Trekking Adventures

While this tale I’m about to tell happened a little over two years ago, the lasting impact will live on forever in local Tucson folklore.  But first, especially for people who are not familiar with the desert vegetation, I’ll start with a little biology.  

There is a type of cactus feared by all called Cholla.  This cactus comes from the Cylindropuntia family, which is  

This is what Cholla looks like.

 closely related the family that includes Prickly Pear.  All species of Cholla have specially adapted spines that are barbed from tip to base.  Once the spine enters your skin and come into contact with blood, the tip of the spine will actually curve or hook into you.  Cholla translates to ‘joint’ which are what sections of this cactus are called.  So if you get stuck by one spine, it will hold on so tight that it will remove that chunck or ‘joint’ of cactus, and it will then be stuck to you.  The joints are essentially the seeds, and they get carted off into the desert by hanging on tightly to mammals. They might very well be the worst cactus you could possibly run into.   

With that said, the story starts on Halloween night a couple years ago.  I was invited to a costume party and came up with a last minute costume - An Inappropriate Yoga Instructor.  It was an easy costume to come up with; tight leggings, tank top, sandals and a head band.  So on with the costume, and out the door I go.  Deciding that driving would be a bad idea, I elected to ride a fixed gear bike that I had been borrowing from John (owner of SW Trekking).  

I’m not sure if making fun of Yoga followers the whole night was building bad karma for me, or if it might just have been one of those days, but whatever the case, the evening turned sour quickly.  

After a few Halloween brews, I started making my way home on the fixed gear.  While closing in on home, I noticed car lights coming up from behind me, so I turned my head to see what the car was up to.  While turning my head I also turned the handlebars ever so slightly and my front wheel hit the curb, ejecting me off the bike and into the air.  Just so happens that what I flew into was a nicely landscaped median that separated the main street from a frontage road.  

When I mean nicely landscaped, I really mean covered in Cholla.  And when I say flew into, I really mean I flew into it.  The next thing I know I’m upside down, suspending off the ground, looking past my feet at the moon through a hole I just made in the middle of a cluster of huge Cholla.  Knowing exactly what I had gotten myself into, I tried to remain calm.  This worked for about one second until I decided that something had to happen.     

How did I get out of the Cholla you ask?   Well, I rocked over to the left, then one big roll to the right and I had essentiallyrolled out of the patch of Cholla.  It’s important to remember that I was dressed rather poorly for such an event.  One of my sandals had fallen off, so my bare feet were cover in cholla, as was the rest of my body.  There is no way to describe how bad it was, so here is a picture.  

You can see a back pack “stapled” to my back.  In that pack is my cell phone, and my only civilized means of contacting help.  But, as it turned out, I was unable to move enough to get the back pack off, so there I was.   Frozen in the exact pose you see in the picture.  So I do the only thing you can do, I start yelling for help.  Thankfully a lady came out of her house to see what all the commotion was about, and kindly called 911 for me.  When the first responders got to me, they took some picture (of which you are seeing), and decided they didn’t want to get too close to me.  Thankfully, they did help remove some of the larger patches of Cholla so I could sit.  

The ambulance came, put me on a bed, and drove me to the ER.  Once in the ER, two nurses spent the next few hours yanking these barbed and hooked spines out ofme.  With a rather shotty heath insurance plan, I elected to forgo any type of pain killers out of fear of their price tag.  

Of all the thousands of spines that came out, many more had broken off underneath the skin.  This provided me many hours of entertainment for the next four months trying to extract the more painful spines stuck in my toes and fingers.  In the picture above, you can see some of the many spines that were stuck in my fingers, arms, neck and head.  

So now we flash forward to the present day.  All but a handful of spines have been successfully removed.  A few remain, and will probably live the rest of their lives in my various body parts.   

Like any good story, there are a few morals here.   One, Chollas are hands down the worst possible cactus to run into.  Two Yoga cloths, especially footwear, are not designed for crashing bikes into cactus.  And finally, don’t make fun of Yoga instructors or else you’ll fall into Cholla.  

I was later told by someone that the Apache tribes would capture prisoners during battle and striped them down to bare skin, tie their hands and feet together, and you guessed it, threw them into Cholla fields.  This would have fatal ending for the prisoner.  Thankfully for me, they were firefighters and not Apaches’.

Pictures provided by Tucson Fire Department.