Greetings from Grand Junction! While my mentor was gone for a week I had the awesome opportunity to go out in the field to help work on various projects, such as a migrating birds survey and the famous Sagegrouse Habitat Assessment Framework. But now I’m back in the groove of surveying different areas for the threatened Colorado Hookless Cactus (Sclerocactus glaucus) with a fellow non-CLM intern. We’ve been hiking these mountain bike trails in an area called Tabeguache for a race in August called the ‘Epic Bike Race’ and for the Colorado Mesa University Bike Race. Unfortunately, we did find one right on the edge of the trail so I’ll probably have to monitor that during the race. We’ve also been looking for them in the North Desert in Grand Junction which is a highly used OHV recreation area. Imagine steep rolling desert hills interspersed with pipelines and oil drills. We’re stuck with a small manual 4-WD truck so it seems like we spend more time trying to get up hills and getting stuck than looking for cactus. But on our first day we got lucky and I spotted these monsters from the window:
These are the largest we’ve seen yet and the biggest clump of them together! It was pretty exciting. So that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing. Putting on my cactus glasses and getting dizzy from staring out the window for them. On a side note: I went to Moab to visit Canyonlands and Arches National Parks last weekend and it was 107 degrees! I can’t believe how hot it gets here. When we hike we have to leave at 6am and it’s still blistering hot by 10am. Hopefully we’ll get some monsoonal rains this weekend…
Lindsey Bargelt
BLM Grand Junction Field Office
“Small” and “manual” mean “good” in 4WD vehicles. 🙂
Hey Lindsey,
Glad to have you on the cactus trail! Where were you when you spotted the individuals you have pictured / have you taken Anna out to see them? I only ask because they look like they do in fact have hooked abaxial spines and are growing in patterns more typical in S. parviflorus than S. glaucus. Hope all is well in GJ.
Hi Phil,
How do you know Anna? Our main project is finding the western extent of S. glaucus in the North Desert in Grand Junction, where they do sometimes have hooked abaxial spines. The Denver Botanical Garden will be doing genetics test on the ones we find later to learn more about them, but Anna did confirm that these were S. glaucus and we’ve found many more further west before they become S. parviflorus.