4 
Annual Reports of Academy of 
ing of May 19, \ve travelled southward on a narrow-gage branch 
some 20 miles to a little Mexican town, Dos Cabezos, nestling among 
the barren cones of the Dos Cabezos hills, a crescent shaped north¬ 
ern extention of the Chiricahuas. Thence by automobile we trav¬ 
elled some 35 miles farther across the intervening desert to our 
destination. 
This part of the “desert” is largely composed of hard baked, red¬ 
dish, clay soil which grinds into a fine dust and in the rainy season 
becomes a thick, sticky mud, which impedes travel to an extent 
not dreamed of in the dry, sunny days of spring and early summer. 
On the Dos Cabezos hills the only flowering plants were the tall 
wand-like ocotillos, their stems armed with thorns almost as rigid 
as steel and bearing on their tops spikes of brilliant red blossoms, 
shining like tongues of flame in the sunlight. Besides a few tufts 
of prickly pear ( Opuntia ), there was no other vegetation except 
the scattered tufts of low prostrate herbs more or less covered with 
the soil. On the flat stretches of the “desert” there were scattered 
mesquite bushes and everywhere the low tufted buffalo grasses. 
The dry washes full of large and small pebbles and banks of sand 
were bordered by taller yellow grasses, whose lighter colors offered 
the only relief from the uniform reddish brown that streched away 
on all sides. Far away ahead of us were the purple masses of the 
Chiricahuas and on other sides were other more distant, pink and 
purple mountains, lying farther and father away, and changing 
from one tint to another as the sun sank lower in the west. 
Now and then we passed scattered groves of tree yuccas, hun¬ 
dreds and hundreds of single or branched shaggy trunks surmounted 
by their prickly crowns of narrow needle-pointed leaves, from the 
midst of which rose the new flower stalks, at this season closely 
resembling gigantic “spuds” of asparagus. 
White-necked ravens flew from one to another, and an occas¬ 
ional road-runner made off from behind one of the trunks. Scaled 
or “cottontop” quail flushed constantly from our track and where 
large patches of Sackaton grass occurred, jack rabbits and cotton¬ 
tails were to be seen scurrying here and there for shelter. Two 
species of lizards, Holbrookia and Cnemidophorus ran along the ruts 
ahead of our car with lightning-like rapidity. As we approached 
closer to the mountains, vegetation became more varied and great 
fields of giant white poppies stretched out to meet us, while along the 
creek that extended out from Pinery Canyon, to finally disappear 
