February in Yarnell: The Desert Stirs

Rocks, rocks, rocks, and rocks.  Over the past month working on the Granite Mountain Hotshots Memorial Trail my crew and I have been putting our noses to the grindstone building staircases for a section of the trail we affectionately call Rock Bottom.  Each set of steps has presented new and interesting challenges to overcome and learn from. My three person team started and completed a total of four staircases during the month of February all varying in size, step number, and height. Every staircase finished left me with a mixture of pride and exhaustion.  Working hard to build something that looks beautiful (at least I think they're beautiful) and will last a long time is a rewarding and satisfying experience and shaping, moving, and placing rocks ten hours a day for eight days in a row leaves me with an entire body full of sore muscles from my legs to my neck to the joints in my fingers.  Needless to say I sleep like a rock while I'm on hitch.

 Of course I could talk about rock stuff all day long but there were other interesting happenings during these hitchs that my less rock obsessed readers might be interested in hearing about. For one thing, February is the time of year when the flowering plants of the desert decide it's time to do some reproducing and start coming to life.  The two pictures above are of my two favorite flowers I saw these past few weeks.  On the left is the Claret-Cup Cactus (Echinocereus triglochidiatus) which is a type of hedgehog cactus.  I've been walking by these little guys every day without giving them much notice and now, all of a sudden, they're exploding with some of the most vivid colors I've ever seen in a flower.  It's gotten to the point where I can't even walk by one without stopping and stooping over to examine all of its new blooms and buds.  The picture on the right is the much more subtle Birdcage Primrose (Oenothera deltoides).  While the flowers of the Claret-Cup Cactus are unusually rigid and hard to the touch, the Birdcage Primrose has particularly delicate flowers that are the consistency of moist tissue paper.  They are so delicate in fact that they only bloom in the late evening and then shrivel up under the heat of the following day's sun.  Every morning when we arrived at the work site a totally new array of flowers would be arranged by the roadside to greet us and by the time we left for camp, usually around five or so in the evening, they would all be shriveled to a husk.  It's flowers like these that serve as a reminder of the rewards of working and living in nature for extended periods of time.  It would be all too easy to drive by these flowers on the side of the road and have no idea how lucky you are just to have seen them.  By being rooted in the same place while the seasons change around me I'm able to appreciate both the subtle and not so subtle changes that are constantly taking place in the desert.

 
 While the local flora was definitely center stage these past few weeks, the fauna also made an appearance, most notably in the form of the Desert Tortoise (Gopherus agassizii).  We saw one baby tortoise that I wasn't able to get a picture of and a second full grown adult that I was able to photograph.  The Desert Tortoise population of the southwest is being threatened due to their slow maturation period (between fifteen and twenty years) and limited natural defenses against off-road vehicles.  Seeing two on the mountain is strong evidence that there is a breeding population in the same area that we have been working in.  Before any project like this, ecologists are hired to do sensitive species surveys to insure the proposed trail won't do any serious ecological harm to the area.  Since the Desert Tortoise isn't typically found in mountainous habitats it's very possible that they didn't find any simply because it didn't occur to them to look.  As of right now I don't believe there are any plans in place to insure we minimize our impact on the tortoises habitat. Should we stop what we're doing to asses what kind of damage this trail will do to an already stressed species? Does the emotional significance of this trail in particular outweigh the potential environmental harm? I don't really have any answers to these questions.  I joined ACE to help conserve the environment and all of the creatures who make it their home but at the same time the thought of all those beautiful steps going untrodden makes me shudder.  A core belief held by many trail workers is that by building a trail through an ecosystem you confine the impact done to that ecosystem to a narrow corridor.  The theory is that since people will inevitably use natural areas for recreation, building durable trails keeps them from damaging the rest of the ecosystem outside the trail corridor.  Hopefully this theory will hold good for the Desert Tortoises of Yarnell.

Well that's all I've got to say about the past month or so.  Tune in next time for my post about my trip to Petrified Forest National Park.