Back Road Adventure: the Organ Pipe Loop Road by Gregory McNamee

Chollas are sneaky things. The fuzzy, stringy cacti wait for an obliging passerby, then latch on to clothes, skin, fur. They travel by cow flank or pant leg to a desired destination, then jump off to get a new plant started. They plan their movements well in advance to take advantage of any blunder, and I swear that they can see me coming from a long way away.

So I think as I sit on a bank of sun-warmed rocks alongside the loop road that wanders through the eastern portion of Organ Pipe National Monument, disconsolately picking at a clump of cholla that’s bitten down on my left sock. I know all about cholla through hard experience, and I keep a pair of extra-long tweezers in my backpack to pluck out the attacker efficiently and painlessly.

That backpack, of course, is sitting back at home. No matter. As they say in football, when you’re a pro, you play hurt, and so, having extricated myself from most of the cholla stalk with an obliging piece of saguaro rib, I hobble back to the truck and drive onward, glad that the spines didn’t find a tire—yet.

The Organ Pipe Loop Road

Fringed by mountains and spreading out like a fan southward toward Mexico, the rocky plain that makes up much of Organ Pipe National Monument is a meeting place for the comparatively lush Sonoran Desert upland environment, so favored by those chollas, and the hotter, drier, lower coastal plain of Sonora and the Colorado River delta. This is desert that tends toward extremes of heat in the hot season, but that’s blessedly mild in the winter and fall, a range that seems to please the imposing organ pipe cactus, Stenocereus thurberi.

The gateway to the 21-mile-long loop road stands just opposite the Monument headquarters, on Arizona Highway 85 a few miles north of the international border. The road is good, as dirt roads go, though as always in the desert it pays to keep a close eye on the weather, since the heat can be hard on a person and vehicle and the desert plain is subject to flooding after a hard rain.

Longtime Organ Pipe hands have their favorite times of year. Sue Rutman, the Monument’s resident naturalist, tells me that she has a soft spot for summer, when the desert is an anvil for the sun. Since I am sensible, mine is early spring, when, if the winter rains have been generous, the loop road passes through sunny fields of poppies and other wildflowers worthy of the Wizard of Oz.

So it is on this early spring morning, the broad Sonoyta Valley carpeted with a profusion of newly bloomed flowers. The valley, and the beginning of the loop road, lies in what ecologists call a “mixed scrub community,” marked by the low brittlebush and bursage that sway in the soft breeze, as well as the larger foothill paloverde and ocotillo. The road soon climbs to the rocky, sun-drenched foothills country that saguaros and organ pipe cacti so love.

At 5.2 miles from the entrance to the loop road stands a particularly fine specimen of the latter, its candelabra arms reaching into the sky. Take the time to step out of your car to admire this great piece of creation, but keep an eye out for those cholla—there’s a particularly dense patch of it nearby, and the old-timers didn’t call it “jumping cactus” for nothing.

Climbing Up to the Ajo Mountains

The road climbs gently, drops into the gulch called Diablo Wash, then climbs again to give a fine view of the steep canyon from which the wash descends. The rocks here are covered with what appears to be moss, an unusual sight in the dry desert; this primitive plant turns a vivid green after a good rainfall, which occasions another old-time name, “resurrection plant.” In springtime, the moss’s emerald trail follows the road around a narrow pass in the foothills of the sheer Ajo Mountains.

The pass opens on to a view of the highest point in the range, Mount Ajo, which, though only 4,808 feet tall, makes a challenging climb for even the most experienced hiker; the tough volcanic mountains look as if they’d been piped out by a mad pastry chef with a blender full of lava, and for all their scenic quality there’s nothing gentle about them.

My favorite section of the loop road, no matter what the season, begins at mile 9.4, where a sight rare in the Sonoran Desert awaits: a rock arch 720 feet overhead, stretching out to a length of more than 90 feet. Arch Canyon offers an inviting hike, climbing from the road’s 2,500-foot vantage to elevations that sustain shady oak and juniper trees.

Another hike winds out from the parking lot at Estes Canyon, about a mile and a half farther down the loop road. The trailhead begins at the spacious parking area, making its way up a rugged two-mile-long climb to the surprisingly wet, green Bull Pasture. The round trip takes a couple of hours, with a wonderful payoff in sweeping views of the low-desert plain far south into Mexico.

Down to the Sonoran Desert

Descending from the flank of the Ajos, the loop road now passes through dense growths of jojoba, a Sonoran Desert plant valued for its high-quality oil, and the curious and uncommon thing called the Mexican jumping bean, a dark-green shrub whose seeds harbor moth larvae that move around here and there, less jumping than twitching.

Soon, at about mile 18, the road leaves the hills and returns to the desert floor, traversing stands of saguaros, organ pipes, Christmas cacti, and everywhere patches of cholla in its many magnificent and troublesome varieties—pencil cholla, teddybear cholla, chain-fruit cholla, hunters all, looking for a juicy calf to sink into.

Organ Pipe is a place of demands and extremes, but also subtle and spectacular beauties alike. The loop road is the best way I know to introduce yourself to this unique place and its wealth—277 bird species, 70 kinds of mammals, 46 reptile species, 76 butterfly varieties and counting, and more, not bad at all for a desert, a place whose Latin original, desertus, means “abandoned.” Far from it—even though you’re likely to have the road to yourself, making Organ Pipe an ideal place for a quiet backroad drive to get away from it all.