Monday 5th November

 

Breakfast in the hotel dining room was really nice: fresh orange, coffee, papaya, water melon, eggs with chorizo, refried beans, tortillas, toast and honey.

 

Our aim for the day was to find a couple of populations of Yucca linearifolia, which I had seen elsewhere in limited numbers in thick fog on a previous trip and was keen to see again properly.  I had been given directions to two sites by my friends Bertus Spee and Greg Starr so I was confident of success.  First was the site known to Bertus, which we found straight away.  We all started off up the hillside, which got steeper and steeper until it became apparent I was not going to do it.  I suffer badly with a form of vertigo that makes me utterly certain that I am going to die when on steep, slippery ground.  Why I choose to torture myself and spend my leisure time in Mexico on those very kind of surfaces looking for plants is beyond me.  By now everyone had disappeared out of sight, so I gradually inched my way back down again, taking note of some interesting plants on the way, deciding I would rather track the side of the steep hillside from the lower point, rather than from the upper point, to find the yuccas.  Saw some nice Dasylirion cedrosanum with both green and glaucous forms being present, a cute little sedum, Fouqueria splendens and a squillion cacti.

 

                             

 

 

        

 

         

 

I wandered around the bottom of the hillside until I saw the yuccas (quite near the top) so I picked my best route and slowly made my way back up to them, feeling pretty terrified most of the time.  Still, I made it and what I considered as an achievement at having got to them and conquering my fear, however irrational, felt good.

 

         

Text Box: I believe Turkey Vultures are attracted to struggling beasts.  This one was…

 

I slowly started making my way back, not realising the time.  I had nearly got back to the car when I saw Mark approaching, waving his hat frantically.  I had been gone for 3 hours, the others had been there and back inside of one hour and assumed I have fallen and injured myself!   I felt rather silly.

 

Anyway, on to site two, approached from the other side of the town of General Cepeda via a dirt track that passed the cemetary.  A few days before had seen the Day of the Dead festivities throughout Mexico, and General Cepeda was no exception with bright flowers and decorations adorning the whole place.  The grasshopper was equally vivid, its scarlet wings hidden until provoked into flying.

 

 

A few kilometers down the bumpy track and we found our yuccas.  As Greg pointed out, those on the lower slopes appear to be a hybrid of sopme description, I imagine with the Yucca filifera seen further down in the flat plain below.  The Yucca linearifolia were, as we came to expect, on the steep upper and north facing hillsides but thankfully much more accesible than the first colony of plants.

 

   

                   

 

 

I was interested to see a variability in growth habit – those plants on the upper, steeper part of the slope were erect with upright trunks.  On the lower areas they were growing almost prostrate – the trunks lying on the ground and sending up multiple small crowns almost as ground cover and barely visible above the surrounding plants. 

 

We then decided to push on to try and find a nearby site for Yucca endlichiana but all we managed to find was how busy the traffic got in Downtown Saltillo when it gets dark!

 

We had dinner at the hotel, which was magnificent, followed again by tequila fuelled musings on the verandah.

 

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