We visited in May, when the desert was truly alive, especially once we turned into the park gates just off Highway 285 north of town. After driving through stark scrub desert to the north, we were greeted on the park road by tall, snaking ocotillo with fiery red tips and prickly pear cacti covered with large yellow blossoms and furled pink buds. Perhaps because of an unusually rainy spring, the blossoms were budding not only on the edges of the spiked pads but even in the centers of the pads.

The road wound up to a low building on a ridge overlooking the Pecos River valley and town of Carlsbad. We would soon learn we were at 3,200 feet, atop the Ocotillo Hills, named for the bright cactus that had greeted us. Around the large parking lot were large soaptree yucca, also covered in enormous, spiky white blooms, and many species of agave, or century plant. These giants grow close to the ground, storing energy for about twenty years before sending up a single blossoming stalk to reproduce, after which the plants die. Those twenty years must have seemed like a century to whoever gave the agave their common name.