheere): Yes.

0:49:05 - (Alicia Pike): So we kind of grazed over people doing things to cactus.

0:49:12 - (Audrey Scheere): Yes.

0:49:13 - (Alicia Pike): Then I want to hear the dirt. What's the latest horror story besides this chainsaw incident? What are people still doing to them after all these years?

0:49:23 - (Audrey Scheere): I'll start with this one from the 80s because a lot of people get a kick out of this and they're still talking about it on Reddit these days. But one time a gentleman sort of near the Phoenix area, as they understand it, was shooting away at a cactus just for sport, shooting away at a large Saguaro. One of the arms apparently broke off and then the whole cactus toppled over on him and crushed him and killed him.

0:49:47 - (Austin Lounge Lizards): But he was slightly disadvantaged by the angle of the sun. But after all, the cactus wasn't packing any gun. His finger twitched, he made his move. He drew. His guns did bark and echoed with the laughter as the bullets hit their mark. Well, the giant cactus tremble and came that warning sound. The mighty arm of justice came hurling toward the ground and the gunman staggered backwards. He whimpered and he cried.

0:50:24 - (Austin Lounge Lizards): The saguaro crushed him like a bug and David Grundon died.

0:50:35 - (Audrey Scheere): So that's a story we have. I was also looking at some headlines from over the years. There was a big one that kept coming up where a saguaro cactus impales car in Arizona crash. Now, this was a drunk driver who crashed into one. It came right through his windshield. And then in my further digging, the person that was working on his car then made a joke post on Craigslist about this car with a Saguaro stuck in the windshield is for sale.

0:51:05 - (Audrey Scheere): And that went viral. So there are some pictures you can find of that. I did want to say, if people are not familiar, an arm of a saguaro is extremely heavy, like a tree branch. And if it falls, it's heavy enough to crush a vehicle. So that can definitely take you out.

0:51:23 - (Chris Clarke): It's basically the world's least fun water balloon.

0:51:26 - (Audrey Scheere): Yes. And to that point, I did read that since Saguaros are so tall, they're somewhat prone to lightning strikes. Maybe not as much as other things, but they are. And they can actually explode because the water inside them boils. Is that true? Do you know about all of that?

0:51:45 - (Chris Clarke): It wouldn't shock me at all, but this is the first I'd heard of it.

0:51:50 - (Audrey Scheere): Let me give you a few more facts and just see what you think. Things that I found. So if a Saguaro is moved, it is prone to getting a sunburn. So there are things that you need to do to protect it. When we're waiting for the monsoon rains around June, early July, the Saguaros, they get skinny and you can just tell they look really thirsty. So it's really exciting to me when we get the first dump of rain or two or three and they plump back up and you tell that they've sprung back to life. They look good, everyone's happy again.

0:52:24 - (Audrey Scheere): So they do shrink down and then plump back up. Saguaros are on the Arizona license plate. I recently was thinking about all the businesses in town that have saguaros as a part of their logo. And then I put a montage together. I just thought it was hysterical because you just kind of know a business is in Tucson because it's in their logo. Like they use the cactus as a letter in the logo, like the T or just they have funny things hanging off of it. So keep an eye out for that if you come visit Tucson.

0:52:54 - (Chris Clarke): I think my favorite one of those that you talked about was the plumbing company where the sora was made out of pipes.

0:52:59 - (Audrey Scheere): That's my favorite one. And I drive by that on my way to work. So there's a logo of a plumbing company. It's just pipes, and you can't see me, but I'm holding my arms up because, I don't know, a Saguaro is just funny as pipes. It gets me every time. Another thing folks might not know is a dead Saguaro will oftentimes remain standing and then the ribs stand there and kind of fountain out at the top and make a really neat spectacle. I was also reading that recently and probably over a longer time, but recently saguaro ribs are in high demand and people pay high value just because they can be used for a lot of things.

0:53:40 - (Audrey Scheere): I don't believe you're allowed to take Saguaro ribs when you just see them somewhere. So check into that before grabbing and going. Another one. The Arizona State flower is the Saguaro blossom. These are ones that I actually pulled people on Instagram. I just wanted to hear what they knew about saguaros, the people that live in Tucson. And one that came up is that the scientific name of the saguaro is do you want to say it? Because I'm going to butcher it.

0:54:08 - (Chris Clarke): Carnegiea gigantea.

0:54:09 - (Audrey Scheere): So it's named after Andrew Carnegie because of his support through the Carnegie Institution for the 19 three establishment of the Desert Botanical Laboratory in Tucson, which locals will know as the Desert Laboratory on the top of Tumamak Hill. I feel like you've probably covered this a million times, but I do love this fact from Tucson Audubon, that does claim that it is not just the most iconic symbol of our region, it is the icon winning over the Joshua Tree.

0:54:42 - (Audrey Scheere): But the Saguaro serves as a source of food and shelter for over 100 different local species. And that's 32 species of birds. So that's just marvelous.

0:54:53 - (Chris Clarke): That is really cool. I got to think that the inside of a Saguaro would be fairly well insulated against temperature extremes, which is something that Mojave birds could definitely use because they're dying out. Because aside from burrowing owls and things like that, the only animals that can get down under the soil and be insulated from the 123 degree heat are pretty much mammals and reptiles. And so birds are having a tough time in the Mojave and they could really use some saguaros to be a little bit more insulated housing.

0:55:26 - (Chris Clarke): I think we have a campaign to launch planting more saguaros for wildlife habitat in the Mojave.

0:55:33 - (Alicia Pike): We both planted them in our yard, so we're spearheading the effort.

0:55:37 - (Audrey Scheere): All right, let me join in. Except for I'm not in the mojave. I will adopt one for you to plant in the Mojave.

0:55:44 - (Chris Clarke): There you go.

0:55:44 - (Alicia Pike): Thank you.

0:55:45 - (Chris Clarke): And we can send you a Joshua Tree.

0:55:47 - (Audrey Scheere): Oh, perfect. I would love that. I did see on this note, it passed by on LinkedIn. I'd have to go hunt it down and I think it was Tucson, Audubon. A group was testing a nest box atop know, kind of at the height of a saguaro just to see. I think if birds would take to that and just as a kind of what if Saguaros died out, what will the birds do and how can we help them? But seeing that picture of just a wooden box on stilts with a thought that would replace a saguaro was pretty heartbreaking.

0:56:25 - (Alicia Pike): Humans just think they can TerraForm the world and that it'll just keep functioning naturally. I'm not sure we see the folly of that. The house on sticks is a really sad mental image.

0:56:39 - (Audrey Scheere): It would get hot, too.

0:56:41 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:56:41 - (Alicia Pike): I was thinking, what kind of insulation did they use in that little plywood box? Because that's not going to match up to the beautiful, calm core of a Saguaros.

0:56:52 - (Audrey Scheere): Totally. I'm down to a last few facts. One that I did enjoy was that every ten years, the Saguaro National Park leads a saguaro census. So the last one was in 2020, and they found that in Saguaro National Park, there are about 2 million. Saguaros nice. That was nice to know.

0:57:14 - (Alicia Pike): Significant.

0:57:17 - (Chris Clarke): And it's a great national park, but it's not all that huge. So it says something about how many Saguaros are in Arizona and Sonora in that tiny little sliver of California where they show up. It's definitely a lot of saguaros in the world, it would seem.

0:57:34 - (Audrey Scheere): Yep. If someone such as yourselves, not in the Tucson, Sonoran Desert area, wants to adopt a saguaro, there is a program for that by the Friends of Saguaro National Park@friendsofsaguaro.org, but proceeds help with saguaro research and protection activities.

0:57:53 - (Alicia Pike): Nice. We'll definitely have that link in the show. Note you can go out and adopt yourself a saguaro.

0:57:59 - (Audrey Scheere): One other interesting thing I knew about for a while, and finally, recently was able to make my way out there. It's kind of on the northwest side of Tucson in that pima prickly park I mentioned by the Tucson Cactus and Succulent Society is something called saguarohenge. And so it's like stonehenge, but there are eight Saguaros in a ring, and it was designed years ago by a late landscaped architect as a tribute to his mother. And then they built the park around it. This predated the park, but there's a plaque there that says Saguaro Henge celebrating the nurturing relationship between plants and people.

0:58:35 - (Audrey Scheere): It's a beautiful spot to visit.

0:58:37 - (Chris Clarke): I will definitely have to check that out. That sounds amazing.

0:58:40 - (Audrey Scheere): Yeah. And it's funny because there are just so many Saguaros out at the park that you can walk through and take a hike and walk through them. But something about seeing eight in a ring put there in an intentional way, it just makes you sit and contemplate and meditate a bit.

0:58:57 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, that's getting it would be wrong to call it homesick, but I'm getting something like that for Tucson as we speak. It's always been one of my favorite places. I've always felt like if I die and I've never lived in Tucson, I'm kind of doing it know? My wife and I were there in December for about a week. It's just really good to get some time in among the Saguaros and the ocotillos.

0:59:22 - (Audrey Scheere): It's a special.

0:59:24 - (Alicia Pike): So, uh, crested Saguaros have not come up yet.

0:59:27 - (Audrey Scheere): Oh, I left it out and I just closed the tab. Alicia, thank you. So you I did want to tell you that there is an organization. I believe the original members were based around Tucson. It's not really clear right now because it's an online group, but there's an organization called the Crested Saguaro Society. So first of all, maybe you tell us about crested Saguaros and then I'll fill you in with the details about the society.

0:59:56 - (Alicia Pike): Oh, no, please tell us all about it, girl. You're the professional here.

1:00:00 - (Audrey Scheere): Oh, I'm not the professional, but crested saguaros are a type of saguaro that grows in an odd way. The top ends up looking really mashed together in a crustate fashion. So they're crested in that they don't have long arms, maybe they have some arms, but the top of it looks kind of like a crown. And so these are really special and often folks will say, if you find one, don't tell other people where it is because there are other people that will go and want to take it. So it's somewhat secretive, but there's a group called the Crested Saguaro Society, which was formed in 2006, and they go out and locate these crested saguaros.

1:00:45 - (Audrey Scheere): I don't know that they share the GPS coordinates, but they take photos, they document and they kind of keep everything in a database. And you can go to their website, which is Crestedsaguarosociety.org, and that is an online community of dedicated naturalists who volunteer time and resources to learn about and share observations on Crested, saguaros and other mutated cactus. So they've documented over 3200 crested saguaros and you can actually read about them. They were featured in the Wall Street Journal.

1:01:20 - (Audrey Scheere): And something else, it was probably Atlas obscura. It's a really neat group.

1:01:26 - (Chris Clarke): That sounds so cool.

1:01:27 - (Alicia Pike): I'm definitely going to be checking that out because I love Crested Saguaros. I think they're gorgeous. Nothing like a genetic mutation to make you special.

1:01:38 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, that's why she hangs out with me. So, summing all this up. If we had a listener who is really, really impatient and was sort of hitting fast forward and got to this part and you had the chance to just in a couple of sentences, sum up why it's a good thing that saguaros exist on the planet in this one special part of the planet known as the Sonoran Desert. How would you explain that to them?

1:02:08 - (Audrey Scheere): Sure, I think not only are they iconic and a wonder of the world, they're such a vital piece of our desert ecology here in the Sonoran Desert, that if they didn't exist, we don't really know what that would mean. Maybe some people do, but it would.

1:02:25 - (Chris Clarke): Be drastic, like imagining, I don't know, Holland without tulips, or maybe more like turkey without tulips, because that's where they're native to.

1:02:35 - (Alicia Pike): Sequoia National Forest.

1:02:37 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

1:02:37 - (Alicia Pike): There you go.

1:02:40 - (Chris Clarke): For work. We had a trip to Redwood National Park last week to have a retreat and meeting and some hiking, and I tried to get people to name all of the national parks that were named after plant species and nobody wanted to play along.

1:03:00 - (Chris Clarke): There are only a few Joshua Tree being. One and Redwood and Sequoia national parks both and Saguaro, obviously. And then you get into the BLM national monuments and it just goes crazy.

1:03:13 - (Alicia Pike): Well, that just doesn't count.

1:03:15 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

1:03:16 - (Alicia Pike): National park or bust. I mean, come on. That's why nobody wanted to play with Chris. Yeah started including all the BLM.

1:03:23 - (Audrey Scheere): Well, Chris, if someone is coming into town, they may not realize that Saguaro National Park is divided into two parks, east and west, that are split by the city of Tucson in the middle. A lot of folks like to visit the west side because the visitor center is somewhat grander, but check out both sides, east and west.

1:03:43 - (Chris Clarke): I will confess I've only been in the western Tucson mountains part. I've not visited the east side yet.

1:03:48 - (Alicia Pike): Busted. Yeah you.

1:03:55 - (Chris Clarke): You know, I've been nearby sabino Canyon, et cetera. It's a lovely part of the world. But yeah, I need to get into that unit of the park for sure.

1:04:04 - (Audrey Scheere): Well, as a central to east sider of Tucson, you're welcome anytime.

1:04:09 - (Chris Clarke): Excellent. Audrey Scheere, Old Pueblo Curiosities, on Instagram. Thank you so much for joining us. It's really generous of you to spend some of your time and this has been fun.

1:04:20 - (Audrey Scheere): It was a blast. Thanks for having me.

1:04:29 - (Chris Clarke): We want to thank Hank Card and the Austin Lounge Lizards for letting us excerpt their song Saguaro, which is off the band's 1984 album Creatures from the Black Saloon.

1:04:41 - (Alicia Pike): Thanks also to Fox Five Tucson for the use of their report on the golf course Saguaros Chainsaw Massacre.

1:04:49 - (Chris Clarke): If you want to check out the Saguaro fruit wine ceremony essay in Gary Nabhan's book The Desert Smells Like Rain, go to 90milesfromNeedles.com slash Books. There are a lot of other good books available there on desert topics as well.

1:05:02 - (Alicia Pike): And to join the growing group of.

1:05:04 - (Alicia Pike): Supporters of 90 Miles from Needles without.

1:05:07 - (Alicia Pike): Whom we could not produce this show, go to 90milesfromneedles.com. slash Donate 90 Miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.

1:05:19 - (Chris Clarke): And thanks for listening. We love you.

1:05:21 - (Alicia Pike): See you next time.

1:07:17 - (Alicia Pike): Are we taking a different highway from here? And this is quartzsite.

1:07:23 - (Chris Clarke): This is quartzsite.

1:07:24 - (Alicia Pike): It's been a while since I've been here. Do not take me to a rock shop. Just asking for trouble.

david grundman

S2E12: The Majestic Saguaro, Part 1