Part 3

The visitor from El Paso, as the Chihuahua desert (the name is fairly deserved) slides backward underneath him, will be amazed at the serpentine stripe of vivid verdure below, all completely leveled, and all marked off by geometrical lines and tightly bordered by pale hills where the vegetation is reduced to tiny dots not tall enough to cast a shadow. Still proceeding north, he will presently be above a ninety-mile stretch where the vegetation is so skimpy and the river so closely boxed in by desolate hills that Spanish explorers bestowed on it the sinister name _Jornada del Muerto_—Dead Man’s Journey, which is self-explanatory.

But on the other hand, a visitor descending into New Mexico from the northland in wintertime above this same Rio Grande will traverse a featureless jumble of peaks on which the black coniferous forest no longer shows as black at all but, snow-encased, gleams as white as the naked snowfields themselves. And he will find incredible the immense range of climate spanned in a flight only an hour long.

The jet traveler approaching from the west beholds the greatest, most spectacular panorama of all, the true wasteland of the desert, with vast blocks uplifted from out of earth’s crust, plateaus dissected by giant empty canyons whose walls are seared to utter nudity by ages of the most intense sunshine on our continent. Here the architecture of nature is all designed on a gigantic scale, and the climate exhibits influences of a mighty ocean, of towering mountain chains, and the range of wandering planetary winds which created the desert. From the altitude of a cruising jet, the distances, the speed, the color, and the light are indescribably exhilarating.

Since the traveler arriving from any direction can see for identification only a few species, it will suffice to point out only two of the harbingers of eastern New Mexico, both of which are dominant on that area of the Great Plains: the blue grama grass, which in fall and winter bears the graceful sickle-shaped head, and the small _Yucca glauca_ which cannot be mistaken for anything else.

Along the northern line, the visitor should look for the somber, almost black, forest of spruce and fir with its white patches of aspen on the 10,000-foot slopes. Descending farther southward, even a casual observer will note that these species give way first to the yellow pines, then to the junipers (“cedars”) and dwarf pines or piñons. The visitor arriving from the south will find most conspicuous of all the olive-green creosote bush in its summer-winter foliage, next, the omnipresent mesquite (_Prosopis_), then the various _Opuntia_ cacti (chollas and prickly pears), and the yuccas.

As he comes in from Arizona, the splendid saguaros will beckon him toward the gateway of New Mexico, but they will nowhere enter it themselves. The vase-shaped body of the ocotillo consisting of unbranching, ten-foot wands should be recognized at a glance, as likewise should the various yuccas and agaves. And in early springtime, a low tree with a rounded mass of golden bloom will joyously proclaim its identity as a paloverde.

The desert plants thus enumerated can be recognized along various stretches of U.S. 66 as one holds his speed at a conservative ninety or, even better, at a conservative sixty.

The amateur scientist will need to do some homework before he learns much systematic botany or plant physiology. It takes considerable study to comprehend the slow, age-long process which has resulted in the evolution of all this grotesque vegetation: the interaction of extreme aridity, high temperature, low humidity, high evaporation, infrequent precipitation, the hostility of numerous chemical solutions, and the natural rapacity of the animal population. Each plant must have an adaptation of its own, from the tiny winter annual, which must race through its course from a tender rosette to ripened seed before the searing sunshine arrives, on up through the series to the stoic saguaro, which seems able to scorn nature’s enmity.

A final warning to the air traveler. He should be sure before deplaning that he has observed a _bajada_. It is a must. Bajada is one name, outwash slope is another, alluvial fan is still another. The stewardess should inquire of each student, and if his answer is “no,” she should reply, “Then you’ve just flunked the course.” A bajada is the most characteristic single feature of all in the sloping, stony topography of the desert—and remember that the surface of the desert is regularly sloping and stony. The Spanish word itself means only a down slope, but it has come to have a semitechnical sense—a fan-shaped apron of rocky debris at the foot of a mountain where it has settled out of the summer torrents and there keeps accumulating in successive floods. As the mass builds up, the bigger fragments drop out closest to the parent crag, then the small ones, finally the coarse gravel, and lowest of all on the slope the fine sand. Thus the fragments are graduated in size, in distance traveled, and in the nature of soil resulting. As the fan increases in size and laps up higher and higher on the mountain’s flank, the geologists often describe the result by saying that the mountain “is burying itself under its own debris.” From the air, the lines of drainage will be seen to have assumed the form of a tree with its trunk downward, its branches high in air. But the most interesting aspect of a bajada is the nice proportion which nature works out between the plant species and their location on the curve.

FROM SAGEBRUSH TO SPRUCE TREES

The traveler who has viewed the Southwestern panorama of nature from its sagebrush to its spruce trees has indeed seen most of it. The spruce which grows wild only well up on the higher mountains is familiar to everybody because it has become a favorite in formal planting everywhere. But the sages—who knows them? To the tenderfoot, almost any gray plant is “sage.” To my friends the cowmen, sage means commonly saltbush. To my friends the foresters, sage means an artemisia. But there are romantics to whom “purple sage” is Apache plume, which is a member of the wild rose family.

Some popular education would seem to be desirable. And this applies, too, to the cacti, for there is more misinformation about them than anything else that grows, runs, or creeps—except rattlesnakes. The clever people who design travel folders and pictorial maps almost always put saguaros in New Mexico. But saguaros do not grow in New Mexico. That is final! And the yucca is not a cactus. That also is final. Nor yet the ocotillo—that defiant, splendid denizen of the desert which flaunts the scarlet torch of flowers. The question that is always on the surface as one writes of plant life in the Southwest is, “Who wants to know?” The picnicker wants to know the names—and nothing much besides—of the wild flowers. My friend the cowman already has the names; that is, the common ones. If I chance to mention blue grama grass, he gently corrects me, “black grama.” Then if I mention black grama, he says, “no, white grama.” But at least he is concerned about something more important than nonscientific names. He wants to know if the plant is something that a lean old cow can eat, whether it stays green in winter, and if it will hold the soil in place. The tourist who pilots car and passengers some six hundred miles between breakfast and bedtime asks only what he was looking at. The rest of us who go into the mountains often enough to be impressed by the layer-cake succession of plants on their slopes can, with the aid of some reading, amass a store of knowledge where others amass only mileage. On a tour, it is mileage or knowledge. One has to choose.

Actually, our New Mexico desert is not dominated by sage. That honor is held by the creosote bush, called by some of the old-timers _greasewood_, _Covillea glutinosa_, by some of the scientists—along with five other synonyms. Like the mesquite with which it shares the same general habitat but _does not intermix_, it occupies an immense spread of territory, roughly from Texas to California. Since no livestock will eat it and the ground it occupies is equally useless for agriculture because of aridity and stoniness, creosote is a veritable coyote for survival. The traveler descending from Taos to Santa Fe need not look for it. The sage of that locality, which gives the landscape its singularly mournful aspect, is a true sage. With good reason the cowboys call it _black sage_.

In 1846, Lieutenant Emory, as he rode southward with the Army of the West, first encountered the creosote as he approached Socorro. The northward extension of the plant is at the same point today, and the range of mesquite extends only a few miles farther north. These two remarkable plants are the main markers of the Lower Sonoran Zone. In the same arid, stony, broken country, the traveler will find an abundance of cacti, and these plants are usually supposed to be the most tenacious of all tenacious growing things. Actually, in southwestern Arizona and neighboring parts of California there are whole areas where the aridity is too severe for cacti, but for our state—let it stand. Everybody, of course, has noted the grotesque shape of the plants, but not everybody has noted that the shape was chosen with a canny intelligence. A globe exposes less surface (that is, the vulnerable area for evaporation) than any other solid of equal volume. And a cylinder is second best. Another thing—cacti being succulents are filled with a watery sap or juice which quickly coagulates after a wound and stops the waste of moisture. Furthermore, the plant’s aggressive root system is arranged so as to capture the grounds scanty moisture most quickly and completely after rains.

Cacti of more than sixty species occur within our state, but more than nine tenths of the plants seen along the highway—unless they are brought together for a garden collection—can be grouped into one genus, the _Opuntia_. The family likeness is shown not by the shape or general appearance but by the fact that all are jointed. Both the cane cactus (also called cholla and elkhorn) and the pancaked prickly pear, unlike the big barrel cactus and the numerous small species which resemble it in shape, have joints and may therefore be rightly called opuntias. The “pancakes,” it may be remarked, are not leaves but divisions of the stem. A cactus gets along without leaves. So a good rough-and-ready test is this: if it has leaves, it is not a cactus—which eliminates ocotillo, yucca, agave, sotol, and so on.

The barrel cactus is sure to be seen growing beside service stations in the southern part of the state. Its name as well as its size identifies it. The flowers and the large lemon-shaped fruits are worth a glance. If they do not occur on the south side of the plant, it has been transplanted and turned. The evidence is as trustworthy as the presence of moss on the north side of a tree in the forest.

The barrel cacti, the opuntias, acacias, the ocotillos, along with the creosote and mesquite already mentioned, have a way of growing along together in what is called a plant society. These all belong in the bottom layer of the cake called the Lower Sonoran Zone, which is best seen on the Rio Grande mesas near El Paso.

The layer next above it comprises the foothill country of the Upper Sonoran Zone, which includes most of the state of New Mexico. Some of its common markers are juniper, piñon, oak of various species including live oak, mountain mahogany, mescal, yucca, beargrass, and the famous blue grama grass. It is exhibited all along the Continental Divide in the southwest part of the state but nowhere so well as in the Fort Bayard Reservation. There a tract, protected for three generations from woodcutting, fires, and intensive grazing, offers a large-scale picture of the lovely land that once was New Mexico. There the character and amount of vegetation astounds the visitor who is familiar with only the close-picked, parched aspect of the landscape that generally borders the main highways. When seen from the air, the very color of the grass-mantled earth is many shades lighter than that of the bare overgrazed ranges a few miles to the south. And the difference can be seen by anybody.

The foothills are dotted, not covered, with juniper and piñon. The dwarfed, rounded little junipers (properly enough called cedars) leave the traveler unprepared to believe that they will anywhere become respectable forest trees. Yet in the Burro Mountains, the alligator-bark species, finest of them all, reaches a diameter of five feet and an age of about 1000 years. The wood has an extraordinary fragrance, and its smoke tells the neighbors for blocks around that you are warming yourself at the fireplace. Another notable thing about the wood is its resistance to decay in the earth. I have removed pieces of it from subterranean ruins of the Mimbres culture which, according to the best archaeological opinion, are some eight hundred years old.

The yuccas deserve a story by themselves. One small, unimpressive species greets you on the meadows at the foot of Raton Pass; others have to be searched out along high limestone ridges where the foothills are deciding to become mountains. The one chosen for our state flower is the tall yucca (_Yucca elata_), a superb species best seen along the Continental Divide near Silver City. The genus reaches its greatest size in the grotesque Joshua tree, which never fails to attract the eye on the Mohave desert in California.

The century plant has a name that always gets attention. But let us be sure we mean the same thing. Rightly, it means the mescal, the favorite food of the Mescalero Apaches. Besides these two names, it is called also maguey and, no doubt, Spanish dagger along with various other spine-tipped plants. All of which clinches the argument for a name which for all users is a certain designation for one object and only one. It is not just because botanists like to appear learned that they call this plant _Agave parryi_. That title is as descriptive as middle C for one key on the piano, and in the same way international.

Everyone inquires about the century plant’s life expectancy. An insurance man might make an inference from the name. The plant is a big compact cluster or rosette of rigid, upward-pointing, spadelike leaves, each four or five inches in width and each tipped with a vicious, stout thorn. Year after year the plant just sits there by a boulder, unnoticed. I question whether anything alive on the desert has a better life expectancy. As far as my observations go, it has no diseases. It is invincible to drouth. Freezing does not harm it, and fire cannot burn it—although a yucca even when green will flame up like a torch. No hungry old cow can crop it, and no rodent gnaws it, at least not enough to do harm. And since the Indians have gone on reservations, no human uses it. So it stays there.

In fact, nothing less than a caterpillar can leave a dent on it—not, of course, the caterpillar that eats young tomato plants, but the Caterpillar that pulls heavy road machinery. The plant just does not die before maturity, it would seem. A remarkable organism, indeed! But after many, many years, depending on the amount of moisture it receives, it makes up its mind to flower. In one tremendous effort, it shoots up a twelve-foot flower stalk at the rate of several inches a day. The blossoming is a final, dramatic, beautiful gesture, for by the time the flowers have withered, the great tenacious plant has turned to a ghastly purple and is dead.

On the high slopes where the last yuccas end and only a few junipers remain in the race for survival, the yellow pines come in to mark off what is called the Transition Zone. The pines need no description, no printed promotion. The traveler, any traveler, can appreciate them although he might not be stirred to the slightest interest by the lovely yuccas. Since the beginning of time, the pines, fragrant, cheerful, companionable, have been man’s best friend. Among the ponderosa pines takes place most of the hunting, most of the camping, much of the picnicking. There is no danger that the tourist will overlook the pine belt and the pines for they are probably the most numerous tree in New Mexico.

Above them, the classifications are less clearly defined and ecologists are less inclined to agree on zonation. The Canadian Zone, if we settle on that name, occurs only in small areas on the map, and most of them north of Santa Fe. These are high ridges and island peaks that tower high enough to tempt the Engelmann spruces. Yet some of these islands occur as far south as the Mogollon Mountains and thus bring Canadian Zone scenes almost to the Mexican border. For hardy ecologists who want to explore high ridges and horns of bare stone which rise as clean as a hound’s tooth clear up into the Arctic-alpine Zone, it is necessary to enter Colorado.

Engelmann spruce forests may be associated with the 10,000-foot level. The blue spruce is very similar, perhaps only a subspecies, but it comes in a little lower. The Engelmann makes a dense forest hardly allowing invaders, but the blue is more tolerant, less austere. It loves the water and is the natural companion of chill, cascading trout streams. Though fond of shadow, it seems to grow equally well where the narrow canyons widen and admit the sunshine upon the tiny meadows of lush grass, cranesbill, velvety red cinquefoils, lupines, and yellow columbines. And when one of these miniature openings is fringed with spruces whose pointed tips rise sharp against a curtain of azure with its white cumulus clouds, there you have the loveliest vista in the mountains.

OUR VISIBLE IMPACT ON THE PLANT LIFE

Though nature lovers usually find the life zones more fascinating than any other aspect of plants in the mountains, there is one other much more important. It is the misuse, injury, and destruction of native plant life. Because scientists are generally alert to the conservation of what is useful and beautiful in natural resources, I venture to bring up the matter here.

A useful case history is provided by Silver City, New Mexico. It was founded in the early seventies as a silver camp, which would fairly guarantee a certain amount of reckless haste and rowdy carelessness. Point two was its location on a foothill watershed only twenty-seven square miles in area. Point three was an extreme concentration of livestock near the town. Point four was the fact that the annual rainfall was crowded mainly into July, August, and a part of September.

Mines are naturally users of timber. Obviously, shafts and tunnels have to be timbered. More than that, little smelters nestled back among the hills were also hungry for wood. And since coal was expensive and hard to get, most of the adobe cottages were heated many years by juniper, oak, and piñon firewood. All these matters were naturally, if not actually, inevitable under the circumstances.

The massive ore wagons and freight wagons had to be drawn by four- to ten-horse teams—and the horses kept on eating. Then because it was also a ranching country, each cowboy had to keep a _remuda_ of saddle horses—and they ate too. Also, the few cows that provided milk for the children grazed hungrily over the stony slopes. Most of all, the range cattle, which had no provender at all except that which the competitive, half-starved steers could provide for themselves, overgrazed every square foot of pasturage down to the bare soil. The government’s open-range policy made overgrazing inevitable because no ranchman could protect his pasturage since it was all unfenced. The cow that got there first got the grass. That passed as land management, which proves that some statesmen then were about as wise as some of the Wizards of Washington now. But the advent of fences caused the cutting of millions of fence posts where none should have been cut.

When the grass went, its roots went, and when its roots went, there was nothing to hold the soil, and then it, too, started to go. And go it did. A deep hole formed in Main Street, as it is still called on the Silver City town plat. The best explanation I can find of that hole is that earth was taken out of it to form adobe bricks for the walls of houses and corrals (that clay did make good adobe!). Meanwhile, the woodhaulers’ wagons had greedily carted away the trees from each little canyon, while the narrow steel tires cut deep ruts which formed two deep gullies at the first heavy rain. Then the parallel gullies proceeded to wash out deeper and create a middle ridge or high center on which axles got stuck. Since there was nobody responsible for making a new road, there was no choice except to move over and form another track and use it until in turn it became unusable. (By this simple kind of destruction, the old Santa Fe Trail, it is said, reached a width of a hundred feet.)

But the water descending the slope kept increasing its destructive velocity as the denuded ground approached the bareness of a tin roof. Villagers observed that the hole in their Main Street was becoming a waterfall after each rain, and that the ruin was passing into a big-time operation. The town built a dam to restrain the floods. It washed out in the first one. Soon Main Street followed it down the drain, which by this time was already a hideous gash in the earth many miles long and twenty feet deep. Then the water began on a really different scale of destruction. One furious flood washed away the cabin in which Billy the Kid’s mother lived. More than that, it washed away the wall of Judge Newcomb’s house and abducted his Steinway from the second floor. A few yards from the spot, an old photograph taken in 1891 shows a woodhauler’s ox team lying in the street there. It gives no hint at that time of the famous Big Ditch—the only name that Main Street, Silver City has had now for the last forty years.

By 1927, after many other attempts had been made to tame the floods a steel bridge about one hundred feet long and thirty feet above the floor of the “canyon” was swung into place. In 1935-1936, the Soil Conservation Service went to work in earnest, made the watershed a demonstration area, and spent a third of a million dollars there in a short time.

In the _New Mexico Magazine_ for August 1934, the really incredible story of the Big Ditch is exactly documented with old photographs and newspaper clippings. After a friendship of many years with old-time miners and ranchers at Silver City, I would not point an accusing finger at one of them. I appeal, however, for a greater vigilance over plant life and soils nowadays from everybody. In such protected areas as the Fort Bayard Reservation, the U.S. National Forest enclosures, and the frontier cemeteries, the imagination can visualize a New Mexico that is far different from what is here today—a close-picked, hard-used land where unwise woodcutting has continued through much of the last three centuries and where the thin ranges have been required to support in the last century alone perhaps more than one hundred million cows, sheep, and horses. The magnitude of the cause accounts for the magnitude of the effect.

A good many years ago, I wrote as the concluding paragraph to _Sky Determines_ what seemed to some exaggerated praise for my adopted homeland. There is now less and less cavil from any readers. I believed the words true in 1934, and I stand my ground now.