EmmaDonovan
Crossing the Road
Those are saguaros, they're big and pretty easy to avoid.
The cactus that you have to watch out for is the cholla. It's called "jumping cholla" because its barbed spines attach to ANYTHING at the slightest touch. They adhere tenaciously to skin, fur, clothes, and packs and are extremely difficult to remove. They really do seem to jump on anything that passes them. Any time you walk/hike/ride in the desert you take the chance of ending up with cholla spines on you.
Cholla grows in patches like this, called a "garden of cholla" (a pleasant misnomer). They are all probably from the same plant. Cholla garden individuals typically all have the same DNA.
If you live here long enough you will hear some terrible stories about cholla.
One of the worst I've heard was a friend of mine whose horse spooked and threw her into a cholla garden. She fell on her back and was covered in spines from the back of her neck all the way down to her feet. It took a week to remove them all, they just kept finding more. She had to sleep on her stomach and spent four months recovering even though she was otherwise uninjured.
Just writing that gives me the heebie jeebies.
