As we hike through desert scrub, the soft, light purple of a madrone tree catches my eye. Its boughs twist out with sculpted elegance. If I were to imagine a unicorn’s horn, the limb of a freshly peeled madrone would do the trick. The last time I was in Guadalupe Mountains National Park in West Texas, I was transfixed by the trees’ red bark. But I had forgotten they peel. That was summer; this is late fall. When the bark is new it is white and so smooth it gives the madrone another name: Lady’s Leg. In the spring, the trees bloom with white flowers, and in summer they begin to shed their bark. The glossy leaves carry clusters of red berries, sometimes called manzanitas. Their scientific name, Arbutus unedo, means “strawberry tree.” “This is a tropical plant!” exclaims our guide, Theresa Moore, the park’s acting superintendent and visitor services manager. A tropical plant in the desert.
The Chihuahuan Desert surrounding us is a rarefied landscape. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the land was submerged in water. As the sea receded, the Guadalupe Mountains revealed themselves, along with various biomes that give the area its singularly rich biodiversity. From the desert floor to the high country, variations of sun and shade, moisture, and soils support wide varieties of plants and animals. Think of the terrain as a Venn diagram of “life zones,” where disparate environments coexist and where the Rocky Mountains, desert, and plains intersect at the limits of their ranges. Ponderosa pines and Douglas firs bend in the wind high above dunes, while pinkish madrones dot the background. All in one park.
According to the National Park Service, the madrone is a rainforest relict, a remnant species from awetter climate following the melting of the Pleistocene ice cap. “The topography that you see, present day, reflects ancient environments, and there are very few places in the world where you can do that,” says Charles Kerans, a professor in
