Theresa and I are so close to our target of 30 collections and it’s kind of amazing. In all honesty, if it wasn’t for some bad timing, we likely would have hit our 30 and surpassed it. Sometimes though, you just need to roll with what the season throws at you. Recently, we camped in Fillmore’s Field Office to collect the seeds from plants we scouted there about a month ago. It was moving along at a slower pace, and we thought we timed it pretty accurately. Unfortunately, Utah decided to have a week straight (and then some) of days over 100 degrees F and when we went to collect our seed, we were dismayed that the plants essentially got fried before the seed could even develop properly. So, instead of our trusty work truck being full to the brim of seed bags, we got about half the collections we intended to get. All is not lost however. Since we GPS everything, next years crew will be able to get the ones we missed out on this year.

Rural Utah has a sense of humor I can appreciate!

Return to Crystal Peak in Fillmore’s Field Office.

As of last week, we wrapped up a cool rare plant monitoring project by collecting a tiny amount of seed for a grow-out project the office is interested in. It was hot. It was dusty. Fire ate away one of our populations. And somehow, a road flooded, and we strategically had to maneuver off-road around it. Our truck hasn’t let us down yet though, which is a miracle considering we’ve logged over 7,000 miles on every sort of road and non-road imaginable. I probably just jinxed that luck now.

When not sweating out of every pore in my body during our work days, I have been enjoying the cool hikes the Wasatch front has to offer. I’m looking forward to some upcoming scouting in the higher elevation areas of our office since the mountains have seemingly exploded into bloom. It’s a breath-taking sight to see meadows thick with color.

Saving a mantis dude from our debugging process that we put the seeds through

-Corinne
SLFO

Well, we have picked a bajillion seeds by now, I think. Seriously, we made some great progress this last month, though it is getting pretty hot out now and I am very much done with the dust and heat. But boy can it be stunning out here! Life is good in the Salt Lake Field Office.

BLM, SLFO

As July is coming to an end, many of my collection goals I had made at the beginning of my internship are wrapping up. I find myself with a higher confidence in collecting seed. I have realized that 10,000 seed is actually not that much. Many of my plants (and many plants in general) produce so many seeds that I only need to collect from a handful to reach 10,000. This plant below has about 4 seed per little capsule and hundreds of capsules per plant!

I am still learning plant identification skills everyday! I love knowing what plants I am seeing and which ones are native or not. Plant identification is something I will never get tired of.

I got to meet with a botanist in the Forest Service that does active restoration in Siskiyou county. Having a day just to hear what she does and how she does it was awesome! It really made me think about my career path and that I may want to guide my career into restoration. My mentor is not doing restoration and may not start any projects till a few years from now, so unfortunately gaining experience in that field is unlikely. However, it does motivate me to look into jobs in the restoration business and hopefully get a job in that field after SOS.

The temperatures have been rising since May and now they seem to have reached a plateau. They oscillate around 100 and 107, usually the latter at the end of the week. Thank goodness most of my seeds have been collected and I can enjoy the AC more often. Although, I find myself day dreaming about the outside as I get chills every now and again from the AC being turned up too high.

The BLM office hosted and participated in a float trip down the Trinity river. We all set afloat on rafts to head downstream. The mission of the trip was to monitor a long-term restoration project. The goal of the project was to create more inlets from the main river to create more fish and wildlife habitat. This was a really fun float and gave a different view of the river. The public was also invited on this trip and they got to see the improvements on the river. Overall this was a great learning experience!

-Redding, CA BLM office

My internship here in Idaho is zipping along! After a fun and informative week spent attending the CLM workshop in Chicago, my crew jumped into collecting data for MAIM (Modified Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring). A typical day for this includes driving up to two hours on somewhat treacherous dirt roads deep into sagebrush country. We then record information about the plot, set up a three-spoke transect and record vegetation heights and cover using the line-point intercept method. We also conduct forb sweeps along the lines and take an inventory of every species present in the plot. This data can then be used to assess the site’s suitability as sage grouse habitat and to inform decisions about grazing permits.

Last week, I also got the opportunity to go out with the non-game wildlife biologist for Idaho Fish & Game. Myself and some other interns were lucky enough to escape a hot day by going underground to look for bats and cave invertebrates in the lava tubes. Although we didn’t see any bats that day, we did find a rare cave beetle! We also helped conduct insect surveys aboveground- we looked for a rare jewel beetle commonly found in the roots and flowers of Eriogonum sp.

Cave explorations

Eriogonum sphaerocephalum

As my plant ID skills sharpen, I find myself spending more and more time looking at them, even in my free time. For fourth of July weekend, myself and a few friends headed up to the Sawtooth Range near Stanley, ID. We backpacked up to the beautiful Goat Lake, which was still coated in snow and ice! I expected there to be snow up at high elevation, but didn’t expect the entire area to still be completely buried. Instead of heading up higher through slushy snowfields, we opted to hike down at lower elevations, which afforded us more time to look at plants. We were entranced by beautiful meadows filled with Artemesia tridentata, Calochortus nuttallii, Eriogonum sp., Penstemon sp., Purshia tridentata, Delphinium sp., Balsamorhiza sagittata, and more.

Sunset at Goat Lake in the Sawtooth Range.

Ridge-line full of wildflowers!

Savanna

Shoshone Field Office- BLM

So this is my first blog post since starting my internship here in Carlsbad, New Mexico! I have to admit… driving here from Northern Virginia and reaching my last hour and the first real stretch of desert, I thought to myself, “what in the world could possibly be collected or even growing out here?”. All I saw was shrub after shrub and yucca and oil drills for miles! However, just a couple of days in the field and I was proved wrong. When you pay attention and look closely enough there is beauty all around out here in ‘The Land of Enchantment’ and I find it pretty amazing.

One of my favorite flowers so far was that of our first successful collection, Centaurium maryannum, the gypsum centaury, which we found growing way down in a ravine of Ben Slaughter Draw.

Centuarium maryannum

Another beautiful flower was that of our first failed collection, Zephyranthes longifolia, the copper zephyrlily. Apparently, these little guys are quite appetizing to rabbits and cows because the day we came back to make our collection, after weeks of carefully watching over them, we found they had all been munched on! It was definitely a letdown but we learned our lesson and moved on to more scouting.

Zephyranthes longifolia

Despite our slow start, things should be picking up soon! We have since found several more collection-worthy populations that will be going to seed soon and I assume with monsoon season quickly approaching we will discover even more desert treasures.

Beetle inside a cactus flower

-Ashley Warrington, BLM Carlsbad Field Office

This marks the end of my second month working in Carlsbad, NM and I have to say I feel like I’m in the twilight zone… Being from North Carolina, I don’t think I have ever seen so much cactus in my life and I also find it kind of surreal that there are just no trees (besides a ridiculous amount of pecan trees). I ended up joining a group of interns from the Carlsbad field office on a trip to Santa Fe this weekend and I almost cried out of joy when I saw a pine tree. Though, I will say that I am enjoying the lack of humidity in spite of how hot it can get out here.

I have started getting used to seeing cacti everywhere but that doesn’t stop me from getting excited when I see one in flower

Despite the drastic change in environment, I am thoroughly enjoying my time here. I have seen and experienced so many new things I never would have without taking this internship and moving across the country, for example the Carlsbad Caverns! They are definitely worth a trip out here if you ever get a chance. The sheer size of the caverns is humbling in my opinion.

Entrance to the caverns

There are so many different landscapes within New Mexico that it makes every trip exciting, even if you get lost! I can now honestly see why its called “The Land of Enchantment” and I am eager to continue exploring the state during my stay.

Got lost on the way to Tent Rocks and stumbled upon a hot spring! Well more like tepid spring… Photo Credit: Julie Mao

We eventually made it to Tent Rocks!

Bandelier National Monument

Petroglyphs near Santa Fe

And now, as a botanist, here are my obligatory plant photos:

Centaurium maryannum

Zephyranthes longifolia

Unidentified thistle

Things around the Buffalo Field Office in Wyoming have really picked up since I returned from the workshop in Chicago. Upon our return, my fellow intern, Christine, and I have been going out to the field together to start our inspections. What we do is a bit different than what most CLM interns are working on. To explain briefly, she and I inspect abandoned oil and gas wells to check on their status and how the reclamation process is progressing. Reclamation is the final requirement in releasing a well from bond, and if it isn’t being completed properly the operator will be notified by the BLM and can be fined if necessary.

On our first solo mission out to the field, Christine and I chose 5 wells out of our assignments for which the office had received notice that the operator was to plug and abandon the well. No further paperwork had been sent in in the few years following the notice to plug and abandon, which we thought was odd. So we decided to investigate. Prior to heading out, we created a map of the site and roads to load into Avenza (an app I highly recommend checking out). Something I’ve learned working this summer is that navigating dirt and two-track roads in Wyoming is never as straightforward as you think. Locked gates and roads in rough condition were the major obstacles we faced that first day out. A good portion of that day was spent trying to find the right road into the site, but we succeeded after plenty of trial and error. The wells we inspected that day still had infrastructure in place and lots of cheatgrass around them. Clearly, the reclamation isn’t going well.

We went back out to that site a few days later to check on the rest of the wells in that grouping. All were in a pretty similar state to the ones we saw on the first day. As we were leaving the site, we heard a call over the CB radio that there was a fire right off the main road we took into the site. I scanned the horizon and saw smoke rising in the distance. After a moment of irrational panic that somehow we had caused the fire, we realized it was a few miles from anywhere we had been that day. There were already BLM firefighters working on it, so we continued on with the rest of our day.

The CLM internship is no cake walk. Our days are long, arduous, and exhilarating. Our mornings are early and turbo-charged. I don’t know how most people’s mornings go, but I need something quick, delicious, nutritious, and calorie-packed that I can eat with one hand as I swirl about packing all my other necessities for a 10-hour field day. I’m sure lots of people need a breakfast like this.

I give you: the quiche. Spend a couple hours on the weekend making one (or two), and you’ll have fantastic breakfast you can eat on auto-pilot all week. You can make several, cut them into servings, freeze them, and simply reheat in the morning – they’ll stay good frozen for about 2 weeks (if they last that long). And yes, you can make one. I promise.

9″ pie plate makes 6 servings, est. 400 calories each serving. This quiche has feta and cheddar cheeses, broccoli, spinach, and a little kale. Add or substitute suggested ingredients as you like!

Perfect Savory Pie Crust

Prep time: 15min

Wait time: 1 hour

• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 tsp fine sea salt
• 10 Tbsp unsalted butter, chilled & cubed
• 2-4 Tbsp ice water, reserve in a wide-mouth dish

Quiche Filling

Prep time: 30-45min

Wait time: 1 hour

• 1 Tbsp butter or olive oil
• 1/2 cup of sliced shallots (sub: 1/4 cup diced onion or 3-4 Tbsp minced garlic)
• 10 oz (two big handfuls) fresh spinach and/or kale
• 1 1/2 cups broccoli, chopped
• Pinch or two each as you like of salt, cayenne, thyme, and oregano.
• 1 cup grated cheese. Consider cheddar, gruyere, feta, or Monterrey jack.
• 4 large eggs
• 1 1/4 cup heavy cream (sub: half & half thinned with water)

Directions

If you bought a pie crust (boo!!), preheat the oven to 325F and skip to step 8.

1. Pulse the flour and salt together in a food processor. Add butter and pulse until the mixture looks like fluffy sand with pea-sized chunks of butter in it.
   • If you don’t have a food processor, use a pastry cutter, a fork, or just crumble the butter and flour by hand.
2. Add ice water, 1 tablespoon at a time, and pulse until the dough just comes together. It should stay in a ball if you press it in your hand, but not seem wet.
3. On a clean counter, scatter a little flour. Turn out the dough onto the floured counter and gather it into a ball. Flatten the ball into a firm disk, wrap in a clean terry cloth towel or wax paper, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour or up to 2 days.
4. When you’re ready to bake the quiche, remove the dough & let it warm on the counter for about 10 minutes. Lightly dust the counter and a rolling pin with flour. Roll out your dough to about 1/4″ thick. Start by gently rocking the rolling pin until the dough gives, then make longer strokes. Alternate rolling directions so you get a circle, not a weird oval.
   • Preheat the oven to 400F.
5. Gather the pie crust pancake by sliding your fingers under the dough, starting at the edges and working into the center until you can pick it up and transfer to a 9″ pie plate.
6. Fold the overhanging edges inward into the pie plate, and pinch them so they look nice on the lip of the plate. Don’t worry if it doesn’t look like the store-bought crinkles, it’ll be good!
7. Line your pie crust with some parchment paper, and pour in some dry beans to keep the crust weighted down. Or, use baking weights if you have them. Bake for 10-15min until just starting to brown, then remove from oven.
   • Turn oven temperature down to 325F.
   • Now you can either put the beans back in the jar, or throw them in the crock pot for a ready-made meal. Breakfast and lunch!!
8. While the pie crust is baking, sauté the shallots (or onion or garlic) in butter. Add the broccoli and stir for about a minute, then add in the spinach until it is just wilted. Remove from heat.
9. Whisk together the eggs and cream in a bowl, adding in your chosen seasonings & spices (salt, cayenne, oregano, thyme, etc.).
10. Layer the green vegetables in your pie crust, and sprinkle cheese generously over the greens. Pour the egg mixture over the cheesy greens, and add more cheese on top. 🙂
11. Bake your quiche at 325F for 50-55min. Top will be golden brown, a knife will come out clean but a little moist (not clumpy or runny). Remove quiche from oven and let stand 10min before serving. If making lots for later, let the quiche(s) cool completely and cover before refrigerating or freezing.
    • Reheat quiche in a toaster oven for approx. 5min at 350F, or pop in microwave for 1 1/2 min on a medium-high setting.

Hope you enjoy!!

Stay fed out there, CLM Interns!