This may be of some interest to those cavers who used to visit the El
Abra - its an exchange about mala mujer with the amazing naturalist
Jim Conrad who lives parttime in Mexico ( his very worthwhile
newsletter available free! digitally!! at
naturalist_newslet...@backyardnature.net - thank you Mixon for
turning me onto this)
COW-ITCH
Here and there in the forest where it's particularly
protected from the sun and wind -- where it's moist
and shadowy -- you find shrubs or small trees with
thick, brittle branches and broad, veiny, shallowly
sawtooth-margined leaves, such as is shown at
wonder how this relates to the shrub/tree we called mala mujer in the
arid impenetrable scrub forest of northern mexico - the long narrow
El Abra range on the east coast south of Mante? We were up there to
chop our way to the various big pits that had been sighted by small
plane - and distressingly found - when we would come back the next
season, that our path had been taken over by mala mujer, an intensely
reactive nettle plant which advantageously took the tiny amount of
sunlight we opened up.
No, this Cow Itch is in the Nettle Family while Mala Mujer, which stings
just like it, is in the Euphorb or Poinsettia Family. I've seen another
name for it,though, Mala Hombre, so you're not the first to see a
similarity in the stings.
and for those of you who enjoy caving reminiscences:
The pits were well worth the effort. One that involved a 3 day chop
opened up on a 100foot diameter 60 foot deep wonderland where dozens
of pairs of military macaws resided. We simply sat (we had no rope
with us that day) and observed them flying about from above for a
timeless spell. The El Abra has no water and no resources desired by
the locals who live below and is almost completely left alone by
humans. It is so impenetrable that to even step a few feet off the
trail we chopped and flagged was to invite being lost for days as one
caver famously discovered. In his 3 days of wandering increasingly
deliriously he drank water from bromeliads and encountered a jaguar
in a long eye locked moment in a twilight opening. Afew years
earlier, the cavers stumbled across some very lost locals who had
come up to hunt and returned them to their village, where a major
fiesta was held in our honor and to celebrate their resurrection. In
all the years we spent exploring there, we met only one local who
offered to *guide* us to a pit he had been to, years back. He
arrived while we were having coffee and with one of our volunteers
took off at breakneck speed thru the jungle (there must be a word for
arid jungle, but I cant think of it) periodically flagging, while the
rest of us crashed along behind enlarging the path. He led us
straight to the pit in about 4 hours- well, as straight as one can go
when the ground is extremely solutioned with ravines, leg breaking
holes in the pinnacley karst covered in slippery entangling vines
groundcover shrubs and trees. A major feat of dead reckoning and
memory and perhaps some other sense most of us no longer have access
to.
