My departure date drew closer and closer, and I could hardly wait.  My heart has been pulling me west for some time, waiting for an opportunity for the rest to follow.  A long trek from Virginia went by quickly in just a few stops with old friends in some beautiful places.  My journey was coming to a close as I was passing through Colorado, and eventually I realized that the objects I was seeing weren’t clouds anymore, but white top mountains.  The first glimpse of the Rockies is something I won’t forget, and I knew I was in the right place.

Monday rolled around and it was time to get to work.  This first week has been a whirlwind of introductions, meetings, manuals, and papers.  I have been on acronym overload for the past four days.  Although it’s been such a short period of time, I have already gained a clarified view about the BLM’s purpose and function.  What was a cloud of complexities…is still a cloud of complexities, but I have begun to wrap my head around it, teasing apart the vastness of BLM’s tasks and obligations.

-David Drewett, Wyoming BLM State Office

Hello! My name is Anna Freundlich and I am working in the BLM office in Lakeview, Oregon. Here in Lakeview I am going to make seed collections as part of the Seeds of Success (SOS) program and these past few weeks have already been pretty exciting. I graduated May 19th, went home for two days to pack, and then drove from my hometown of Lexington, Ohio for six days to arrive here in Oregon. While we were a bit rushed, my sister and I had a good time traveling across the U.S. From hiking in Wisconsin to visiting Mt. Rushmore to seeing bison on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake we had plenty of adventures. And besides getting lost in California for two hours on my last day of travel, the commute went pretty smoothly.

My first week and a half of work was rewarding and challenging. As one can imagine, the plants here in Oregon are quite different from the plants out east. Nearly every plant is foreign to me, but luckily the local botanist Ian Grinter and my fellow intern Lucy Landis are very patient and are helping me learn the plants out here. Because our Lakeview office is in a higher elevation and this area has been in a drought for the past three years, the seed situation is “interesting”. Our plants normally flower and set seed later in the season, but combined with the drought some populations are setting seeds later than anticipated or are not setting seed at all. My first day in the field Lucy and I went to check out a population of Trifolium macrocephalum clovers, only to discover that there were no seeds for us to collect. We also hit bad luck when we went to collect seed from a population of Lupine; we were dismayed to discover that the cows had beaten us to the lupine flowers. If only we had known that the flowers were so tasty!

But things are not hopeless. Today we went out to Sage Hen Butte in the southern part of the district with some botanists from Alturas. On a hilltop overlooking the mountains, we finally found a site that had potential for seed collections. Here we found many different populations of native plants including Indian paintbrush, multiple species of Eriogonum (Wild Buckwheat) and my favorite plant of the day Lewisia rediviva. This small plant had red stems, beautiful white flowers, and seemed to crawl out from under the rocks. After our CLM training trip in Chicago next week, we plan on making many collections at this beautiful site.

I am looking forward to a great summer and I am so glad I have this opportunity!
Lakeview, Oregon BLM

Favorite flower of the day!

Mt. Robson from the Shore of Kinney Lake

Eleven days; nine major highways; eight states and provinces; seven national parks; six national forests; and five state and provincial parks later, I arrived in Anchorage, Alaska from Shreveport, Louisiana.

We made it!

My trek traversed the southern plains, semi-arid prairies, the cold deserts, the western cordillera, the boreal cordillera, and the marine west coast forests. Along the way I met new Betula, Anemone, Lupinus, Erigeron, Trillium, and Equisetum species, as well as a plethora of nonvasculars.

My co-intern and I have been working in Anchorage for just over a week now, partnered with both BLM and the Alaska Natural Heritage Program, and most of our time thus far has been spent either in training or in the herbarium, familiarizing myself with common species and speciose genera. For me, it was initially a bit overwhelming to be confronted with a flora so radically different from that with which I’m familiar, but our mentors have provided excellent resources and enthusiastic support. We’re also scheduled to do field surveys sometime this week, and I imagine meeting the plants in “person” (i.e., three dimensions) will certainly help in learning their names.

Today was spent weighing, packinging, and labelling seed from last year’s Seeds of Success collections, and it was exciting to see the fruit (no pun intended) of last year’s interns’ labors. The Plant Materials Center, which houses Alaska’s S.O.S. program, is near Butte, AK in the Matanuska Valley. This was easily the most scenic lunch I’ve ever taken.

Our first field outing– shortly after the Chicago training session– will be with NRCS, and we’re headed to the Chandalar Shelf in the Brooks Range! My excitement exceeds that which the English language is sufficient to describe. I’m continually grateful for this opportunity to contribute meaningfully and to travel to such phenomenally beautiful locations.

More to come after our stint in the field!

Bonnie B.
Anchorage BLM Office & AK-NHP

After a month of waiting, the Rogue Valley’s native plants have finally begun their first round of seeding!

So far we have been able to make numerous collections of interesting plants like the silvery lupine, Lupinus albifrons, the onion grass, Melica geyeri, or the slender meadowfoam, Limnanthes gracilis. The process of surveying these plants and then following them every week until they go to seed has been a unique and gratifying experience for myself, personally. The longer I work on seed collecting, the more sophisticated my eyes are becoming when gazing into southern Oregon’s natural environments. It is a constant reminder that there can be a seemingly infinity of objects to perceive in nature at any particular spot, if we could just learn to see what is there.

My partner, Mason, and I are excited to get back into the field and not only collect seed of our scouted populations but also hunt for freshly flowering populations to keep on our radar for the upcoming summer months.

– Jason

Three days after graduation I drove from eastern North Carolina to Grand Junction, Colorado, and started my internship with the BLM field office here the day after I arrived. It has been a whirlwind and a complete change of environment. Everything is different here! Every day I look around me at the Book Cliffs, Grand Mesa and the Colorado National Monument and have to pinch myself and ask “Is this real life??”  Definitely not the flat plains I’m used to (and I thank God every day for the lack of humidity). My knowledge of the flora and fauna are completely lacking though, as my fellow local interns have been quick to point out. But I’m quickly learning and want to learn more about this beautiful landscape. The past two weekends I’ve been playing tourist and visiting all the big destinations…unfortunately I can’t get myself up early enough to search for moose on the Grand Mesa. But who knew Grand Junction was in the middle of wine country? Or dinosaur? Or wildflower? I also got a chance to visit Teton National Park and Yellowstone over Memorial Day weekend

In the past two weeks I’ve mostly been doing all the standard training (Is four hours of defensive driving necessary? really?) and a variety of projects out in the field, from mending fences on exclosures, to big game transects. I’m slowly learning about the relationship between the public, the federal government and public lands. I’ve attached some pictures that glimpse at what I’ve seen the past two weeks.

The largest flat-topped mountain in the world!

Sclerocactus glaucus, a threatened species

Colorado National Monument

Prickly Pear

Barrel Cactus

Mule Deer

Wild Rose

Elk

All the best,

Lindsey B.

Bureau of Land Management

Grand Junction Field Office

Howdy from the high, lonesome rangelands of Harney County, OR y’all!

Well, actually, I’m writing to you from my office at the Rea Selling Berry Seed Bank on the campus of Portland State University in sunny Portland, OR. Thus is the duality of my new lifestyle as a CLM intern. Every other week I leave Portland and drive eight hours to one of the remote places in the contiguous United States, immersed in solitude, totally at one with myself and this brand new flora for six days in a row. The rest of the time, I live in the heart of this wonderful, bizarre city, surrounded by my weirdo friends, in a totally different ecoregion with lots and lots of moisture.

Listen guys, the range is no joke. I mean seriously, you could die out there doing the most routine field work. Last week, the local BLM botanist in Harney County told me of a few places I should put on my “must see” list, so I decided to take a little field trip to Foster Flat Research Natural Area to scope an ephemeral playa lakebed Artemisia cana/Poa secunda plant community. “Oh, only thirty two miles down that there dirt road, I should be there in less than an hour,” I said to myself. Three hours later I made it to Foster Flat.

The Burns BLM district is dry — really, really dry — receiving about 7-12 inches of precipitation per year. That said, thunderstorms and showers are common in late spring. As I made my first forays into Foster Flat on foot to examine the miracle of desert plant life, I noticed a very large thunderstorm in the distance — looming, menacing, threatening. I then recalled an anecdote relayed to me by my former supervisor and friend Tom Kaye at the Institute of Applied Ecology in Corvallis, OR. Apparently Tom knew a guy who got caught in the middle of one of these little rain events in the hollers of Harney County back in the old days, and the fellow ended up bogging down his vehicle and getting stranded back there for a week! Yes indeed, one whole week. Was it true? Was it lore? Was Tom just giving me a little gentle hazing? I looked around at the bleak, godforsaken (yet botanically rich!) landscape, lovingly stared into the depths of my iPhone for the slightest hint at cell reception and muttered a few choice phrases as I imagined the thirty two mile hike out of Foster Flat. Those poorly drained clays and silts are unforgiving, and I wasn’t waiting around long enough to find out if my Subaru could levitate out of the all-but-certain quagmire that approached. I spent the rest of my work day channeling New Zealand rally car legend Possum Bourne as I (slowly and safely) navigated through the epic landscape of the Harney Basin, “Stairway to Heaven” blasting on my vehicle’s sound system all the while.

Yep, just another exciting day on the job in Harney County. The outsider might gaze upon the desolate terrain and decide that there’s not much to see except a denuded wasteland. In reality, I work in a botanical wonderland — windswept, silent and mystical. This harsh, unforgiving landscape has many stories to tell, and yet more to be written.

Starting a new job often comes with a mixed bag of emotions including excitement, fear, determination, and anxiety. I personally experienced all of these emotions and more prior to starting my CLM internship in Cedarville, CA. I was nervous about the job, as well as moving to a new place where I knew no one. Of course it is natural to have these feelings but at times they seemed overwhelming. However, taking a leap of faith, and concurring my emotions has made me into a stronger person. Each time I leave my comfort zone and try something new, I am rewarded with new skills, more confidence and new life experiences.

When I arrived to Cedarville, I new it was going to be a new way of living and would take some getting used to. The town has a population of roughly 400, there is one grocery store, one gas station, and I do not have any cellphone service. A remote location such as this may not be for everyone however, one month has passed and I have come to love it here. It is quietly tucked away in a valley surrounded by beautiful mountain ranges with ample opportunities for outdoor recreation. Enough said about Cedarville. Let me tell you what I have been up to at the Bureau of Land Management.

The Surprise Valley field office in Cedarville manages over a million acres of land, straddling the border of northeastern california and northwestern nevada. The majority of the land is considered sage-steppe ecosystem and is important habitat for many wildlife species including the greater sage-grouse. Populations of this ground dwelling bird are currently in decline due to habitat destruction and fragmentation. As a result, restoring the sage-grouse habitat has become a main focus of the Surprise Valley BLM.

One cause of habitat destruction comes from encroachment of western juniper trees (Juniperus occidentalis). Due to a reduction of wildland fires, juniper trees have expanded their territory significantly, encroaching on the sage-steppe ecosystem. Western juniper absorbs a high volume of water, and competes with native vegetation for resources. Part of the sage-steppe ecosystem restoration strategy is to reduce juniper encroachment using a variety of treatments. This project will include both pre-treatment and post-treatment vegetation monitoring. What I have been doing for the past few weeks is establishing pre-treatment vegetation monitoring plots and collecting data.

Jumping right into this project on my first day of work was challenging. I had to learn the protocol on the spot and learn a long list of plants that were unfamiliar to me in a short period of time. However, it has been a valuable learning experience so far and I am certain that my knowledge and skills will continue to progress as more time goes by.

Vegetation monitoring has taken up the bulk of my time however, there have been a few opportunities to get involved with other projects. For starters, I have been scouting out sites to collect seeds for the Seeds of Success program. This has been a challenge due to the ongoing drought in the area. Forbs are especially difficult to find. I also spent a day planting basin wildrye (Leymus cinereus) starts that were grown by local high school students using seeds that were collected by a previous CLM intern. Lastly, I was able to go along with my mentor to install game cameras at two bighorn sheep guzzlers. Afterwards we used radio telemetry to track down the bighorn sheep that were released several years ago. With some patience, we spotted four bighorn sheep having a lazy day on the side of a ridge. On the drive back to the office, we came across a Golden Eagles nest holding this bundle of joy:

Until next time,

Amy Thorson

BLM Surprise Valley

Cedarville, CA

This is blog number three, just finished my seventh week in Vale.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about conservation, its importance, and what it should look like in the face of climate change. I haven’t completely thought through all of these ideas, and am really just presenting a bunch of questions. Nor do I know how many people actually read this, but comments are appreciated.

The other week I went up to Washington to monitor a sensitive species that has only been found at this location. We spent a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of gas to get to the site every day that week. We also had to take a pretty dangerous road to and from the site each day, and were monitoring on some dangerously steep and slick hillsides. One we deemed too unsafe to complete the assessment. This all made me wonder just how worthwhile our efforts really were.

Is it really that important to monitor and conserve this particular species? While pondering this question I began to contemplate why conservation is important in general. This idea, the importance of conservation, or lack thereof, lies at the heart of what I’m doing here, at the heart of this program, and at the heart of my educational and career choices.

Conservation work does not always generate immediate success, results, or satisfaction. It tackles long-term problems and goals. This fact makes the work tough at times, but I’ve always told myself that the bigger picture, the long-term benefits of my work makes it all worth it. The knowledge that what I’m doing matters and is important has always been my fuel. But why does it matter? Why is conserving plant species important? Well, because each species is part of a complex ecosystem on which other organisms depend, on which other species depend, on which other ecosystems depend, on which we depend. Or maybe the answer is simply because other species are living things, and have their own right to continue to exist. These answers have generally sufficed my questioning mind. However, the more I think about the issue the less clear cut it becomes.

The natural world is always changing, always evolving. This is true even if our species hadn’t altered so many landscapes, or exacerbated global climate destabilization. I struggle with the idea of conserving something; a landscape, an ecosystem, or a species, in its natural state, since change is a constant and because the term “natural” is subjective. Species, landscapes, and ecosystems are evolving on geologic time scales. So who’s to say our definitions of “natural” and “native” are in fact natural and native? Is our own species not part of this “natural” environment? Taking these ideas into consideration, how beneficial is it truly to conserve a species in a location we’ve deemed “native”? On top of that, how beneficial, or important, or fruitful, are those efforts in the face of climate change? If the chance of long term survival is slim for the particular species we monitored in Washington, were our efforts a poor use of resources? What actions should scientists and conservationists be taking in the face of climate change? How do we decide which of those actions are most important, or the best use of our resources?

I’m not offering any answers here. Rather, I’m interested in what other people think about this topic. This is something I think about frequently, and don’t have great answers to, as few people I expect do. But they’re important ideas to discuss nonetheless. Please share your thoughts!

Colleen

Vale BLM

Washington site

Coming from southern Ohio where there is water in the air and ferocious foliage, this wide open and dry country is quite the contrast!  Although the drive was long, I was able to see the landscape change from the foothills of appalachia to the flat midwestern plains, then morph into the high desert and finally the mountains!  It is a beautiful time of year to take a good long drive.

Upon my arrival, I was faced with an exotic landscape and friendly faces.  My first week in the Lander Field Office consisted of a lot of introductions and some planning for my next couple of months of work.  Using USGS topography maps of the 2.2 million acre field office and University of Wyoming’s Rocky Mountain Herbarium, I was able to map out known populations of target species, then the fun really began!  The rest of my time was spent exploring the field office and getting aquatinted with the local flora.  At first it was kind of overwhelming…I felt like a stranger in a foreign land, but as I got my hands dirty things started to click.  I was able to vaguely recognize the western relatives of the eastern flora and brushed up on my keying-out skills.  Can you believe I forgot what papilionaceous was?!

The Lander Field Office is huge, covers a multitude of ecosystems, and has some amazing wildlife.  Just this week a rattle snake rattled at me, I stared down a mustang, and saw a golden eagle soaring through a canyon.  I have high hopes to see a moose.  My first two weeks have been eye opening and I’ve already learned a ton!  I think these next few months will be full of new experiences and jam packed with information and fond memories!

Until next time,

Emily Usher, Lander, Wyoming BLM