On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 23:38:10 -0700, "G.T." <[email hidden]>
Quoted message said:From today, towards the bottom:
http://homepage.mac.com/getosx/007_sticker.jpg
I have never picked one of these up in the low desert, I was in
Laughlin, NV today. I'm pretty sure it attacked me while I was crossing
the graded median of a divided highway at the very end of my ride. I
wasn't paying attention to the vegetation in the median as my car was in
sight. I had ridden through chollas, prickly bushes, and young joshua
trees but thankfully didn't succumb to any flat causing items until the end.
Greg
Dear Greg,
Yes, the attack probably took place next to the highway, not out where
the other plants were growing.
Goathead vines favor the dry, bare, disturbed, sunny soil found at the
graded edges of roads, paths, and parking lots. Car tires and rubber
shoe soles transport the vicious seeds to the scraped areas.
That's the traditional explanation.
A more sinister theory argues that goatheads actively pursue their
prey and would happily sprout next to the boxes of inner tubes if
Peter Chisholm didn't dust his shelves regularly in Boulder.
Luckily, their reliance on modern transport and their preference for
scraped soil means that goatheads usually vanish a few feet away from
the roads that they line for miles. No bulldozers and no traffic means
no goatheads.
Left alone, other plants will slowly overwhelm goatheads and crowd
them out, but mowers and the tires of maintenance vehicles conspire to
keep the edges of roads and paths more suitable for goatheads than for
other plants.
If you walk a dog or ride a bicycle on an asphalt path in goathead
country, you'll be pulling stickers out of paws and tires.
But if you leave the path, the sticker problem magically disappears
within a few feet. The closer you are to civilization, the more likely
you are to pick up a goathead.
Cheers,
Carl Fogel
