The Wilderness of Unreality

Here in this wilderness of unreality, the Saguaro National Monument near Tucson, Pop Frost carefully adjusts his camera for another picture of the fantastic residents of the cactus forest.

ARIZONA, SOMEONE HAS sagely remarked, is geology by day and astronomy by night. It might be added that at dawn and dusk, those all-too-brief interludes between day and night, Arizona is biology.

Horizontal shafts of light from a rising January sun were touching with gilded tips the crags and pine-clad ridges of the rugged Santa Catalina Mountains to the north. The flush of dawn was fading from a few cloud wisps retreating unwillingly from their rough pallet about Spud Rock, high on the Rincons. But hills, and washes, and brush-covered flats of the Cactus Forest still lay in the drab anonymity of the heavy shadow reaching out across the desert at the foot of the gully-wrinkled Tanque Verdes. Deep within this shadow and near the crest of a knoll crossed by a narrow and twisting desert road, stood an automobile bearing Illinois license plates. Nearby a tall, slender, bespectacled man in a worn leather jacket and soft, gray hat was leisurely setting up a tripod.

AN EASTERN TOURIST-PHOTOGRAPHER VISITS ARIZONA'S FAMOUS SAGUARO NATIONAL MONUMENT IN SEARCH OF INSPIRATION AND CAMERA FODDER

Don W. Egermayer, custodian of the monument, is a former Minnesotan where he was a member of the State University football team. Below, the monument headquarters, where rangers will provide visitors with information as how best to drive through the forest.

Having placed the camera to his satisfaction, Marvin Frost, Sr., paused to look out over the wide expanse of the Santa Cruz Valley to the west. Bathed in the crisp light of early morning, the distant desert gleamed with the bright green of midwinter foliage. Although 15 miles away, the business district of Tucson stood out sharply in the clear, desert air. Beyond rose the jagged picture-mountain peaks of the Tucson range. But Pop Frost's enjoyment of the scene was interrupted by the glint of gold on the tip of a giant saguaro rising 30 feet above his head. Glancing back at the hulking shoulder of the mountain towering behind him, Pop was warned by the blazing sky immediately above the ridge that the sun was almost upon him, and turned to his camera.

Like a silently drawn curtain, the shadow below him had disappeared. Where wash, and knoll, and flat, a moment before had merged in gloom, a miracle had come to pass. Now like a sea of golden spears, file upon file, rank upon rank, wave upon wave; across knoll, and flat, and wash, and all that rolling valley floor northward to the towering Catalinas stood a mighty army. Silent, motionless, serene; their gleaming arms held high to greet the dawn, a million breathless giants seemingly had risen out of the night. A Palmer Thrasher gave his flute-like double call; from a distant knoll a coyote raised his voice in a quavering requiem to the departed night, and Pop Frost bent behind his camera to pull the focusing cloth over his head. The famous Cactus Forest, that "Wilderness of Unreality" of Saguaro National Monument, was about to have its picture taken at sunrise.

That was two years ago. Pop Frost, with two sons in the University of Arizona, had brought Mrs. Frost from their Lake Forest home to spend Christmas with the boys. Casually, at a nearby point of interest, they hadgone out to the national monument. The senior Frost, since retiring from his profession as architectural superintendent, had taken up pho-tography as a hobby. Here, in the Cactus Forest, he discovered such a wealth of scenes and settings as he had never dreamed existed. No orthodox forest this, but a weird growth of leafless, columnar giants looking down upon an unworldly, tangled undergrowth of spiny, thorny, prickery vegetation. Within this pro-tective cover lived queer reptiles, strange mam-mals, and sweet-voiced birds.

Pop's visit of weeks stretched into months. More and more of his time was spent, camera swinging from his shoulder, hiking through different portions of the forest looking for peculiarly shaped saguaro, spectacular scenes, appealing composition, delicate flowers, and reptiles that could be induced to pose. On his very first visit, Pop's interest had been aroused in the anatomy and physiology of the great cacti. He went to the national monument head-quarters and deluged Custodian Don Egermayer with questions. How old were the plants? How much did they weigh? How tall did they get? Did they have blossoms, and at what time of year? Were they good for anything beside camera fodder?

Now Custodian Egermayer was, and is, a busy man. He is held responsible by the National Park Service, which administers Saguaro Na-tional Monument, for the protection and care of approximately 99 square miles of desert and mountain range. It is his job to look out for all of the plants and animals; all of the roads, and trails, and telephone lines; all of the people (about 16,000 visit the national monument every year); and for such equipment as the Service has provided for the maintenance and development of the monument. This responsibility, as well as the physical labor of accomplishment was his alone, for at the time of Pop Frost's first visit to Saguaro, it was a "lone post" monument. But if there is any-thing that Custodian Egermayer really enjoys, it is meeting a visitor who is sincerely enthusias-tic about his monument and its great forest of giant cacti. So when Pop hunted him up at the headquarters and started firing questions, Don was so pleased with the visitor's interest that he laid aside the office work and went out with Pop into the forest. First Don pointed out the skeleton of a dead saguaro, the bundle of wooden poles or ribs which constitutes the framework of the plant. He explained that this served, during life, as the "plumbing" of the giant, carrying, during the rainy seasons, moisture from the shallow but wide-spreading root system to the great masses of pulpy tissue surrounding it. He ex-plained that this tissue could absorb enormous quantities of moisture, thus storing it for use by the plant during the long, hot, dry portion of the year. He told Pop about experiments and stud-ies conducted by the Carnegie Desert Laborator-ies of Tucson, over a period of many years. These experiments indicate that only a very. very small percentage of the few saguaro seeds that find suitable conditions for germination ever reach maturity. During its first years the plant grows very slowly, a three-foot individual being about 30 years old. After that, growth is more rapid, as much as three or four inches per year but when, in later life, the plant branches, this annual extension is distributed among the arms.

Only a few of these trees, none of them on the monument, have been recorded with a height over 50 feet; the majority do not exceed 35 feet. Some have few arms, many branch a dozen or 15 times, while more than 40 arms have been counted on some specimens. In some of the dense groves of the forest, plants average a stand of 15,000 saguaros to the square mile. Some of the largest are estimated to weigh 10 or 12 tons, and are capable of taking up from the wet soil 3,000 or 4,000 pounds of water following a single soaking rain. The first white blossoms appear at the tips of the saguaro branches late in April, and the blossoming per iod continues through May to be followed by the development of egg-shaped fruits which, upon maturity, split open revealing brilliant red pulp filled with tiny black seeds.

The jack rabbit knows all the trails.

Perhaps it was his desire to see those great fluted columns crowned with halos of white blossoms that brought Pop Frost back to Saguaro National Monument in May. He had returned to Illinois, and was planning to spend the sum mer in his usual vacation land near Acadia National Park in Maine. But the memory of those Arizona giants haunted him, and one May morning he surprised Custodian Eger mayer by showing up at monument head quarters, camera over his shoulder, and a smile of anticipation on his face. "I'm back," Pop stated cheerfully, "Where are the Saguaro?" (This question was Pop's little joke. It is the common one asked by first-time visitors to the monument, for the headquarters building is so located that from its broad porches not a single giant cactus can be seen.) In Saguaro National Monument, there are two seasons; the visitor season and the fire season. There are also two main parts to the monument which Custodian Egermayer refers to as his "front yard" and his "back yard." The front yard, an expanse of some 14,000 acres of desert at an elevation of about 2,800 feet, con tains the cactus forest. It is made accessible by a loop road of 9 miles which is subject to all the ills of the average ungraded desert route, crossing deep washes and climbing short but steep hills.

During the winter, which is the principal rainy season as well as the main visitor period, Egermayer is kept busy trying to maintain this road in serviceable condition, and in providing information and guide service for the many visitors. Of the approximately 2,000 people who came to the Cactus Forest during January 1941, two-thirds were from states other than Arizona. Custodian Egermayer makes available as much time as possible, directing these visi tors to the locations of various spectacular indi vidual saguaros, and telling them about the giant cactus and the twenty-six other species of cacti to be found on the monument, as well as the numerous strange and interesting var ieties of plant and animal life which occur there. In the summer, however, when the lightning caused fire danger is at its height on the pine and oak-covered highlands in the Rincon Range which lifts its peaks to an elevation of 8.600 feet, Don must leave the lower part of the monument to protect his 49,000 acre "backyard" from the ravages of the fire demon. During July, 1941, sixteen lightning-caused fires broke out in the heavy timber along the crest of the Rincons. Here are 62 miles of fire trails to be kept in condition. Don must The Kangaroo Rat is no desert stranger. pack in, by horse, food and other supplies and equipment to be in readiness when the seasonal fire guards go on duty at the beginning of the thunder-storm season. About 34 miles of tele phone line must be kept in working order so Mountain ranges hem the forest in, protecting it, and adding to the photogenic surroundings. (Photograph by Chuck Abbott.)

that the 'phones at three stations on the top of the range may be alive when smoke is spotted, either from the lookout at Spud Rock on the monument, or from one of the cooperating Forest Service lookout stations atop peaks in neighboring ranges. The monument headquarters is not connected by telephone with the stations in the mountainous part of the monument, but is equipped with a short-wave radio transmitter and receiver. Through this medium, contact may be made by headquarters with the Forest Service lookout on Mount Bigelow far to the north of the monument. That station is connected by telephone with the lookout and fireguards on top of the Rincons.

While Egermayer is away from headquarters, his capable and charming wife takes over operation of the radio, meets visitors who come to the office with their questions and requests for information, and carries on such other "front yard" duties as time from her essential housekeeping activities will permit. During deer and quail hunting season, Don must be away patrolling the boundaries of the monument. Work in the field even during the months of heavy tourist travel keeps him so occupied that on one occasion, when Mrs. Egermayer was away for two weeks, the nickname of "The Monument With Nobody Home" was applied to Saguaro.Thus it was that when Pop Frost arrived at the monument headquarters on that bright and hot May morning, he found Custodian Egermayer just starting off on a week's project to pack, on horse and mule, five and one quarter tons of supplies and tools to the top of the Rincons. So Pop drove out alone into the cactus forest to test his ingenuity in devising ways and means of photographing saguaro blossoms at the tips of the giant spine-clad arms 30 feet above the ground. Since the cactus forest in January and the same spectacular piece of Sonoran desert in May are two entirely different places in which to take pictures, Pop was soon back at monument headquarters in search of a bit of shade and a cool drink of water. He found Mrs. Egermayer, unofficially known as the H.C.W.P. (Honorary Custodian Without Pay-an appellation of lone-post custodians), was mildly perturbed. A group of visitors had come in to request drinks of water. While she had been busy telling some of them about the monument, the driver, in flushing the car's overheated radiator, had used more than half the drinking water supply which Don had left her to last during his absence. Of course the visitors didn't realize that the monument had neither and other native mammals are sometimes encountered. So far, however, Pop has found more than enough wildlife in the cactus forest part of the monument to keep him and his camera busy. Some of the most typical desert creatures such as the kangaroo rat and the ring-tail are nocturnal. To photograph them Pop has fitted his camera with a synchronized flash. This device proved of unexpected use to Custodian Egermayer in a most unusual manner.One of the famous crested saguaro on the monument, locally known as the "Candelabrum," appealed strongly to Pop's sense of the dramatic, and he photographed it at night from a number of different angles. His attachment for this particular tree has never weakened and he has taken numerous pictures of it over a period of two years. Shortly after Pop first visited the Cactus Forest, scientists of the University of Arizona noticed that throughout the area a number of saguaro were dying and literally melting away. This was reported to the proper officials. Pathologists of the University of Arizona, cooperating with scientists of the Bureau of Plant Industry, U. S. Depart ment of Agriculture, started an intensive study The ailment proved to be a bacterial disease growing to epidemic proportions on the monu ment, as well as in many other parts of the saguaro range in Arizona. Among other facts, the scientists desired to determine how much time elapsed between the infection of a saguaro and its death.Pop, of course, had been considerably worried about the infection that was playing havoc among his beloved saguaros. One day, in looking through some of his early pictures of the "Candelabrum," he noticed near it another saguaro which, in the light of his later knowledge, showed indications of advanced stages of saguaro necrosis. Pop's center of attention being the "Candelabrum," he didn't remember ever seeing the other plant, so began looking through his series of pictures. In one of them, a flashlight picture he had taken soon after coming to the monument, he found the other saguaro showing no sign of the disease. In short, through Pop's series of photos of the "Candelabrum" and the dates he had recorded in taking the pictures, scientists working on the saguaro disease problem have obtained accurate data of considerable value. As this article is written, an active campaign is being launched by the Bureau of Plant Industry in an effort to control the infection on Saguaro National Monument. All diseased plants on a 320-acre test plot are being cut down and buried under aseptic conditions. If successful, the treatment will be continued over a larger portion of the cactus forest.

Protected by the government, the cactus forest was set aside to preserve for all time one of the most beautiful portions of the Arizona desert.