This last month has been a month of office work, a month of underground buds, and a month of buds (friends).

We’ve mowed the prairie once again. We mow several of the plots at our sites to simulate cows’ grazing, but in order to know how much biomass has been removed from the plots we go in with scissors and manually cut the plants and sort by functional group. The plants are then dried and weighed. Mowing and snipping the grasslands is maybe the most ridiculous thing I’ve done. We’re going to go back in a few weeks to re-trim the grass, to see how much it has grown in the time after the mowing. Science is pretty silly sometimes.

The Rocky Mountain Research Station in Rapid City, South Dakota is kept at a chill temperature that nobody seems to have control over. This means that even when it’s 95 degrees out, I still have to bring a sweater to work when I’m in the office. I’ve been doing a lot of sorting and weighing of plants, plus mind-numbing data entry.

The process of weighing the dried plants involves shaking everything out of its paper bag onto a sheet of repurposed herbarium paper, placing the bag on the scale and zeroing it, finagling everything off of the herbarium paper back into the paper bag, then weighing and recording the mass. We’re about halfway through the job: there’s two sites, each which had about 50 plots clipped, and each plot has up to eight paper bags. These eight bags are categorized by their contents: annual forb, perennial forb, warm-season grass, cool-season grass, annual grass, standing dead, Bouteloua gracilis/Bouteloua dactyloides, and Pascopyrum smithii.

Besides snipping and weighing grass, my supervisor, Jackie, also does research involving underground buds, typically grass buds. She studies the bud bank and how plants regenerate from belowground buds throughout their life histories but also after events like fires. Some of this research is done out of Colorado State University, and in the middle of the team’s fire treatment a burn ban was put into effect in Fort Collins. They drove 6 hours to Rapid City to burn the samples and I got to be involved with the use of fire tables!

Fire is super interesting to me. Experiencing the near-annual smoke season in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve heard about how the bigger, hotter fires of today are the result of forest mismanagement and practicing fire suppression. It feels weird to be preached at by Smokey Bear that only I can prevent forest fires when fires have been present in forests since time immemorial. I’ve also known that prairies also rely on fires to “refresh” the vegetation but I’ve never considered how it all works. It makes sense: perhaps fireweed responds to fire so well because its rhizomes are just deep enough to not crisp up in a fire and the burning of neighboring plants opens up aboveground space for its buds to shoot up and bloom.

Jackie took Myesa and me down to Colorado State University in Fort Collins to teach us how to dissect and count the underground buds of some of the native prairie plants. It was a lot of tearing grass apart under a microscope, trying to determine if the bud was, in fact, a bud or if it has become a juvenile tiller. As far as I understand, the distinction is that a bud is completely underneath the prophyll (a sort of casing that protects it) whereas tillers extend past the prophyll. Even after spending a whole afternoon peering through the microscope, I still struggle when distinguishing the roots from the buds. 

Outside of work, I’ve done lots of playing. There’s some pretty good hikes here, and a few weekends ago I got up at 3 am to get a sunrise hike in, despite a thunderstorm that lit up the lawn outside as I sipped my coffee. The weather cleared up just in time for my friends and I to hike up Little Devil’s Tower to see the sun come up over Rapid City. I’ve also had two buddies visit me: my partner, Bryce, from Tacoma and my best bud, Joe, from Chicago.

The Black Hills have been an excellent place for me to get into outdoor rock climbing and it was exciting to share that experience with some visitors. The Black Hills granite will tear your fingers apart and rip your skin open without you noticing, but it is also super grippy and relatively easy to climb. The local climbing community is pretty small and tight, and there’s a huge amount of climbing which attracts people from all over to climb in the Hills.

When Joe visited, we toured one of the numerous caves out here. We went to Jewel Cave, which is named for the calcite dogtooth spar found within. Jewel Cave is the third-longest cave in the world, which is pretty neat. Southeast of Jewel Cave is Wind Cave National Park, and while I haven’t been inside Wind Cave itself, I have gone through the park several times to see the bison and prairie dogs.

A few weeks ago I helped do some point intercept line transects at Wind Cave. Point intercept line transects involve placing a pole, the “plunker”, down along a transect tape at regular intervals and recording which species are touching the plunker and at what heights they are touching it. This was fun because point intercept involves less species analysis than taking aerial cover of 1 meter x 0.5 meter quadrats, which is what most of my summer’s prior data collection has been. Plus, most of the transects were through bare prairie dog towns so there wasn’t any data to record.

Soon enough, I’ll be back out on Buffalo Gap National Grassland, trimming the prairie by hand once again. 

Time is going by fast here in Boise! I feel so lucky to be working in this job learning new things every day, traveling around the Great Basin, and seeing cool plants.

In the last couple months, my co-intern Alaina and I have spent our time scouting for plant populations and collecting seed. We have mainly focused on Sphaeralcea (Globe Mallow) species, but we also spent some time scouting for Lomatium dissectum (LODI) early in the season. Scouting requires us to look closely at a landscape and pay attention to little details like aspect, changes in vegetation, and soil composition. For example, the first time we saw LODI, it was growing on steep rocky slopes next to the Deschutes River. We noticed that the plants were abundant on some slopes and absent on others. We drove along the river, recording when populations of LODI started and stopped. It became clear that the plants were showing a preference for west and north facing slopes. Just from observation, it is easy to see that vegetation patterns change from one side of a hill to another. Even though this pattern is present all throughout nature, I hadn’t really paid it a lot of attention it before this spring. In scouting, I started to see a whole new dimension to the landscapes around me.

Scouting trips required a lot of planning. Sometimes our mentor Jessica provided us points on a map to visit to look for plants and on other occasions Alaina and I spent hours in the office poring over google earth imagery to find likely habitat for our target species. For LODI, we looked for steep north and west facing slopes. For Globe Mallow we looked for sandy soils and disturbed areas. We also used herbarium specimen records to find places where plants were likely present. We then planned trips into the field to visit as many locations as possible.

Alaina and I learned a lot during our scouting trips. On our first trip scouting without our mentor Jessica, we chose to visit a creek in a steep walled canyon in the Owyhee Front. We mapped a possible route to the location on small dirt roads. However, we had no idea what these roads would look like once we arrived. After an hour and a half drive out from Boise, we turned onto a small two track road snaking away through the sage brush. We were feeling confident at first, but as we rattled our way down a long and very rough road, we started to wonder if we could make it all the way to the site. We remained hopeful and made slow but steady progress toward the canyon until we rounded a corner and came face to face with a rusty barbwire fence across the road and a private property sign. We turned around and made our way back to the main road, a bit discouraged. After consulting our map, we found another road leading to our field site and found our way there behind schedule.

Upon our arrival, we were delighted to find that what had looked on our map like a small canyon was in fact a spectacular and deep rocky canyon with spires and sheets of rock stacked like pancakes. We had to take a moment to sit and take in the view. Soon, we refocused on our scouting efforts. We searched the sides of the canyon for LODI, looking for its distinctive yellow umbel flowers and bright green hue. Unfortunately, there was none to be seen.

At first glance, our first day scouting seems like a failure. We didn’t choose the best road, and we didn’t find any LODI at our scouting site. However, we quickly learned that these challenges are part of the process. After this trip we learned to more carefully plan our route when traveling on small two track roads. We also learned that scouting is unpredictable, and you need to be flexible with your plans. On many occasions a promising site ends up not having the plants you are looking for, but this is ok since every unsuccessful site helps you better understand where to look next.

Other scouting trips have taken us to Hell’s Canyon, Steens Mountain, western Wyoming, Jackpot Nevada, and beyond. We have mapped many populations of plants and collected lots of herbarium specimens. We have camped and hiked all over the Great Basin while looking for plants. We have grown very familiar with Globe Mallow and have found plants in all kinds of places, from disturbed sagebrush to a beautiful rocky hilltop to a hillside overlooking a bright blue lake.

A few sites where we mapped Globe Mallow populations

In the last month, Globe Mallow seeds have started to mature, and we have been returning to sites we scouted earlier in the season to collect seed. We collect 25% of the seed in a plant population at each site. It has been interesting to return to the sites we mapped and see the plants at a new stage. These seeds will be used in a new common garden for research that will support restoration of landscapes across the Great Basin.

Almost a month has gone by since I drove north through California to my internship with the US Fish & Wildlife Service in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Klamath Falls is the largest city in the Upper Klamath Basin, an area inhabited by the Klamath tribes since time immemorial. Before coming I did some virtual exploring via satellite imagery, which showed Klamath Falls in a transition zone where the dark green of forested land turns into the beige of a drier, desert landscape. Not surprisingly, my Google Maps tour did not prepare me for the incredible beauty and diversity that actually exists in the Basin. The high desert environment, with its sagebrush, western juniper and ponderosa pine, meets with vibrant riparian and wetland vegetation in the Basin’s river systems and marshes. The Upper Klamath Basin comprises several other drainage basins, some of which feed into Upper Klamath Lake. This lake feeds into the Klamath River, which flows through Northern California and into the Pacific Ocean. To the south you can see majestic Mount Shasta rising through the clouds, west are vast wilderness areas in the Cascades and the pointed peak of Mount McLoughlin, north and east exist several river systems, the Klamath Marsh Wildlife Refuge, and Crater Lake, a landmark of volcanic activity in the region. Basically, a short drive in any direction from Klamath Falls is both unique and stunning.

My fellow intern, Antonio, and I are here to assist on various projects within the Klamath Falls FWS office. My first week we joined the Fish & Wildlife Partners Program, a department that works with non-federal landowners to restore the habitats on their land. We did some wetland surveying, transplanted wocus (a native water lily used by the Klamath tribes) into a restoration site, and shadowed on a landowner outreach excursion. 

Our second week was spent with a hatchery rearing the endangered Lost River and shortnose suckers: endemic sucker species that are not seeing new recruitment in their populations. We spent every morning in a boat, collecting thousands of sucker larvae on the edges of the Williamson River. The afternoons were spent at the hatchery counting the nearly translucent baby fish one by one. Overall we collected and counted over 10,000 larvae. These larvae hang out in large tubs and are fed artemia (miniscule brine shrimp) until they grow larger and can be transferred to in-ground ponds. 

The next two weeks consisted of bull trout recovery work with our supervisor, Zach. Many streams that were historically occupied by genetically unique bull trout are now devoid of them, so there is a large effort to re-populate some of these areas and remove invasive brook trout. We worked our way up Long Creek, a branching of the Sycan River area, which previous studies had claimed were still occupied by bull trout. To sample the fish we use backpack electrofishing. One person will don the electrofishing backpack, and two others wield the dip nets. The electrofisher delivers a current that elicits involuntary muscle movements in any fish caught in the electric field. The fish moves towards the anode and is briefly immobilized to make for easier capture. The first fish we sampled were all invasive brook trout. We took down measurements and put a PIT tag under the dorsal fin. I’m somewhat ashamed to say that this was my first time holding a fish that wasn’t frozen salmon from the grocery store. What’s more, I did not expect these trout to be some of the most beautiful organisms I’ve ever seen.

 The long awaited bull trout were finally caught after we moved upstream to a steeper, rockier section of the creek. To continue our sampling in deeper parts of the creek, we put on “dry” suits and snorkeled upstream. No bull trout were identified in our snorkel search, but we did spend a solid five minutes observing two lamprey building a nest (also called a “redd”) about a foot from our faces. We also discovered that staying completely dry in a dry suit is not a given. All things considered, it was an amazing experience.

This month has been truly eye-opening for me. Not only am I learning new skills and becoming acquainted with the unique wildlife of this incredible region, but I am being exposed to a whole new field of work. The passion that exudes from the FWS staff, their knowledge of the native species here and their insatiable desire to keep learning is so inspiring to me. I can’t wait to see what the season has in store for Antonio and I. 

The Conservation and Land Management internship has been beneficial in gaining experience working with various aspects of fisheries and wildlife conservation and management in conjunction with the Klamath Falls Fish and Wildlife Office. The opportunity to work alongside biologists and hatchery staff has led to gaining knowledge and experience working with species that are important to the local ecosystems in the area, whether it be Bull Trout, Brook Trout, Lost River sucker, shortnose sucker, and Canada Geese.

The first project consisted of using an electrofishing backpack to shock an area of Deming Creek Trail for Bull Trout. The purpose of electrofishing is to collect data regarding the abundance, species composition, health, and density of a fish population in any given area. The task involved using a backpacking unit in the stream to shock fish, catch the shocked fish in nets, and estimate the size lengths of each individual caught. With it being my first experience trying to net fish after they had been electroshocked by the backpack shocker, developing a quick reaction time to net the stunned fish was a must. As the day went on, we had better success rates in netting fish, which led to more accurate data for the study area.

The second occasion of backpack electroshocking consisted of shocking wilderness streams for Brook Trout. With it being my first time getting to use an electrofishing backpack, it was definitely a learning experience. Looking for pools of calm water in the stream, whether it be along the banks of the stream or areas that are directly below large objects, such as boulders, were prime spots that typically held fish. Being able to recognize where the fish might be located helped the success rate of capture and, ultimately, data collection. The downside of using the electroshocking backpack for the first time was learning how to maneuver through a fast-flowing stream carrying the backpack while maintaining balance at the same time. When electrofishing, once shocked fish were caught, gaining experience using a PIT Tag reader, along with processing fish via PIT Tagging, weighing, and measuring the total length of each fish was beneficial for a future career in the fisheries field.

A project that the intern program was able to assist in conjunction with Klamath Fish Hatchery consisted of working with the shortnose sucker and Lost River sucker. The task involved operating a skiff boat on the Williamson River and catching fish larvae with dip nets and storing them in coolers. Being out on the water, we were able to obtain experience driving the boat down the Williamson River, as well as loading the boat onto the trailer at the end of the day. Being able to obtain boating experience was awesome, as knowing how to operate and load a boat is highly sought after in the fisheries and wildlife field. Once returned to the hatchery with coolers filled with fish larvae, the larvae were individually counted and put into rearing tanks. Although counting each individual fish for a couple hours per day was draining, it was exciting knowing that our work is helping with the conservation of each species, as the two species of suckers are currently endangered.

One of the more adventurous projects consisted of going out snorkeling to look for Bull Trout. Coming from the desert in New Mexico where it is very dry, I have never gotten the chance to go snorkeling. Although the water was super cold and we didn’t catch a glimpse of any Bull Trout, being able to see schools of Speckled Dace in the water swimming around was awesome. The benefit of snorkeling was it helped sharpen our fish ID skills while we were identifying fish species in aquatic habitats.

One of the last projects we have completed recently involved banding geese in conjunction with a local wildlife refuge. Banding is a useful tool to gather data on breeding and wintering distribution, behavior, reproduction, survival, and migratory routes of migratory birds. The task involved using kayaks to direct flocks of geese that were on the water toward the shoreline where a fenced pen was set up. It took a lot of patience trying to keep the flock together as much as possible while also trying to push the flock towards the shore. Once the geese were on the shore and enclosed within the holding pen, it got hectic really quick. The process consisted of picking up each individual goose from the pen, determining the sex and age (i.e., hatch-year, mature), banding the goose, and returning it to the water. Over the last couple of days of geese banding, the process has gone a lot smoother as I have gotten more experience banding the birds.

In conclusion, the conservation and land management internship has been really enjoyable, along with being beneficial in getting to experience helping with numerous fisheries and wildlife projects that the Klamath Falls Fish and Wildlife Office conducts on a daily basis. Although a job within the fisheries and wildlife field can be stressful at times, especially if one is moving from seasonal job to seasonal job with no luck on permanent employment, the projects that are conducted within a job can be very rewarding at times, in which I would recommend this type of fieldwork to any individual searching for a career path.

    After arriving in Rapid City, South Dakota, I promptly tested positive for COVID. This meant I spent the first two weeks quarantining alone and working from home. Home here is a little house in the hills surrounded by ponderosa pines, white-tailed deer, and the occasional turkey. But this last week I was finally able to go into the office and out into the field. And what a field it is!

    Coming from the thickly forested west side of Washington state, the wide open spaces of the Midwest are something to get used to. There’s seemingly just grass for miles, with maybe a scrappy-looking cottonwood or two sprinkled in every now and then, almost as an afterthought. It makes me feel prone and nearly agoraphobic, causing me to empathize with rabbits and other critters that get spotted and scooped away by birds of prey.

    My first day out in the expansive fields of Buffalo Gap National Grassland was spent working on our plot for BromeCast. Bromus tectorum, also known as downy brome or cheatgrass, is an invasive species that outcompetes the native grasses on rangelands. Oftentimes the cows will graze the grass down, but if it is missed, B. tectorum dries out and becomes fuel for wildfires. The BromeCast project aims to predict the invasion of B. tectorum in order to better control the spread.

    In the fall, my mentor, Jacqueline Ott, planted B. tectorum seeds attached to toothpicks (for locating the plants later) along transects with bare and control conditions. Our job now is to record the amount of seeds that successfully germinated and were still alive and the surrounding plant composition. Unfortunately, the number of survivors was very low– we hypothesized that this could be because the toothpicks planted the cheatgrass seeds deeper than normal. It is an interesting feeling to be frustrated by an invasive species’ apparent lack of fecundity.

   Although the vastness of the grasslands is new to me, a lot of the plants are familiar. The ponderosa pine forest system exists in eastern Washington and I was surprised that pinedrops (Pterospora andromedea), which is a flower I got tattooed with some other people in memory of an excellent field summer in Washington, is actually much more common out in South Dakota than there!

    My coworker, Myesa, is also the type of person who stops at every new flower and can take an hour to hike half a mile. We went on a little day trip to Wyoming to check out Devil’s Tower and saw lots of neat plants.

    Coming to a fresh ecoregion is exciting because it tests my plant identification skills: some plants I recognize as old friends, like Balsamhoriza sagittata; others I can identify the genus but the species itself is a stranger, as was the case with Castilleja sessiflora. And even further up the taxonomic tree, I am encountering families that are new to me: unpictured, but Myesa showed me some vegetative Apocynum androsaemifolium of Apocynaceae.

    I’ve only been out and about for one week now and I’ve already seen so many new things. I’m excited for the summer and what it holds.

Hey blog! Since my last entry Sahalie and I have been all over Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The scouting season has begun! Our target species to scout for at the moment are Sphaeralcea (Globemallow) and Lomatium dissectum (Fernleaf Biscuitroot/LODI). We quickly learned it was too early for the Globemallow to be flowering, making them quite difficult to scout for without their bright orange inflorescence. The last few weeks we have focused on looking for LODI populations to collect seed from later on. 

The scouting process

The scouting process begins long before we hit the road. We usually spend a day examining topographic maps, and satellite imagery for the regions we want to visit, along with a thorough search of herbarium databases to see specific locations LODI has been found in the past. All of these resources help us narrow down a few places we think we will be most likely to find LODI. For this species we are looking on the maps for steep eroding rocky canyons with north and west facing slopes. However throughout the last few weeks we’ve learned quite a bit more about LODI’s habitat preference that doesn’t always follow this pattern! It seems that LODI likes to have an adjacent hill or wall to shade the slope they are growing on. We have also found it thriving on south facing slopes and in little gullies coming off of mountain drainages. After finding LODI on the steepest eroding slopes it was surprising to find it in the much more subtle topography changes of these shallow gullies filled with tumbleweeds. 

On the ground

Once we arrive at the places we’ve circled on the maps, the real scouting begins. Sometimes we get lucky and find a huge population instantly, you can even spot it from the road. Other times we will spend the entire day barely scraping up a population of 200 plants. 200 plants is the minimum number of plants we need in a population in order to collect seed from it. Over the last few weeks we have found populations that range from thousands of plants, hundreds of plants to just over 200. Once we have established that our population has enough plants we will begin to map it. This entails walking through the population dropping waypoints approximately every 30 meters and giving an estimate for about how many plants surround each waypoint. By the end of this process we will have a point cloud of the population that gives us a sense of both the boundaries and how many individuals it contains. This information is super helpful for whoever has to find the plants again to collect seed in the future. As we map we also collect leaf tissue samples. For each population we will select 12 plants to collect tissue from, scattered evenly throughout the area. Finally, we will take photos for each population. Each photoset includes the plant’s inflorescence, leaves, stems, base, involucres, the whole plant, the plant in its habitat, and a landscape photo of the habitat from outside of the population.

This months best “office” views

Hells canyon

Steens Mountain trip

I have absolutely loved this month of scouting. It’s such a good feeling to pick out a little point on the map of somewhere you’ve never been, and then to go there, see the landscape in person, and find exactly the plant you’re looking for! It has taken us to some absolutely magical and remote places and I cannot wait to see more of the Great Basin as the season continues!

Our crew has grown a lot this last month with several new Forest Service technicians joining the team. We have all become such good friends! Outside of work we have been climbing, camping, and having beach days by Lucky Peak reservoir. I’m feeling so lucky to have such a good crew and group of friends to adventure with out here! Here are few more pictures of what we have been up to.

Sahalie, Nyika, and Katie climbing at the Black Cliffs

Though it’s already been a week, it’s very hard to believe that our internship in Boulder City is over! It’s been (a little under) 6 amazing months in Nevada – I’ve learned so much through this project, visited so many different National Parks, hiked many miles, camped more nights than I can count, and made a great friend. It’s been a busy last few months, and an even busier last couple of weeks as we wrapped up, but I wanted to post a few memories that have stuck out to me since the last time I posted.

I also wanted to say thank you to our mentors at USGS – Lesley, Todd, and Sara – and to Chris. I have learned so much about Joshua trees, climate change, and scientific research, and have felt very lucky to learn from them and have their support. They’ve provided invaluable advice in terms of future careers and schooling, and have been so encouraging and appreciative of our work with them. I will definitely miss working with them!

And another thank you to my co-intern, Maddy. We just wrapped up a celebratory end-of-internship road-trip to California to visit Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Yosemite National Parks, and it was a beautiful way to round out our internship. Can’t wait to visit you in Idaho!

Hard to believe it’s been almost 6 months since we first started at the USGS office in Boulder City. Bridget and I were talking about how it’s such a weird feeling that today is our last day -it’s a bittersweet mix of sadness, thankfulness, and some disbelief that it’s really over after today.

The past few months have been so busy that we haven’t reported on the blog in a while! Between visiting all 3 gardens every other week and side projects added on outside of that, there’s been little time to get to our laptops to type up our entries. But two highlights outside of our Joshua Tree Garden upkeep duties were helping out on a Mojave plant survey project back in early March, and collecting data on periderm-stripping of Joshua Trees across the Mojave (periderm is what Joshua Tree “bark” is called since it is a monocot). Periderm-stripping is when rodents such as rabbits and squirrels chew off the tree “bark” for nutrients when they aren’t able to get enough from their typical food sources. This is likely linked to climate change with fewer plants –rodent food sources– surviving as they receive less rain.

We were also able to make a few more weekend trips, including the Grand Canyon and back to Zion again to hike Angel’s Landing! It’s been so much fun to adventure/hike/camp with Bridget over the months and become such good friends through all of that, our long drives, and living and working side by side.

I’m keeping this post short and sweet, but I need to say a few more thank-yous to our mentors: Chris, Lesley, Todd and Sara. I’ve felt that throughout this time, our mentors have all cared so much about making sure we’re learning as much as possible, giving advice for our future careers/grad school, and encouraging and thanking us for the hard work we’ve put into the Joshua Tree Genome Project. They’ve taught us a lot about research, the desert ecosystem and what it’s like to work at the USGS, which has been so valuable.

Hi, my name is Sahalie, and I’m interning with the Rocky Mountain Research Station this spring and summer. RMRS is a research branch of the Forest Service in Boise, Idaho.

Since arriving in Boise, I have been doing interesting work in the field and the lab. In our first month, my fellow intern Alaina and I spent a lot of time doing surveys on plants grown by RMRS for research.

For each plant in these surveys, we note the plant’s developmental stage, the amount of herbivory, the number of nearby live plants, and the diameter of the leaf rosette. We also collect a leaf from a plant once it reaches the right stage. These sites will be surveyed over the next few months to track the growth and development of the plants.

In addition to conducting plant surveys, Alaina and I have cleaned seed collected last year to prepare it for cold storage. We first “de-winged” the seeds to remove the fluffy pappus of the seed by rubbing the seeds over a rubber mat. Then we put the seeds into an air column which blows air from below through a tube. We controlled the rate of air flow to lift the light fluffy pappus into traps at the top of the tube while the heavier seed stayed at the bottom of the tube.

In addition, we spent time counting seeds in Erigeron pumilus flower heads that were collected from the common gardens last year. We pulled apart the flowers with forceps and carefully removed and counted each seed. At first it was hard to tell the difference between the tiny seeds and other flower parts, but we got good at it with practice.

In the last week, we have begun scouting for plant populations that we will collect seed from later in the summer. We have traveled to eastern Washington and Oregon to look for Sphaeralcea and Lomatium dissectum populations. This work has been really interesting so far and I’m looking forward to traveling to other sites around the Great Basin!

In my free time, I have enjoyed exploring Idaho. I have biked along the Boise River greenbelt and hiked in the hills above the city. Alaina and I live near the Lucky Peak reservoir, and I have been on many evening walks along the cliffs above the water.

A couple weeks ago, Alaina, another co-worker, and I went camping by the Middle Fork of the Boise River. We visited a hot spring and a cave and made pancakes for breakfast!

I have had a great time in this internship so far and learned a lot, and I’m excited for the next few months!