I was lost in the endless starry skies of southern Colorado when I walked directly into a cactus.
I was 24 and on a camping and climbing trip to Shelf Road, near Cañon City, and as some readers may have already guessed, I was not exactly sober. After killing the better part of two bottles of Trader Joe’s Blended Scotch with my buddies around a campfire, I got up to relieve myself. It was a cold, clear night, and the edge-on disk of the Milky Way cut a slash across the sky. I was so enraptured by it that I didn’t see the large cholla cactus right in front of me.
The feedback to some mistakes is immediate and visceral. I yelped, then yelped again when I instinctively reached out a hand and stabbed that, too. I pulled a handful of the prickers out before deciding I needed help. Back at the campfire, my friend Kelly, who wasn’t quite as deep in the bottle as me, managed to extract about a dozen of the barbed needles from my shoulder and side. The next morning, after I had slept off the booze, I woke up with an aching hip and discovered more spines there.
My mishap at Shelf Road isn’t the only cactus injury I’ve suffered over my years in the desert, but it’s my worst to date. This weekend, however, a hiker in Arizona discovered just how bad a run-in with a cactus can get after a rescue that ended with her in the hospital.
The hiker was on the Bell Pass Trail, a roughly 6.6-mile out-and-back near Scottsdale, when a saguaro fell over in strong winds and hit her in the head on October 17. The Scottsdale Fire Department said its technical rescue team climbed the trail and discovered the stricken hiker about two miles in.
Amy Johnson, a hiker who was on-scene for the accident, told The Arizona Republic that the cactus knocked the hiker out for between five and ten minutes and left her with injuries from both the weight of the plant and its spines. A companion managed to use a strap to lift the several-hundred-pound fragment of cactus off her, but the injured woman appeared to have suffered head trauma, and Johnson said she was unable to remember the year or who the president was.
Rescuers evacuated her on a litter and via UTV before transporting her to a local trauma center for follow-up care.
How bad can cactus injuries get?
The McDowell Sonoran Preserve, where the Bell Pass Trail is located, is home to many saguaro cacti. The saguaro is the largest cactus in the United States, with some specimens on record reaching heights of more than 78 feet and weights of more than 10 tons. It’s also the only species of cactus in America on record to kill someone: In 1982, 27-year-old Arizonan David M. Grundman was shooting at a 23-foot-tall specimen with a shotgun when one of its arms collapsed and crushed him underneath its bulk.
While serious cactus injuries are extremely rare on desert trails, lesser incidents are not. Chollas, a bushy-looking variety common throughout the southwestern U.S., are particularly pernicious: A study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2018 found their hooked spines lodged securely enough in flesh that just one of them could lift a half-pound of pork shoulder. (I can attest that they hurt as much going out as they do going in.)
Fortunately, most cactus injuries are minor, and hikers can manage them with a basic first aid kit. In a guide for Backpacker, Buck Tilton, author and cofounder of the Wilderness Medicine Institute, had the following suggestions:
- If all you have is a pair of tweezers, pluck out the spines one by one.
- If you’re planning ahead for a hike in cactus country, consider packing a tube of white glue or rubber cement in your kit. In case of a cactus run-in, spread glue over the spines and gently press a piece of gauze onto them.
- Once the glue is dry, peel off the gauze. The spines should come out with it.
The post A Saguaro Fell on a Hiker’s Head and Sent Her to the Hospital. Here’s How Bad Cactus Injuries Can Get appeared first on Backpacker.