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We called him Grandpa.
We figured that he was at least 100 years old. Saguaros can grow as tall as 16 feet in a century, and Grandpa was easily four times my size, with about a dozen arms that reached straight up into the sky, defying gravity.
Grandpa lived in Catalina State Park in Tucson’s outskirts. He stood in a clearing along one of the park’s most traveled paths, overlooking a wash that typically ran dry. Whenever it rained and the wash temporarily filled up and flowed again, Grandpa’s core swelled up as he sucked up the water, widening so much that the long vertical creases lined by his spines stretched out like the folds of an accordion. Whenever we saw him like this, my family joked about it; Grandpa, we said, must have had too much to eat (and drink); the pants he wore were clearly a few sizes too small. But we knew the swelling was good for him: It meant he was storing water for the long dry months ahead.
It was good for him, until it wasn’t. Two summers ago, after an especially heavy monsoon rain, Grandpa died. Yes, he was old, but he’d probably taken in more water than he could handle. And, top-heavy, he came crashing down. There he was, all over the local news, all 32 feet of him splayed out on the ground, leaving a stump the size of a third-grader.
“Thankfully, this giant has fallen off the trail and will stay where it landed, providing habitat and food for many creatures as it decomposes,” a spokesperson for Arizona State Parks said.
There he was, all over the local news, all 32 feet of him splayed out on the ground, leaving a stump the size of a third-grader.
We visited him the following weekend. His beautiful sage color still held, and his once-chubby core had shrunk back to its regular size, pre-monsoon season. Months later, we returned to find him still lying there, surrounded by much smaller saguaros — suddenly noticeable. His arms looked leathery and ashen, already becoming habitat for other creatures; beneath the fallen core, a group of packrats had found the perfect spot for a nest, weaving together twigs and small pieces of plastic trash and scrub.
The last time we visited was after this summer’s rains. By then, we could see his cactus skeleton, the structural support that allows saguaros to grow as tall as he had, equipping them to withstand strong winds and store as much as 200 gallons — 1,668 pounds — of water. Grandpa’s ribs were visible now, looking eerily similar to a human’s skeleton, white and porous and strong.
Saguaros are known for growing slowly, only about a quarter of an inch during their first two years. By the time he was 70, Grandpa was likely 6 feet tall and producing flowers and fruit. By his first century, he could have been 16 feet tall.
Park officials measured Grandpa’s growth rings and examined his scars, and they determined that he was 200 years old — ancient for a saguaro, who have an average lifespan of around a century and a half. This means he would have been alive in the early 1800s, more than 150 years before the establishment of Catalina State Park, back when Tucson was part of the Northern Mexico state of Sonora, with a population of no more than 1,000 people. This was an era of Indigenous displacement and dispossession, of Spanish missions and Catholic proselytization. Grandpa would have seen all of this and more. He would have been one of millions of his kind; the urban sprawl that has diminished the saguaro’s Sonoran Desert range was still another century away.
He would have been alive in the early 1800s, more than 150 years before the establishment of Catalina State Park.
And here, in his immediate surroundings, Grandpa sheltered other beings, providing habitat and food and shade for countless desert species. Saguaros are a keystone species that play a critical role in their ecological communities by helping nurture other living creatures. Most of the insects and other Sonoran Desert animals — a great variety of birds, tortoises, javelinas, bats, coyotes and many others — feed on the saguaros’ fleshy red fruit, which grows from the very tips of their arms and falls to the ground when ripe. Woodpeckers carve holes in the cactus’ trunks and arms, making nests for other birds, including the now-rare pygmy owl.
The Tohono O’odham see saguaros as people; in 2021, the Tohono O’odham Nation passed a resolution that granted saguaros legal personhood. “There is abundant historic documentation that the Tohono O’odham (Desert People) and their sister tribes of O’odham, regard Ha:san, (Saguaros) as one of their kin with human heritage,” it read.
After Grandpa died, we learned that it would have taken him 50 to 75 years to grow his first arm, an ingenious water storage device that functioned much like his great trunk. He had so many of them. The skeletons of those arms are now splayed out from the base of the old stump but look as if they’re pointing to a few tiny saguaritos popping up nearby.
“Encounters” is a serial column exploring life and landscape during the climate crisis.
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This article appeared in the January 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Older than you.”
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