Yucca grows like sotol from a central trunk, but it adds new growth at the top and lets its dead leaves drop down in a palm-like grass skirt. The yucca also puts up a bloomstalk year after year, and the creamy flowers are a favorite browse of deer and cattle. Yuccas may live from 50 to 75 years, reaching tree-like proportions. The giant dagger that gives Dagger Flat its name may grow more than 6 meters (20 feet) tall. In good years it blooms around Easter-time, and a single bloomstalk may have more than 1,000 flowers and weigh as much as 30 kilos (70 pounds). Indians used nearly every part of the yucca in countless ways. They ate the flowers and fruit, wove baskets and made brushes from leaf fibers, and made soap from the roots. Along the border, natives still harvest the great yucca flower-heads and feed them to livestock. The Mescalero Apaches roasted the mescal or century plant using the same technique they used for sotol. The mescal was as central to the Apache way of life as the bison was to the plains Indians. They made food, drink, medicine, mats, ropes, bags, and even needles and twine from the great, gray-green agave. It is not true that the century plant takes a hundred years to bloom; it’s more like 25 to 50 years. Once started the bloomstalk shoots up at the rate of nearly 2.5 centimeters (an inch) in an hour, or up to 41 centimeters (16 inches) in 24 hours. Soon platters of golden flowers float on the air, and bees, flies, and ants come to the feast. The violet-throated Lucifer hummingbird may sometimes be found at a mescal in blooming season. At night the Mexican long tongued bat leaves its cave on Emory Peak and comes to feed on the nectar and ample pollen. Like all agaves, the mescal expends its strength on this onetime burst of blooming. Once the seed pods form, the plant dies and young plants arise near its base. But that is not the end of its beauty or its usefulness. If you climb the foot trail to Juniper Flat through the thickly grassed woodlands above the Basin, you will pass more than one dead mescal with its towering bloomstalk supported by the limbs of some pinyon pine. Year by year, in graceful and gradual decay, the agave leans in its neighbor’s embrace. As it slowly splits up, it dresses the pine in a flowing drape of fiber fragments. You can see little wormholes here and there, and larger holes where woodpeckers have taken a meal. This life-supporting return to dust goes on all over these mountains. [Illustration: The century plant took its name from the erroneous notion that it took 100 years to bloom. It takes “only” 25 to 50 years. Then the plant dies.]