Otherworldly organ pipe

Sunset, Feb, 1998 by Matthew Jaffe

It's late afternoon in southern Arizona. I'm driving State Highway 85 north from Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The highway is busy with Phoenicians headed the other direction, many driving sport utes and pulling boats, bound for long weekends at Puerto Penasco on the Sea of Cortes.

Most of the southbound travelers will bomb right on through Organ Pipe. Which is both a shame and a blessing. It's a shame that they will forsake the most spectacular desert landscape in the Southwest. It's a blessing because it means that it's still possible to experience Organ Pipe in the silence and solitude that the best of the desert truly demands.

Here is one important fact about Organ Pipe: In three days of hiking, I encountered no one else on any of the trails. Most Organ Pipe visitors stick to the two driving loops that offer a shorthand take on just how diverse the Sonoran Desert really is. Ranging from 1,130 to 4,808 feet, the monument encompasses five different plant communities. The driving loops will give you a good sampling of this desert diversity. But to experience Organ Pipe at its best, you really have to get your boots dusty.

The creosote flat habitat at the low elevations is exactly the kind of landscape that people who don't have a taste for the desert think of when they imagine the arid West. Here the desert is flatter, hotter, and blander than at higher altitudes. But even so, there are surprises, such as the oasis at Quitobaquito, a natural spring shaded by cottonwoods and busy with ducks, green herons, and other waterfowl.

But much of the monument delivers the lusher desert terrain that the Sonoran Desert, with its two separate rainy seasons (winter and the summer monsoons), is famous for: the towering saguaro, cholla, and, of course, organpipe cactus. Organpipe isn't particularly rare, but it is extremely sensitive to frost, and the monument marks the northern extent of its range, containing virtually the entire U.S. population of the cactus. Caught in the right light, with the cholla backlit or a saguaro outlined in a luminous green and gold, this desert claims many converts.

The higher elevations of the Ajo Range can expand the awareness of desert detractors and aficionados alike. In this volcanic range, the banded rock changes with the sun. Orange and sage lichens cover tumbled piles of broken rock, and the vegetation ranges from powdery green palo verdes to juniper trees more common in the Great Basin.

My reflections on Organ Pipe are abruptly broken not long after the line of Puerto Penasco-bound traffic eases. When darkness falls in this desert, it falls hard. Dusk turns fast to night. The sudden appearance of glowing, golden lights in the northern sky provides something new to ponder.

Filled with stars, the desert night sky is plenty spectacular as it is. But these lights are something else - brighter than the stars and a lot closer. I can't dismiss them as flares from the nearby test range because not only do they climb but they also move laterally.

It might seem easier to shrug off the lights as a product of some obvious though still unknown source than to consider the truly infinite possibilities. But infinity beckons. And if you were traveling from, say, Alpha Centauri, and all you'd seen of the American Southwest were the outskirts of Roswell, wouldn't you hanker to experience the desert at its very best?

As it turns out, national news accounts over the next few days are filled with reports of UFO sightings that night from spots all over Arizona.

So if the lights were indeed from some alien spacecraft (and not from a Maryland Air National Guard exercise, as they were later officially explained away), it's not surprising that visitors might descend on this part of Arizona. After all, whether you're going 200 miles or 200 light-years to see the desert, Organ Pipe is definitely the place to be.

* The Salton Sea is a huge ocean-blue puddle on the hot anvil of California's Colorado Desert. Yet hardly a drop was here a century ago. In 1905, a swollen Colorado River broke through a new irrigation canal that, ironically, engineers had designed to bring water to the Imperial Valley. They got their wish. For 16 months, river waters flowed into a geologic sink north of the valley that's 273 feet below sea level. Today this improbable ocean, replenished only by irrigation runoff, is a winter haven for migrating wildfowl and seabirds. It also draws Winnebagus californica, that trailer- or tent-camping species from colder climes that flocks here to bask in 75 [degrees] weather, scout birds through 8x25 binoculars, eat dates, catch scads of fish, and sleep under inky skies ablaze with stars.

Organ Pipe planner

* Where: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is an easy 150-mile shot from either Tucson or Phoenix. From Phoenix, take Interstate 10 to I-8 west, then go south on State 85. You can also take I-10 west directly to State 85. Give yourself about 2 1/2 hours. From Tucson, take I-10 to I-8 or cut directly across on State 86.