Saguaro National Park West and SNP East are flat-out national treasures. One look at the landscape of scattered giant saguaros towering over brush and smaller cacti and you can't help but marvel at these magnificent cacti and the delicate ecosystem that supports them. If you can visit, make sure to see the landscape at dusk when the sun creates various pleasing shadows on the mountains and the saguaros and other cacti such as cholla, ocotillo and opuntia.
Although both West and East parks have attractive little visitor centers where you can buy books and postcards, fill your water bottle or go potty, it is the nine-mile (west) and eight-mile (east) loop drives that put you nose to spine with the real desert. My wife and I oohed and ahhed every time we drove around a curve in the West park. A few days later, with a friend from Australia, we oohed and ahhed in the East park.
Although both parks are basically the same, there are noticeable differences. The West park is completely wild while the East park is being crowded by urbanization. The West park loop road is dirt over gravel and rock; the East park road is hard-surface. The West park has wider vistas; the East park backs up against the Tanque Verde Ridge (a mountain).
Both parks are crowded with multi-pad opuntias, prickly chollas, spray-like ocotillos and stumpy barrel cacti amidst scrubby mesquite trees (which are much more a shrub than a tree). But it is the stately saguaros that give the parks their name and which deserve far more credit in this desert ecosystem than most visitors will take the time to give them. I've got more saguaro photos than I know what to do with! Unfortunately, photos aren't the same as standing next to one and they don't even make a good screen saver on the computer.
Saguaros are apartment houses and commissaries of the desert — for wildlife. If you look closely as you drive the parks' loop drives, you'll see some hints of the relationship between wildlife and the saguaros, like this bird's nest. If you stop to get out and look closely, you may even see some of the wildlife, such as a gila woodpecker, cactus wren and other birds that use the giant trunks and limbs for excavated housing and the flowers, fruit and seeds for food. One monster saguaro we saw had a trunk as thick as the length of my arm from fingertip to shoulder.
Go To Page: 1 2
