On the first full day of our 2012 winter stay in Arizona, we made an afternoon trip to Saguaro National Park, the eastern section, that is. The park encompasses over 91,000 acres in two sections: Saguaro West-Tucson Mountain District and Saguaro East-Rincon Mountain District. The city of Tucson sits between the two parcels of the park. Both have Visitor Centers, and we made the Rincon Mountain Visitor Center our initial stop.

Saguaro National Park is in the Sonoran Desert, and preserves many species of cacti, including its namesake, the mighty saguaro cactus made famous by numerous old western movies. The Rincon Mountain Visitor Center’s back wall frames a view of the lowland cactus desert sweeping up to the foot of the Rincon Mountains. In exhibits, we learned that this mountain range rises to an elevation of 8,666 feet at the summit of Mica Mountain. At the base of the mountains, desert scrub, including the giant saguaros, lead to grassland, and then as the land elevates, oak woodlands and pine forests exist. But on this particular day, saguaros caught my imagination; those green giants with twisted shapes and arms that reach toward the sky.

According to information I read at the Visitor Center, a saguaro can live up to 150 years. Posters stated that many of the cacti now standing in the saguaro forest were mere seedlings in the mid-1800s. They grow their slowest in the seedling stage, perhaps taking five years to become one inch tall. And for all their majesty standing there on the desert floor, the saguaro is a fragile giant. Driven to near extinction by over grazing cattle, a severe freeze in 1939, and even thievery by folks digging up cacti to replant on front lawns, the National Park Service eventually removed all feral cattle and also determined that cold, disease, and other natural factors affect the population cycles of the saguaro forest. Trying to eliminate those natural aspects, such as fire and flooding, actually interferes with nature’s process of weeding out the weaker and unhealthy plants.

We learned in the film at Rincon Mountain Visitor Center that the saguaro served as food and fiber for the earliest inhabitants of the Tucson Basin, hunters and gathers who camped in the major drainage system of the Rincon Mountains. About 1,700 years ago, the Hohokam, possibly descending from the hunters-gathers, developed agricultural communities in southern Arizona. For no established reasons, those people disappeared. Next, Jesuit missionaries, led by Padre Kino came into the area, followed by Spanish soldiers, and ranchers and farmers. All took their toll on the land—and the saguaros. The tiny seedlings grow under the protection of other plants or in rock crevices. By the time the acreage was established in 1933 as a National Monument, nearly every mesquite tree in the western section had been cut for fuel or fence posts. Thus, the trees that were nurse plants to seedling saguaros no longer existed.

After gleaning information at the Rincon Mountain Visitor Center, we took the eight-mile Cactus Forest Drive, a scenic driving loop through a saguaro forest that gave us an up-close look at the tree-like cacti, as well as many other species We drove with windows down, stopping often for photographs and taking in the peaceful quiet of the desert, interrupted intermittently by bicyclists whooshing by in a flash of color from their shirts.

On one visit to Yellowstone National Park, I shot dozens of photos of a grizzly cub. My travel companion, Johnie Stark, that same summer used her entire stash of film on buffalo at our first stop in Custer State Park in South Dakota. That day in Arizona, I shot possibly a hundred pictures of the kingly saguaro, some standing like a slim green pole, and others with arms extending from all sides and levels and at times appearing to reach around their trunks in a hug. I found it interesting that the saguaro does not even have arm buds until it reaches age 75. Lee and I began to guess the ages of different ones, considering the tall skinny ones to be youngsters.

We stopped long enough to hike the quarter-mile Desert Ecology Trail, inhaling the fresh, earthy smell of the dessert, tinged with the creosote plant. Sunset fell silently—and fast, turning the Rincon Mountains into a pink backdrop for the towering saguaros.  Our opportunity for photography passed, and we slowly maneuvered our Jeep out the park gate and back into the rush of Tucson traffic.