The Jumping Cholla Incident

Opuntia bigelovii

by Will Prouty

The Jumping Cholla is also commonly known as the "Teddy Bear Cholla," because of it's dense array of spines, that give the appearance of fur. A name only someone who had seen pictures of it would come up with - anybody dealing with the thing in the wild would go with Jumping Cholla.

It does indeed seem to jump.

Notice in the above picture the many spiny segments lying on the ground, as well as budding off from the main plant. These things break off very easily, and apparently give the impression of jumping to attach themselves at the lightest brush of anything against them.

Here's how my incident began.

Hiking just after dawn over broken ground towards a cluster of cacti, I felt a stabbing pain in my calf. I thought "rattlesnake" at first, but no such luck. I looked down and saw a segment of cholla (pronounced 'choy-a') attached to my calf through my jeans. There were no cholla plants within 10 feet of me, and this was a foot and a half off the ground. A long jump indeed.

I could easily figure out what had happened. The segment had attached to the inside of my boot as I walked by, and when I lifted my foot to climb over a rock I drove it into the back of my leg.

I brushed it lightly with my hand, and now I had a cholla attached to the back of my hand.

It wouldn't shake off. In fact, vigorous shaking seemed to make it grip all the more securely.

Odd.

Still, there is only one way to deal with this sort of thing, and I grabbed it lightly with my left hand, and pulled the unwilling cholla out of my right hand. Only moderately painful, but it showed a surprisingly tenacious grip.

Now I had a cholla on my left hand.

Amazing how deep those spines can sink in. Flexible spines too, shifting over each other and sliding ito my skin in a distinctly nonparallel manner, which could only bode poorly for their ultimate removal.

By now, I had grasped the concept that you didn't remove cholla by using another body part. This would hurt, but I figured I could use a piece of camera equipment to pry it off.

Well, it did hurt, but I was long past any chance of prying it off now. This thing wasn't going anywhere.

In such a situation, there is always a foolproof fallback plan.

Anne.

This is the cholla on my finger - I grabbed a quick picture of it before going for help. Well, two pictures actually. I didn't like the lighting in the first picture. Anyway, I look at this picture and see all those long spines, and I think how lucky I was that where my finger is, there seems to be only short ones there.

Seems to be.

They are actually just as long, they are just seamlessly integrated with my finger.

Using Anne's Swiss Army knife, we cut the bulk of the cholla off my finger, then begin drawing out the spines one by one with tweezers.

Wow.

One even managed to hit my finger nail, and obligingly buried itself under the nail. Not fun.

This nocturnal Kangaroo Rat stumbled onto a cholla fragment, and couldn't get off. Probably died from exposure as the day grew hot after sunrise. University of California Riverside keeps a collection of creatures that have died after getting stuck on cholla, from mice to Cooper's Hawks.

You'll notice Al has a handy Leatherman tool for dealing with stuff like this.

I now have one as well.

I have recovered from my trauma, the only lingering result is that anytime I go within twenty feet of a cholla now, Anne "helpfully" points out its location to me!