At The Backroads

 Barrel Cactus

Distance: 1 mile

Elevation gain/loss: 200 ft

Best Times: During the cooler days of the year, October- June.

Difficulty: Very Easy

Trailhead: Opposite the entrance to Tamarisk Grove Campground of Anza Borrego Desert State Park. Tamarisk Grove, just below the windswept Yaqui Pass, is located roughly 18 miles south of the town of Borrego Springs on Highway S-3 near the intersection with Highway 78. 

 I featured last month, 2 features of Anza Borrego Desert State Park, Font’s Point and Anza Borrego Desert Wildflowers . But being the largest State Park in California, it is hard to describe Anza Borrego with only a few of its features. Anza Borrego showcases a stark and idiosyncratic ecosystem, it is a wild country in the Eastern side of San Diego County.  

The short but steep and rocky path at Cactus Loop Trail showcases the ubiquitous teddy-bear cholla cactus which grows to exceptional size up to 6 ft and density.   

Cholla Cactus 

Jerry Schad, the author of the hiking book,  A Foot and A Field in San Diego County, quoted E. Yale Dawson who described Cholla Cactus in his book Cacti of California as:

 ” The vegetable kingdom has not produced anything else so fearfully armed. But in the desert, one thing is worse than any pain of spine in the flesh. It is thirst!  I have seen emaciated, dreadfully dehydrated cattle, deprived of water for months in the blistering heat, so mad from thirst that they eat the terrible cholla. They munch these awful morsels of moisture until their lips are pinned together with pines, and their throats are a veritable pincushion. The spines, eventually cause their death. “ 

“But incredible as it may seem, there are reliable reports of the desert big-horn sheep browsing on cholla cactus. Some of the cacti has been broken open with fresh teeth marks in the fresh pulp. ” - Jerry Schad’s A Foot and  A Field in San Diego County

Just whose teeth do you think would leave a mark on Cholla?

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