2006/02 Southwest USA trip (NM-AZ) - Senita Basin in Organ Pipe Cactus NM |
|||
Sunday February 12th
There was a kind of cactus we hadn’t yet seen, the senita. There was one in a protected spot in the garden at the visitors centre, but we wanted to see some in the wild. Apparently they are very sensitive to frost, so they only grow in the few spots which are frost-free, such as the Senita Basin. There is a road that goes to the Senita Basin, but it’s a side road off the part of the Puerto Blanco Drive that has been closed by the border patrol, so our only remaining option was to hoof it ten miles or so across the desert.
So we set off from the campground along the Victoria Mine trail and then into the Senita Basin Loop. The trails were a little vague in places, particularly where they crossed streams. I took a wrong turning and found myself on a narrow trail strewn with plastic bags and bottles. I realized that I was following one of the many trails that connect the Mexican border with quiet roads to the north where the wetbacks will get their ride into some United States city. I didn't want to meet them or the Border Patrol so I went cross-country until I caught up with Sandie on the real trail.
After a 
few hours of walking we ended up at the picnic area at the end of the closed road, and we still hadn’t seen one of the senita cacti! The few remaining signs at the (now closed) picnic area indicated that we were looking for one of just a few hundred plants, so we spread out to look. I found a couple of stands of senita further down the road and then when I knew what to look for I found some more. Now, the organ pipe cactus looks very neat when it’s young and growing strongly. Then, when it gets older it changes colour, and bits start to die. In contrast, the senita keep on growing outwards even when nearby bits are dying, 
so it may have a hundred limbs of which twenty may be dead. It looks a mess, but keeps on growing and expanding, with the mature limbs covered with shaggy hair.
Now that we’d found our senita we needed to make our way back as we were about five miles from the campground. We surprised ourselves as we still had the energy for a side trip to the Victoria Mine. This was a gold and silver 
mine, but never all that successful. It shut down when the monument was created back in the 1940s, and now there is just a single building there and a number of blocked-off mine shafts. We had a two-mile walk from there back to the campground, and we finished it by the light of the full moon.