Cactus Explorers Journal - The Cactus Explorers Club

The Cactus Explorer ISSN 2048-0482 Number 4 May 2012
Fig.2 John Carr preparing supper.
Fig.3 Rebutia pulvinosa with its small orange flower.
It wasn’t until November 2009 that I made
another attempt at finding these plants. By that
time Google Earth had arrived and it was
relatively easy to plan an alternative route
from Tarija to the Rio Cajas valley. Leaving
Tarija in the early afternoon, John Carr and I
left the main road at Santa Ana and travelled
north through Caldera Grande to Yesera. There
we turned east and drove over the high
mountains through dense cloud to Alto Cajas.
By a series of hairpin bends, the road then
made a rapid descent of around 1000m in
about 4km, taking us down through a band of
forest to the banks of the Rio Cajas (Fig.1,
BLMT769). Fortunately, the river was very dry
so, even though the light was fading, we made
a brief survey of the area before setting up
38
Fig.4 Rebutia flavistyla BLMT769.07.
camp for the night. Very quickly we spotted at
least three species of cacti growing on the
nearby cliffs: a Rebutia, a Parodia and a
Cleistocactus. The Rebutia was especially
exciting since it had very small heads, was
offsetting profusely, and was in bud; could this
be R. albiflora? Confirmation would have to
wait until the following morning as it was now
too dark to start climbing the near-vertical
cliffs to take a closer look. We set up camp
under some trees, cooked supper (Fig.2) and
turned in for the night.
After a restless night, during which we were
awoken by a passing truck making deliveries
and by John continually fighting off
mosquitoes (they don’t bother with me if
somebody else is close!), we rose with the sun,
ate breakfast rapidly, collected our cameras
and headed for the cliffs. A short climb
brought us alongside the Rebutia we had
spotted the previous night. The bud had now
opened to reveal a small orange flower (Fig.3,
BLMT769.08); it was R. pulvinosa, not R.
albiflora.
Growing with it, and unseen the previous
night, was another quite different Rebutia
(Fig.4, BLMT769.07) and a small Echeveria
(Fig.5, BLMT769.03). The second Rebutia grew
as solitary plants with heads 2–3 times the size
of those on the clump of R. pulvinosa.
Superficially, it looked like the ubiquitous R.
fiebrigii, but the spines were shorter, fewer and
all the same glassy-white colour (R. fiebrigii has
short white radial spines and longer, dark
central spines). We decided this second