ORGAN PIPE CACTUS NATIONAL MONUMENT

ORGAN PIPE took Scott Babinowich by surprise. The supervisory ranger and East Coast native imagined the desert as hot, dry and sandy. What he found at Organ Pipe was lush, full of life and, in a sense, undiscovered. “You could head out into the park and find a cool rock or a bizarre-looking cactus that even the ecologist who had been here for 20 years hadn’t seen,” he says. Quitobaquito Springs, near the Mexican border, was another surprise. “You’re driving for 40 minutes in one of the hottest parts of the park,” Babinowich says. “It’s kind of sandy. There are [cactuses], but not a lot of trees. And in the middle of that, you find a 2-acre pond” that supports birds such as the caracara, an endangered fish found nowhere else and 11,000 years of human history. To Babinowich, Quitobaquito provides a snapshot of everything unique about the monument. “It just defies your expectations,” he says.