This saguaro cactus with the mountain backdrop made for a beautiful Sonoran Desert view.
I had never seen a cactus this big before, so I just had to pull off to the side of the road and take a closeup shot of it.
I estimated the height to be around 15 feet tall, definitely over ten feet, but there were even bigger ones that had to have been at least 20 feet tall, with many more branches!
Apparently saguaros only grow in the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona, live to be 200 years old, and don’t typically grow their first branch until they are 50 years old.
There weren’t only just a few of these big guys either, they were everywhere, for miles, lining the side of the road and filling the desert for as far as the eye could see (just south of Tucson)...
The saguaros weren’t the only cacti filling the desert either, there were also plenty of prickly pears as well, and another type which I’m not sure of its name too.
I’ve seen a decent variety of cacti now, having been camping in the southwest (between southern AZ and NM) for over a month now, and have gotten a few good shots of several of varieties that I’ve found near my various campsites.
I found this barrel cactus hiking in the high desert grassland of my current campsite in southern Arizona, in the Las Cienegas Conservation Area:
Prickly pear hiding underneath a sycamore tree in the Coronado National Forest at the base of the Dragoon Mountains in southeast Arizona:
And a blooming cholla cactus in southwest New Mexico, after a late December snowstorm:
