As my last days on the Monongahela came closer I started to do a lot of reflection on my experiences and time as a CLM intern. Making the decision to come to West Virginia was a big step in both my personal and professional life. When I first moved to West Virginia in May, it was less than a week after I graduated college. This fast transition from submitting my final assignments to starting to take my first steps towards building a post-grad career was overwhelming, but I don’t think I would have it any other way. In those few days, I was excited to begin my journey in my professional career, but was not sure what to expect. After looking back on my time here, I am happy to say that I have had so many accomplishments on both a professional and personal level during my time as a CLM intern.

To start, the professional experience I gained while being a CLM has been so beneficial towards allowing me to understand what I am interested in and what I want to do in my future. One of my favorite things from this past internship was being able to see and learn about the Forest Service. Growing up I was aware of National Forests, BLM, Fish and Wildlife, and National Parks, but never actually knew what they did or how they were all different. Being partnered with the Forest Service for this internship I had the opportunity to work with different people within the Monongahela and their partners to gain an inside look at the ways that people with different specialties are able to come together to conserve public lands. One of my favorite examples includes the restoration work on the old mined lands throughout the Monongahela. I have talked about the restoration process in previous blog posts, so I wont repeat myself, but when it comes to large scale restoration projects there are so many different aspects that have to be thought about before, during, and after. This means there has to be a diverse group of people collaborating in order to accomplish the projects. The forest service, specifically on the Monongahela, does a really good job at bringing together many different people with diverse backgrounds and continue to increase this collaboration through partnerships, contracts, and collaborations with non-profits, contracted companies, and Universities. 

Another amazing thing I learned while doing this internship was not only does the Forest Service work to protect and restore the land, but they are also work hard to allow the public to enjoy and engage with this land. On example is the recreation team. While working with the recreation staff, I realized how much time goes into maintaining trails, campsites, and other public spaces to allow people to explore and embrace nature by hiking, camping, fishing, and hunting on the forest. Then there is the timber team that will harvest wood in certain parts of the forest. One example of this harvesting was on the red spruce restoration sites. When the old minded lands were originally restored the ground was densely compacted and planted with red pine and other trees that are not native to those ecosystems. So to start the restoration process the non-native trees needed to be removed or nocked down so the soil can be loosened and native trees like red spruce can be planted. One way of getting rid of them was by logging and selling these trees. It was a useful way to remove the trees to begin the process of restoring the land and also use the non-native trees in other ways. 

Not only did I learn a lot about the Forest Service, I also learned a lot about myself over the past six months. To start, living in West Virginia was a big change from the last two places that I have lived. I grew up in Phoenix Arizona, and went to college in Chicago, Illinois. Both of these places are urban and highly populated, where as Marlinton, West Virginia is almost the opposite with only a little over 1,000 people as the population. It was a big change and took me a little while to get used to the rural area, but it didn’t take me long to realize how great the community its and it quickly grew on me. Moving to new places are never easy, but having this experience to live in another state and completely different environment than I am used to showed me how adaptable I can be and how exciting new experiences and new places are. One of the things I liked the most about living in West Virginia has been the ability to be immersed in the outdoors. I was able to use my free time on the weekends to explore all around the Monongahela forest, but also other state parks in the area. Some of the cool places I was able to explore include Blackwater Falls, Watoga State Park, New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, Seneca State Forest, and other places around West Virginia. Being here for six months showed me just how much I enjoy activities like hiking and camping but also allowed me to learn some useful tips like doing research about a trail and taking the extra time to downloading the trail map is probably a good idea. 

Overall, this experience has allowed me to grow so much as an individual both personally and professionally.Which reminds me of one of my favorite John Muir quotes “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks”. Having this opportunity to be a CLM intern, I was able to be out in nature allowing me to learn what I expected to learn about the Forest Service and ways to conserve/manage public lands, but even more than I expected about myself. Being in nature and conserving our lands is something that I am really passionate about and showed me that botany, field work, restoration, and land management are things that I want to pursue in my future. I enjoyed West Virginia and being in Marlinton so much more than I could have ever imagined. I am sad to say goodbye. I never would have expected a small rural town in the middle of West Virginia to make me feel at home and be so difficult to leave. If there is one piece of advice I would give someone it would be to say yes to as many opportunities and experiences that you can, You never know where life will take you and what places you will enjoy the most. I never thought I would ever live somewhere like Marlinton, West Virginia, but it has been one of the best experience of my life. So thank you to everyone for their support and I cant wait to see where life takes me next. 

Dear Reader,

Well, it’s my last week in Winnemucca! As is always the way with time, six months have gone by awfully fast, while simultaneously containing so many experiences, new things learned, and good memories. It’s hard to say goodbye!

One of the things I learned here is that no matter where you go, you’ll be happy if you like the people around you. I really enjoyed the place and job besides that, but the people I met in Nevada, both on the job and off, are the most important thing! For someone like me who gets caught up in the doing, the planning and carrying out and accomplishing of goals, that’s a valuable reminder. These types of reminders often jump out at me more at the ends of things, like after graduating from high school, at the ends of sports seasons, when saying goodbye to friends for who knows how long. Similarly, it was really great at the end of this job to be reminded of all the people who have supported me this season, in Winnemucca, Reno, the CBG, and beyond. I’m very thankful for all of the people who showed me the ropes, were patient with me, gave me responsibilities and trusted me, brought me out in the field with them, and contributed to the sense of community I felt here.

The Santa Rosa Ranger District Office is small but tight-knit and reminds me of the Forest Service office my dad works at on the Superior National Forest in northern MN, even though the two places are so far away. In my very first blog post I talked about how I was struck by the abundance of land to manage and work to be done, coupled with a lack of resources and people to work on all of it. After six months here, that is still my impression––and of course I’m realizing that this is not a problem specific to Nevada, but it’s the place where I gained a more firsthand awareness of this challenge (and it’s certainly pronounced here!).

Thinking about land and land management in the Western U.S. was one of the many valuable learning experiences I gained from this job. I frequently think about whose land I’m on in a way that I did not before coming here. I also learned so much about what land management and conservation look like in the Western U.S., from the invasive plants that are a problem here to drought and fire challenges to the ways that different agencies work together to thinking about cattle and grazing and how important fostering good relationships with ranchers is…I think one hopeful thing is that a lot of stakeholders (federal and state agencies, NGOs, universities, private landowners like ranchers…) have common goals of being good stewards for this abundance of land. Every time I saw folks from different agencies collaborate during my job, they were so enthusiastic to compare notes, looking for ways to work together, share knowledge, and be on the same page.

Collaborating with other people, be it other SOS interns, BLM, NDOW, NRCS, and beyond, was one of the highlights of my job as well, for the reasons mentioned above of watching people collaborate and for what I could learn from all of them about their respective jobs and the ecosystems we worked in, and in the case of the Reno SOS interns, become friends with them! I plan to stay in contact with many of the people I met over the course of my time here, and I hope to come back to the area to visit and will definitely look at some grad schools in the western U.S. when the time comes. I will miss the practical, kind and friendly people, the sunny summer, the low-to-the-ground, highly adapted vegetation, Nevada’s network of parallel mountain ranges, the sunrises and sunsets, the hot springs, my walks around Winnemucca, my coworkers and friends, and so much more about this place. I do feel like I’ve had an abundance of time to reflect on things, and I hope I’m taking full advantage of it because I really appreciate what the last six months have brought me. First post-undergrad job and life experience in the books, and it’s exciting to be thinking about all the future awesome things that could potentially happen, but also sad as always to look back on a good chapter that’s ending.

Hi CLM blog! It’s November and it’s my second-to-last post––crazy but inevitable and it’s been a good season. I won’t get into the season reflection right now, so stay tuned for that next week. For now I’ll let you know how it’s been going at the tail end of my season from late October to early November.

Last time I talked about re-seeding disturbed areas in the Santa Rosas. Since then, I’ve been doing a lot more non-fieldwork, as snow starting to appear at higher elevations has meant that some of the forest roads are becoming less safe for driving. Instead, I’ve been doing a lot of end-of-the-season things––data management and entry for Seeds of Success, mounting specimens of the plants I collected seeds from this season, and organizing the Santa Rosa Ranger District’s herbarium collection.

For SOS data management, the main thing of note is the geospatial data entry, which I think is interesting because it can be helpful to future SOS interns in Nevada. Basically, I added points to a map showing where and when I collected various species this summer, and also where I’d scouted but didn’t collect due to poor timing that looked promising for future seasons. Interns each year can look at this map and access a multitude of ideas for where to scout and collect seeds!

The other most interesting things I’ve been doing are the specimen mounting and herbarium organizing. For mounting plants, what you’re doing is gluing pressed, dried plant specimens, along with an informational label, to large pieces of paper so other people can look at them for species identification, records of where species have been found over time, and other purposes! (Some specimens also just look pretty cool.) The part I liked best, however, was actually organizing the office’s herbarium collection (like a plant librarian!). Basically, almost all of the collection’s over 500 plant specimens were being stored in cardboard boxes, not organized, and it was my job to go through them, organizing them alphabetically by family, genus, and species, and moving them to a cabinet they were intended to be stored in. It might sound boring depending on the type of person you are, but for me it was fun to see lots of Northern Nevada plant specimens, most of them collected in the Santa Rosa and Mountain City-Jarbidge Districts of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest from 1974-1975 by Mont and Ethel Lewis, who I can only assume were a botanizing couple! I also liked getting to review and learn new plant families, and bring order to the chaos so the herbarium collection can actually serve its purpose as a useful reference for people at the office in the future.

Other than work, I’m enjoying fall in Winnemucca, and feeling sad that my term is almost up, but also feeling grateful and enriched by the time I’ve spent here.

As the fall has become colder, and we get closer to winter, the field work continues to prevail while we collect and process seed. Being from Arizona, collecting seed outside in cold, windy, and sometimes rainy weather continues to push my boundaries and show me that I am capable of more than I thought. I have always been used to tolerating the heat but the cold is another story. So as we continue to go out into the field to collect seed all across the Monongahela Forest, I have quickly been learning the best ways to stay warm. 

On my last blog post, I stated that I was excited to learn all new ways to collect different species than I have before and now I am learning new ways to process and clean the seed! To start, the seed I have been processing the most is Mountain Ash. Mountain Ash seeds consist of clumps of small red berries that are pruned off of the branches. To process them I start by separating the stems and the berries by throwing away the stems and putting the berries in a medium size sieve. Once I have a decent amount of berries in the sieve, I smush them through the holes in the sieve to separate the seeds from the skin and pulp of the berries. After smashing many berries, I rinse the sieve into a bucket to gather the rest of the seeds and then strain out the water. Once the seeds are cleaned I lay them out on a paper bag for them to dry. The dry seed will then be placed in a bag and labeled. Not all seed processing is done this way because of the wide variety of ways plants have evolved to disperse their seeds. This is interesting to me because of all the different and unique ways that can be used to process seeds depending on the plant. I look forward to learning new and unique ways to process seed in the coming weeks! 

Not only is it interesting how all the seed collection and processing happens but also why it is important to collect seed from around the forest. Collecting seed on the forest is important for a couple different reasons. One reason is to use the seeds to plant on different forest restoration sites. This is achieved by collecting seeds from a variety of species, processing these seeds, and then sending the cleaned seed to a plant nursery. Once the nursery is done growing the seed, the plants will be sent back to the forest so they can be planted on the current restoration sites. The second reason we collect seed is to increase the genetic diversity of the plant species around the forest. The restoration sites on the forest consists of both plants that have been bough from nurseries in the surrounding states and from the nurseries that planted the seeds collected on the Monongahela forest. By planting native species from different places, the genetic diversity of the forest will increase. This greater diversity will hopefully allow the restoration sites have an increased chance of survival and success. 

I cannot believe October is ending already. The summer has come and gone faster than I could have ever imagined. However, fall on the Monongahela National Forest has been one of the best falls I have ever seen. The biodiversity of plants around the forest creates a unique and beautiful color change that creates an assorted color scape that changes every day. This fall is one I will never forget!  

With the changing of the seasons, my fieldwork has also changed along the way. The beginning of October came with the end of the summer field seasons for botany surveys. Many of the larger projects were finished in September, but I was able to help finish surveys for future trails on the southern half of the forest. This was an amazing opportunity to take in a lot of the early fall foliage and be able to help find more interesting and cool plants like ferns and fungi.  

These past couple of weeks I have also been helping finish some of the research that I talked about on previous blog posts. Back in June and July, Katie and I helped a graduate student, Breezy, from Kentucky University on some of her research that compared bat behavior between wetlands in restoration and old forest locations. While Breezy is back at school, Anna Branduzzi from the non-profit Green Forest Works and I helped take water samples of her wetland locations. It was nice to see yet another aspect of Breezy’s research and go back to some of the places and see how they are also changing during the fall.  

Even though the field season has ended for some people, there is other field work that has just begun. Specifically, I have had the opportunity to begin seed collection in various locations around the forest. Over the past week I have enjoyed this seed collection and have been excited at all the new techniques I have learned. Seed collection is interesting to me because the method of collection is different for every plant. While in undergraduate, I had previous internships where I collected seed from many herbaceous plants that can be found in prairie ecosystems. Even with this experience I was able to learn new ways of collection because of the several types to plants we were collecting from. These plants consist of tress like Mountain Ash, Stripped Aspen, and several types of Hawthorns. While collecting from tress, I was a little nervous about if I was going to be able to reach the berries or seeds because I am short. However, I learned that there are many techniques to help reach the higher up seeds. One example includes the methods used to collect mountain ash. To collect the groupings of berries at the ends of the higher branches we used a long pruner to cut off the berries from the branch and collect them off the ground. This method can be seen in the picture below of my co-worker, Hannah, using the long pruners. As we continue to collect seed in the coming month, the already collected seed will be sent to partnering nurseries within the states surrounding West Virginia. These nurseries will then grow the plants for restoration use in the coming years. 

As I come into my last month of this internship, I have been doing so much reflection on just how much I have been able to accomplish and all the amazing people I have been able to meet along the way. I am so thankful for all the experiences this internship has already brought me and I cannot wait to see what this last month has to offer. I am excited to continue to collect seed and see everything that West Virginia and the Monongahela has to offer before going back home to Arizona and the desert.  

Hi CLM blog,

What’s new with you? For me, the end of September and first part of October have brought some changes, at work and in general. The end of September marked the end of the two Reno Seeds of Success crews’ terms, so I had to say goodbye to the four of them (in a professional context at least), which was sad. Working (and hanging out outside of work!) with them was the highlight of my September, and I’m hopeful that we will remain friends even when we don’t have plants and seeds to look for together! I’m going to visit a couple of these cool people this weekend so I’m optimistic.

Now that the seeds are almost completely dispersed for most species, I’ve started working on some other things. I made a tissue sample collection for Machaeranthera (/Dieteria) canescens at Angel Lake, and got to enjoy the fall colors and dense fog up there, which was cool to see. Lots more moisture than the atmosphere had contained for many months was hanging over the tops of the mountains, and at higher elevations like Angel Lake you could get pretty much engulfed by it!

In October a few cloudy systems have moved through Winnemucca also, and the mountains around town have been intermittently snowy, which I’ve really enjoyed. Maybe it’s just that I’m a Midwestern person who has rarely seen that, but having snow on the tops of the mountains gives them more definition and helps me notice peaks in the distance that I’d scanned over without really seeing when they were snow-free. I also learned that tumbleweeds, once dry, can clump together to form aggregations several feet long across four-wheeler trails, which added a kooky obstacle on one of my runs last week (of course, after googling the phenomenon, I learned that what I experienced was on the small end of the spectrum of tumbleweed aggregations!). In general I’m really appreciating being cold sometimes after a hot summer––much more what I’m accustomed to.

The other main thing I’ve been doing for work is some re-seeding of disturbed areas in the Santa Rosas. There are some heavily grazed and fire-affected areas along the Quinn River near the northern edge of the Santa Rosas, and I’ve been bringing bags of seed mix up and broadcasting it over these disturbed areas. Hopefully this will help some native grasses and forbs take root in this semi-bare, dry ground.

If it was seed conservation summer, now it’s ecosystem restoration autumn. I’m excited to see what comes next as the seasons keep changing.

Bye for now!

Emma

A slow but consistent exodus has been occurring in the Lincoln, as the markers of fall have begun arriving and summer comes to an end. Several times an hour the high and strained call of an elk bugle will pierce the air, and the nights down in the desert have called for closed windows and warm blankets. It seems like every day is another seasonal’s last day, and our crew has dwindled down to a handful of people. Some are road tripping, moving on to their next job, or traveling back home. The last few weeks have definitely been busy as we’ve finished the work left for us in the forest!

Currently we’re just finishing up our last bits of botany surveying. While we haven’t found any rare plants actually in our survey areas, we did accidentally find a robust population of Wooton’s Hawthorn (Crataegus wootoniana) one day earlier in the season! During one of our Mexican Spotted Owl habitat monitoring days, we sat down in the shade for lunch and noticed the branch right next to one of our crew, Joe’s, face was that of a hawthorn branch! We recently traveled back to the location to check and get an estimate of the population, and there were definitely at least several hundred!

Some other work we’ve recently been doing is helping out with seed collection of Goodding’s Onion (Allium gooddingii) for long-term storage, or seed banking. The seeds will first be sent to the Arboretum at Flagstaff in Arizona (which is a neat little place that does some cool botanical projects- definitely check them out!) and then to the National Laboratory for Genetic Resource Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado. Collection involves hiking out to known populations that are currently seeding, and collecting a specified percentage of the population depending on the area. We were able to collect a large number of seeds, which hopefully will help out with future research!

In other office news, we did gain a new crew member! Miss Malaxis (named after the orchid genus that we’ve been seeing a good amount of in our surveys) has been appearing often in front of our district office. There’s an ongoing debate on whether Miss Malaxis is a male or female, but the name will remain regardless. They’re extremely affectionate, sweet, and loves climbing the trees outside the office! If I wasn’t traveling so often and didn’t already have three cats at my home in Indiana, I for sure would just take Miss Malaxis with me!

Besides Miss Malaxis, this season has been full of other fun finds! I think my time here in the Lincoln was made 100x better by the fact that our entire crew was awesome. I definitely was concerned about coming out to the NM desert in a small military town, knowing no one, and wondering how I would fill up my free time after coming from an environment of living with 5-20 other people! As it turns out, the environmental field is a small world, and I actually knew people from ACE working in the same forest- besides that, our crew and the other seasonal crews (wildlife, trails, etc.) often got together outside of work for exercise, hanging out, and other fun times. It was great having a network of people to explore NM with, as most of the others were also from all over the country as well. I am extremely appreciative of how welcoming everyone was! NM itself is also a really neat state, with lots of opportunity for hiking and adventures (when it’s not too hot out!). I saw my first wild bear in the Carson NF, and I’ve now been to the tallest point in both AZ (Humphrey’s) and NM (Wheeler)- my next goal is doing a 14er in Colorado!

Working in the Lincoln has been a great first-time Forest Service experience, made all the better by our awesome botanist, Aurora, and other supervisors Jen and Pete, who we helped with their projects. I definitely want to say thanks for making this internship such a good time! As for my future plans, I’ve got many applications in with the Forest Service for next spring, and am definitely hoping to get another season in. While COVID has made doing grad school a concern for me (I really don’t want to do an essentially virtual master’s), I am in communication with a couple potential advisors- we’ll see where the next few months take me! When I leave here in a few days, I’ll be heading up north to Colorado for some solo hiking and camping, and then heading over to Flagstaff to visit friends and scope out NAU’s programs. In November I’ll probably be heading to IN, since it’s been almost a year since I’ve been back. I’ll be signing off here with a little photo dump of my last few weeks in NM! Thanks for reading!