Secretive group spends thousands of hours hunting Sonoran Desert for rare cactus in Arizona

A clandestine group has spent thousands of hours searching the Sonoran Desert for massive rare cactuses endangered by the expansion of Arizona cities.

The Crested Saguaro Society began searching the approximately 100,000-square-mile desert for crested saguaros — the largest cactus in the US, which often grows over 40 feet tall and is adorned with a fanlike crown — since 2005. Their quest has successfully located thousands of the towering prickly plants.

The 10-person group estimated it has spent at least 100,000 hours hunting for all the crested saguaros they can find.

The special cactuses, which makes up an estimated one in every 200,000 saguaro cactuses in the desert, are then logged into a database that only two members have full access to, so that their locations are protected from potential poachers or vandals, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Those two members are currently Joe Orman, a 62-year-old retired aerospace engineer, and Theodore Codding, a 62-year-old public administrator from Tucson, who is also retired.

The group has also been working on recruitment efforts in hopes to bring in some younger members, but they have yet to agree on a way to evaluate candidates.

“We’re the keepers of the Holy Grail,” Orman said. “Unless we can find some younger people to join the society and then share that database with them, it’s just gonna die with us.”

So far, the group has found about 3,300 crested saguaros, giving them whimsical names like “Once in a Lifetime,” “How about a Hug?” and “Magnifico.”

One of the members, 77-year-old retired courtroom clerk Pat Hammes, said she guesses that she and her late partner, Bob Cardell, spent eight hours a day, twice a week for six years, locating about 2,200 of the cactuses.

“It becomes a bit of an obsession,” Hammes said.

When Cardell was alive, he would log his findings on CDs or USB drives before handing them over to members with access to the database as an additional security measure. The group has denied requests from researchers to share their findings.

“Bob liked to look you in the eyeballs when he shared information,” Codding said. “We have trust issues.”

Orman said that a recent trip to the desert resulted in the discovery of four new crested saguaros but group members often stumble across one of the rare cactuses only to later learn that it had already been logged.

“We’ve been skunked many times,” Orman said. “We’re out in the field, and we think, ‘Oh, we found this wonderful new crested saguaro.’ And then we go back and look on the website or check the coordinates or talk to Pat and it’s already been found 15 years ago.”