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Show 120 and colorful reddish-orange blossoms on the tips that made them look like giant candles. And big saguaro cactus all over the place - the Sonora Desert is the kind of place most people think of when you say the word 'desert.' I was anxious to explore this different type of rangeland." Hiking thro ugh the Superstition Mountains in the Sonora, "Everything has prickles," Jan reports. "The minute you walk off a foot trail there's about a zillion little prickly things that get in your toes and your heels and everywhere, and you think, 'Where did that come from?'" "Little prickly things" doesn't sound like a very scientific term for a girl viho was educated in plant identification, but Jan adds, "They're little parts that have fallen off cactuses and plants. Even when they're still attached, they catch on your clothes." Jan is referring to Devil's Claws, seed pods with two sharp, barbed hooks. After they'd ensnared themselves on the legs of her jeans and her socks, the motion of Jan's walk released the seeds from the pods, spreading them over a larger groviing area. After her courseviork in Phoenix was completed, Jan returned to Hanksville in the summer. She was again in the field doing vegetative inventory, but she had a new position with the BLM, and additional obligations. She was more involved with trend studies, learning how the vegetation was changing around the Henry Mountains. Jan's work took her to other parts of the Henrys than she'd studied a year earlier - the area is filled with vastly different types of terrain and points of interest. Indian ruins are found there; sand dunes, hot springs, agate fields, and in a small grove of aspen trees, a one-acre knoll knovm as "Nasty Flats." |