Bumper Crop of Cacti

a portfolio by jack dykinga Saguaros of the Sand Tanks

A new national monument preserves giant specimens

Thirty miles of

A bone-jarring jeep road will sour me on about anything. Yet, an hour-plus southwest of Phoenix, after caterpillaring my way over football-size boulders, I crest a final ridge and my jaw drops. Before me lie the Sand Tank Mountains, home to what must be the most lush stand of saguaros in Arizonaand therefore the world.

I live farther south, at the base of the Tucson Mountains just east of Saguaro National Park. I know these cacti, but I have never seen anything like the saguaros in the Sand Tanks, a range of modest elevation-4,084 feet-named for some life-saving water holes.

While the Sonoran Desert around Tucson seems to be losing a good number of the slow-growing giants to age, robust saguaros of all ages and sizes abound here. These cactus icons-which may live two centuries, weigh 2 tons or more and attain heights above 40 feet-grow only to about 6 feet in their first 50 to 65 years. They produce their signature "arms" at a height of 15 feet, between the ages of 75 and 100.

And, while my desert back yard appears studded with little guys about 2 feet high-what I call "the class of 1978 or 1983" (years of abundant rains)-the Sand Tanks also shelter the classes of 1750, 1800, 1850, 1900, right up to seedlings sprouted during the 1998 El Niño.

Perhaps that's why Bruce Babbitt, former secretary of the Interior and governor of Arizona, selected the Sand Tank Mountains as the heart of the new Sonoran Desert National Monument. Preserving such a rich biologic heritage makes this Arizonan stand a little taller. But then, I'm in good company. [PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 24 AND 25] Dense stands of saguaros, chollas, ocotillos and paloverde trees mark the rugged landscape of the Sand Tank Mountains. The range anchors the core of the Sonoran Desert National Monument.

[LEFT] Photographers often return to favorite subjects. When Jack Dykinga revisited this ancient saguaro cactus, he found the desert colossus had succumbed to the ravages of time and the elements. This is the last and possibly the only photograph of the giant still standing.

Seldom-seen pinnacles and spires along the Sand Tanks' western flank warm in the crystalline light of sunset.

[LEFT] The skeleton ribs of a saguaro cactus form a graceful arbor above the Sand Tank Mountains as dawn breaks over the isolated range. [ABOVE] Saguaros and chain fruit chollas flourish at the foot of a rocky slope. Runoff from infrequent rains often supports lush plantlife in the valleys below desert mountains.

Oak Creek Memories

While searching for the site of their family cabin, three generations of women find an ageless bond

I always knew about Oak Creek, where my mother spent her summers as a child and where she took my daddy just after she married him, before he, in turn, took her east to start their life in Georgia. For me, it had a mysterious, almost mythical allure. Of course, I knew only what I had heard from Mama and what I had seen in the sepia-toned photos stored in our attic.

In my mind, I saw Oak Creek as being from another time, a time when the West was still wild, a time when a little girl could grow up hunting, fishing and camping-real camping, not Winnebago camping. For me, a product of the 1950s, a child of the South, Mama's stories of staying at Oak Creek in the 1930s and '40s were as foreign as if she had been raised by wolves. Perhaps she was. It could happen at Oak Creek.

It was not until years later that I, as the mother of a daughter myself, yet still a daughter to my own mother, made the trip to theplace that was so much a part of me, even though I had never been there. Three generations of females flew west from Atlanta in the spring of 1998. Mama, my 13-year-old daughter, Molly, and I all had different agendas. My mother wanted what might very well be her last visit to her home state, and I longed to know more about her early life. I wanted to find myself somewhere in her beginnings, to know the "Arizona part" of me. Molly came only because I wouldn't let her stay home with her friends, even though she thought she was old enough.

The three of us traversed the circuit of my mother's childhood, starting with Prescott, where she was born. Her family's Victorian house still stands, now listed