Saguaro NP, AZ
2022 Parks Road Trip Diary: Days 77-78
Saguaro National Park, on the outskirts of Tucson, AZ, is home to a vast collection of cacti. Most notably, it has what is for many of us the prototypical cactus: the Saguaro. On our trip we only really passed through this park, so I’m not sure this post will do it justice, but I can say with confidence that its cacti truly were grand.
Day 77: The Day That Would Not End
Solving a Driving Puzzle
Leaving Sedona, we had a logistical challenge: make it to Big Bend NP in Texas, at least spend a few hours seeing Saguaro NP in Arizona, and limit the driving to max eight hours per day. (Both of us struggle to drive more than four in a day. It just gets so tiring.)
To give you a sense of how far things were, Sedona to Saguaro is about 4.5 hours and Saguaro to Big Bend is about 10 hours. That’s 14.5 hours – it could be done over two days, ideally with each having ~7 hours of driving.
Also relevant is that, after some research, we decided our visit to Saguaro NP could be brief. It didn’t really have any must-do hikes, plus it was (yet again) skin-bakingly hot outside, so we would’ve needed to take it easy anyway. We really just wanted to take in the Saguaro cacti at their grandest, and we could do that by driving the Cactus Forest Loop in East Saguaro NP. That would only require a couple hours at the park.
This meant that we could probably hatch a plan where we drive to Saguaro, visit it for a few hours, and continue driving a bit more to some campground closer to Big Bend where we could sleep for the night. We found one called Aguirre Spring Campground that was 4.5 hours away from Saguaro NP, near Las Cruces, NM. That’d mean 9 hours of driving today – more than we’d like – but there wasn’t really a better option.
The drive to Saguaro was smooth, and in Tucson we got lunch (so delicious btw), took care of laundry, and stocked up on groceries. Around 3 or 4PM we finally entered Saguaro National Park!
The Saguaros
Saguaro is the type of cactus that looks like this and is a symbol of Arizona. They and their many different gnarly, budding shapes very much were the main attraction in the park. These things were huge!
The facts about Saguaros seemed particularly fun (thanks NPS):
- It takes around 70 years for one to become ~6.5 ft tall.
- It is incredibly efficient at collecting and retaining water, and because of the water weight a full-sized Saguaro (45 ft) can weigh over one ton.
- Birds like to hollow out holes in the larger Saguaros to make their home in. The holes stay cool even in in the summer because the cactus’s retained water acts as a shield from the heat.
There were other types of cacti around as well. Here are a few pics!
Our time there intersected with sunset, which was sublime. But also stressful, because we still had over four hours of driving left, and now it would be happening in the dark.
Four Hours, You Say?
We left Saguaro NP around 6pm. Judy and I split the remainder of the drive between us, with me driving second. As we finally approached Aguirre Spring campground around 10:30PM (actually, 11:30; we passed a time zone), there was a big closed gate and a tire spike strip blocking the entrance. A nearby sign read: NO PARK ENTRY AFTER 8PM.
Why?! This was the first time our entire trip we’d encountered a time limit on campground entry. This was really not a welcome experience after our collective ninth hour of driving.
It took some serious energy to switch from self-pity mode to problem-solving mode. We were actually right back near White Sands NP, which we’d been to at the start of the trip. So we had a sure thing: go back to the campground we used previously, Oliver Lee. Its only downside was that it was almost an hour away, in the opposite direction of Big Bend.
Whatever. We couldn’t take any more risks on unknown places, or we might be falling asleep on the side of the road tonight. We did make it to Oliver Lee and got a site, but man were we beat. We totaled 10 hours of driving and didn’t enter our tent until 1AM.
Last time we visited here, we woke up for sunrise. This time, not so much.
post originally written 1/1, backdated to match reality