Otowi Mesa Trail 6/25/20 6:05pm partly cloudy and ~90 degrees with a slight breeze at the start but dark clouds were on the horizon and the wind started picking up.
In my last blog I talked about wanting to explore the rest of the first mesa, so that is what I decided to do for the first part of today. As I started walking towards the middle of the mesa, I noticed that the ground began to be much less exposed rock and much more sandy. Also towards the middle, I started to see a trend to where the cacti grew. The cacti grow mostly along the edge of an exposed rock or next to other plants. I thought this was really interesting and I had a few guesses for why it could be. My first guess was that the water could drain too fast in deep sand so the cacti have to be next to a rock or other plants that slow the water drainage so the cacti can take in its fill. My other hypothesis was the cacti need something to latch their roots onto in order to grow.
I was originally drawn to this plant because it is one of the few plants on the mesa that I do not know the name of. Also the little tendrils but that’s beside the point. To start my investigation into the plant I, as I normally do when I want information, asked my mom. She has lived in New Mexico for more than 30 years so I usually trust her expertise on these kinds of things. Unfortunately, she was as clueless as me so I had to turn to good ol’ google. I decided that the best way to find this plant would be to look at southwestern photographers that focus on plants. Luckily, I found the website https://plantsofthesouthwest.com/collections/trees-shrubs and after a few minutes of looking was able to recognize my mystery plant. Cercocarpus montanus otherwise known as the alder-leaf mountain-mohagony. This shrub provides grazing for many foraging animals such as deer and belongs to the rose family of plants.
Sketching makes me look deeper into the subject that I’m attempting to capture and helps me see the overall structure better. Next time I would like to see if I can zoom in to the specifics of a subject instead of looking at the larger structure. I enjoyed the act of sketching but attempting to accurately capture what I see is very difficult for me. Seeing as I am not a talented artist to start with, paired with the adverse environment of trying to draw without a surface, I found that my sketches fell short of the mark. To be fair though, sketching is not necessarily only about accurately capturing the subject, it is also about allowing yourself to find a deeper understanding of that subject. Since that was the mark I was truly aiming for, I most definitely did not fall short.