Peoria, Arizona.

I always enjoy the views of the saguaro cacti on our hikes in Arizona. As I have commented many times over the years, this species of succulent is found only in the wettest desert in the world, the Sonoran Desert, mostly in Arizona and northernmost Mexico.

Those stately arms usually bend from a very short forearm area to directly vertical paralleling the main trunk. Occasionally, though, the arms appear to have a mind of their own and choose to follow a path quite unlike their brethren. On a hike along the Yavapai Point Trail in Lake Pleasant Regional Park, next to a stately, upright specimen, we met “Twisted Sister”. At least that is the name I gave it, the unusually shaped “arm” growth made me think of the heavy metal band of the same name.

About the photo: Captured on my Samsung S20U cellphone, I exported the image into Lightroom for basic tweaks, then on to Luminar AI. As usual, I remind you, dear reader, that you should be able to click on the image for a better view.

Postscript: I have been adjusting to a new computer after my old one “bricked”, I’ve been a bit behind in my progress on blog writing. The reason is the need to spend much time rearranging my photo library to fit an entirely different image storage model based upon limitations in these newest superthin, superlight laptops. For their advantages, they’ve given up internal storage space and lowered the number of available external ports. Probably my biggest disappointment is the lack of a full-size SD card slot, instead replaced by a micro-SD slot. That’s not a problem for my cellphone, but it will change how I export images from my D500. Someday I will share some of the issues that I have encountered as I adopted a new image storage model. For now, I’ll just say that my other computer was a lot less hassle.

John Steiner