Saturday, March 26, 2011

Desert Lesson #1

Don't Touch Anything!

Vol Fan learned this the hard way.  Several years ago we took our vacation in Big Bend National Park in west Texas.  Big Bend is in the Chihuahuan Desert and was our first trip to that type of environment.

We were hiking on afternoon and Vol Fan spotted a piece of cactus lying on the ground.  He thought it was dead and that all the spines had fallen off.  So he picked it up and cut it open, hoping to see how much water was really stored inside of a cactus.

Within a few minutes, he made a horrible realization.  The cactus might have been dead but it was far from spine-free.  He had successfully lodged hundreds of hairlike spines in his hands.  And those spines had a barb like a fishhook on the end which made them extremely hard to remove. 

So when you are in the desert and see something like this...
Look up close and make sure it isn't covered in something like this...

7 comments:

Susan said...

I once witnessed the extremely funny episode of watching my much older cousin try to rescue my much younger brother... and the two of them became "handcuffed" together by a piece of cactus. It was almost like Chinese handcuffs. The more they tried to maneuver, the more stuck they became!

Noe Noe Girl...A Queen of all Trades. said...

Ouch! Duck tape is a wonder drug for those nasty little boogers!
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Tammy said...

Yikes!

Unknown said...

The desert is full of surprises! I can feel Vol Fan's pain!

Busy Bee Suz said...

Oh my gosh...that must have been a painful lesson!!!!

Mental P Mama said...

oopsie daisy

Desert Survivor said...

Makes me remember the time when a bunch of us were roasting cactus. One guy asked if we should take out the spines before or after. Another said that the roasting would make them fall out. It was quickly learned that this was not the case, and removing those tiny spines from the tongue is not fun!