CONTRIBUTIONS TO WESTERN BOTANY NO. 16 



white gate ahead which meant a station. Driving up to the spacious house 

 I sang out and knocked but no response. I decided to drive into a shed 

 and camp. Just then an Indian came up and said he was the caretaker, 

 and everybody was away. He asked me if I had a key. I said "yes," and 

 so I tried the door with my pass key and it opened. So he told me to go 

 in and make myself at home, which I did. It was still baking hot. The 

 next morning I browsed around and found that a woman kept house there 

 and everything was handy for getting one's own meals, and which I pro- 

 ceeded to do. 



After breakfast I took my portfolio and struck out for flowers. It 

 was a vegetable paradise, flowers everyuhu and in great variety, all in 

 the Tropical life zone. I soon had every dnir full and an overflow. It 

 took me three days to get the entire flora near the station. Then it rained. 

 The floodgates of heaven opened and the u tar lit pou 1 >i do'vn in sheets 

 and everything was ait< it. I never savs such a storm. In half an hour it 

 was all over and i ] ] j ;-t , - t < ugh -' h id never kn.k 



up her heels. The n xt d \ i; r ined just a< hard for an hour and at the 



dry sand bed 30 feet wide, u in i' m f<i >- i ! h <ue * to 



of raging water four feet deep, tearing up everything in its wake. In four 

 hours afterward < ; I--d a-ain ji'-i as before and the wash was 



dry. I anticipated much trouble in crossing the wash the next day on my 

 way out, but had no grief. 



1 1 e i n ' t t 1 - i i i i 1 



and creosote bush ' i .. < ' - (Mimosa and Aca- 



cia), etc., along the wash which is an open valley a few hundred feet 

 below the general mesa region whuh slopes quickly into it. The topo- 

 graphy of the region shows that it is ven old g >logi« dlv. The range, 

 ike B bo uivori from ^ ich tie region \\ - derived b> erosion, is still 

 little more than a hogback rising half a mile into the sky and which runs 

 ?.ome 50 miles north and south and slopes sharply into* the mesa region, 

 .aid its canons are short and sharp, but with few real cliffs, and with 

 rather wide boulder strewn beds, where water crops out wherever the slope 

 Flattens down a li us again in the sand. There seem 



o be no perennial streams. Whatever water there is goes mostly to the 

 seepage. Around the water there are some cotton 

 monti) and black willow (Salix Bonplandiana) and 



: station is hardly 3,000 feet above the sea, and for 

 hot, and there is no snow and little frost. The for- 

 y is mostly eruptive, and the ground is covered with 

 m of gravel and sand. There is no sod, the perennial 

 ifts. The soil is heavih impregnated with iron and 

 out a quarter mile above the station, east, the eruptive 

 w cliffs and rocky draws, forming shelter for many 

 Erythrina grows along with Eysenhardtia. Erythrin'a 

 ich of the red bud, but the .pods are quite different. 



