What it means
Cholla is the cactus that ruins afternoons. The word covers a whole genus of shrubby cacti built from chains of cylindrical joints, but when locals say it they mean two: the teddy bear cholla, short, pale and so densely spined it looks furry and glows gold when the sun is low, and the jumping cholla, or chain-fruit cholla, taller and treelike, hung with drooping strings of green fruit. The desert plants field guide says cholla has ruined more visitors’ days than anything out here with a pulse, and the guide is right.
The first lesson is the pronunciation: CHOY-uh. The second is the one everyone learns once. You brush a teddy bear with your calf, a joint the size of a fist is suddenly attached to you, and every instinct says grab it. Do not. The spines are barbed, the joint will move to your hand, and now you have two problems.
You will hear the word as a warning on the trail (“watch the cholla on the left”) and as a name: Camelback’s Cholla Trail, Scottsdale’s Cholla Park, the Cholla Prime Steakhouse.
Where you’ll meet it
The flats and lower slopes of the Preserve, where teddy bears crowd the sunny south-facing ground; the edges of almost every north Scottsdale trail; and Camelback, where both the trail and its namesake line the ridge.
Where the word came from
Cholla is a Spanish word, and Anglo Arizona kept both the spelling and the Spanish pronunciation, which is why the double l comes out as a y. Its root sense is not settled; the Park Service offers “sore” as one meaning, which is at least accurate. Botanists split the cylinder-stemmed chollas from the flat-padded prickly pears into their own genus, Cylindropuntia, of about 35 species from the Southwest to Mexico.
“Jumping” is the folk name for what the plant actually does, and it is less magic than strategy. The joints of jumping and teddy bear cholla are barely attached. Each inch-long spine wears a papery sheath covered in microscopic backward-pointing barbs, so it slides into skin or fur easily and resists coming out. Brush one, and the spine hooks in before the joint snaps off; to the victim, the cactus seems to leap. Animals and wind carry the joints away, and the ones that drop take root. Teddy bear fruit carries few if any viable seeds, so a whole hillside of them is often a family of clones from fallen joints.
The trail name followed the plant. Camelback’s Cholla Trail shares its name with the cactus on the ridge and with Cholla Lane, where the old trailhead sat until Phoenix moved it to Invergordon Road in the rebuild that reopened the trail on September 29, 2022. Who first named the trail, and when, is not documented; see Echo Canyon vs. Cholla for the hiking side.
What it is not
Not a prickly pear, which has flat pads and tiny hairlike glochids instead of barbed spines. And not soft. The teddy bear’s “fur” is all spine.
The fine print
The teddy bear cholla, Cylindropuntia bigelovii, stands one to five feet on a dark trunk, with silvery spines that almost hide the stem and yellow-green flowers in spring. The jumping cholla, C. fulgida, can reach about 13 feet; its pink flowers give way to fruit that hangs on in the drooping chains that give it its other name. In drought, bighorn sheep and mule deer eat that fruit. The McDowell Sonoran Conservancy’s survey found five chollas in the Preserve: teddy bear, chain-fruit, Colorado buckhorn, Arizona pencil and the skinny Christmas cholla.
Chollas are a whole neighborhood. Cactus wrens, the state bird, build football-shaped nests deep in them, safe from almost everything; packrats stack fallen joints around their burrows as armor. The Tohono O’odham have long harvested cholla buds, boiling and drying them for stews; the Park Service notes that four ounces of buds carry more calcium than an eight-ounce glass of milk.
The removal protocol is the Park Service’s: slide a comb between the joint and your skin and flick, quick and firm. Pull the remaining spines one at a time with tweezers or pliers, along the line they went in. For dogs, the dogs guide is blunt: joints stick to paws and need pliers, which is why a comb lives in the trunk.
Chollas are protected native plants in Arizona; most fall in the salvage restricted category, and a few rare species are highly safeguarded, so digging one up takes a state permit.