Look closely at the plants clinging to these rocky mountain slopes as you climb, because you're driving through the northern reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert, the largest desert in North America, and it's full of tough, strange, wonderful survivors. That plant that looks like a bundle of dead gray sticks stuck in the ground — a fountain of long, thorny whips — is the ocotillo, and it's not dead at all; after a rain it leafs out green in a matter of days and tips each whip with a flame-red flower. Those big rosettes of stiff, saw-toothed blades are agaves and their relatives, the sotol and the lechuguilla — the desert's yuccas and century plants, some of which the native peoples roasted for food and fermented for drink. And the squat, ribbed, fiercely-spined barrel cactus hunkers among the rocks, storing water for the long dry.
Keep your eyes up on the crags, too. Mule deer, big-eared and gray, browse these slopes, especially at dawn and dusk. And though you will almost certainly never lay eyes on one, know that mountain lions — real, wild cougars — do prowl these mountains, hunting those deer, right here at the edge of a city of a million people. It's a genuine wildness. And watch the skyline of the rocks for a formation the locals treasure: a great outcrop shaped like a bird with outstretched wings, called the Thunderbird, named for the great winged spirit of Native tradition, and said to appear and vanish depending on the light and the snow. So this "barren" mountain in the middle of the city is nothing of the sort — it's a living desert wilderness, spiny and secret and wild. Climb on through it. Roll on.
Photo: Leaflet · Public domain
