Saguaro cacti can reach 60 feet tall and weigh 4,000 lbs. While I had some free time in Arizona, I took my drone to the Saguaro Forest so that I can show you the landscape of the Sonoran Desert.

It is simply amazing how huge these cacti are. I am 6’ 3”, 250lbs and I am dwarfed by this gigantic cactus-tree which lives in the middle of a very hostile environment.. how can such a large plant exist in this environment! Simply incredible. What was also incredible is that I was in Arizona for four days, and on one of those days they got more rain than they got in the entire year of 2019. It was raining, all day long in the DESERT! We had planned to go find cactus south of Pheonix, but the weather radar said it was raining there, and then we planned to go to the north-west of pheonix, but when we got closer it started raining on us and we turned east to Butcher Jones Recreation Site… and before we got there we decided we found the cacti we were looking for. So this was Plan C with a twist. Makes me want a waterproof drone.

I did a free-flight Photogrammetry scan of an individual cactus.. Translation: I flew two laps around a cactus, taking pictures from nearly every direction, and then used software to put them together into a 3D model. The picture below is a screenshot of the reconstructed cactus, which includes the camera locations above (where the drone was when it took the pictures). This was only 52 pictures, and produced a result that tells me the height of the cactus is 6.3 meters high (20’ 8”). With 200+ pictures, I would have a very high resolution model of a cactus that I could insert into other virtual environments and use as a three dimensional digital asset.

Explore the Saguaro forest below!!