It was the most stupendous week for the Carson City Sierra Front intern team. We finished all of our fire monitoring fieldwork. As one of the most recent interns, I am fairly fresh when it comes to experience with fire monitoring. I feel comfortable doing them now, but it was still sad to see them go. The most challenging part of being a new intern is going through the process of learning to recognize all the plants by their full Latin names. While I remember at least the genus, or a 4-letter code for most of the plants we see, if we go to a new area with different diversity, I am fairly challenged when it comes to naming plants. This has made fire monitoring difficult because we have to shout out names of perennials and identify all the plants in our nested square meter area.

Our last fire job was the coolest of all. The standard routine for monitoring a fire is to first find the plot using various maps and a GPS, and then collect and record data. This week, we broke our routine for the first time by setting up two plots in a more recently burned region. When setting up the fire plots, we had to take into account the aspect of the slope, so that the slope was facing east or west, and we had to make sure the area was consistent in slope, as well as a few other variables. We ended up going back and forth between two less than ideal areas looking for the best place to set a center point for the transect that would skew our data the least. It was challenging to find locations that would satisfy the conditions required to create transect lines, however it sure beats having to find a foot high piece of rebar in a field of Sisymbrium altissimum; much along the lines of finding a needle in a haystack.

(Where is the rebar? Here is a fire plot that we had to find in the sea of Sisymbrium)

On our final plot, Mary, the other intern who joined the CLM intern team at the same time, and I collected perennial density, and nested density of the plants along one transect line. This was rewarding in two ways. First, it showed me how much we have progressed in being able to identify plants, as only a few plants stumped us. It was enjoyable for me to feel that I had learned enough to carry my own weight in terms of fire monitoring and plant identification. Second, I felt that it was a larger milestone in terms of having a more equal knowledge of the area as the other interns who had been doing it for longer. It was almost a graduation of sorts into being a full-fledged team member.

Fall is slowly making its way here in southern Oregon. The leaves are changing and it’s even raining right this second. The field work is still roughly the same for me. I’ve been inspecting quarries on the far reaches of the district and mining operations also. Some quarries are so old, they’ve begun to reclaim themselves and you can barely tell it was even a quarry at one time, while others are still being actively used for road maintenance. Other than inspections, I’ve been working on GIS analysis for the Resource Management Plan for western Oregon. This includes queries of quarry data, ancient and present mining claim data, and many areas of critical environmental concern (ACECs). Oregon does have some interesting mineral potential due to its complex geology. Here are some pictures of my recent field travels.

Whisky Creek overlook above the Wild and Scenic Rogue River

Mt. Bolivar – The highest peak in the Coast Range

A pretty old stamp mill at a mine site

An open adit found during a recent mine inspection

Cheers,

Morgan – BLM Medford

Over the last couple of weeks I have visited 5 separate lakes in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, the purpose of these visits was to conduct surveys for Elodea canadensis. Elodea is a commonly used aquarium plant and is used in many school science lab settings as its leaves are very thin and cells within the plant are easy to view with a microscope. It is thought elodea was originally introduced to lakes in Alaska through dumping of aquariums into lakes. Elodea is capable of asexually reproducing from small cuttings, and due to its brittle nature, even very small parts that break off from the mother plant are able to establish themselves. Float planes transporting the plant on rudders from infested lakes to clean lakes is a growing concern.

Elodea can quickly overtake lakes, blanketing the sun from reaching over native aquatic plants. The entire ecosystem of infested lakes can be greatly impacted in a relatively short period of time. Large changes in aquatic habitat can then create problems for fish species that are relied upon by many people, such as Alaskan salmon.

To ensure Elodea does not enter waterways within the park, we have begun to conduct surveys of lake commonly visited by float planes. This year we went to Grizzly Lake, Copper Lake, Tolsona Lake, Long Lake, and Twin Lakes. Luckily no Elodea specimens were found.

Well…My internship comes to an end in two weeks. I served my five months, then a two month extension at a neighboring BLM office and now in two weeks, I am released of my service. This summer has been an exciting and rewarding experience full of accomplishments and lessons. It seems like so long ago when I first came out here. There was snow on the ground and the morning temperatures were in the teens, then when summer hit the temperature pushed 100 degrees for days at a time and the dryness of the air seemed to suck the moisture right out of my body. Now as fall begins to set in, I have mornings in the low 40s and afternoons in the mid 80s.

It has become very hard to stay focused. My fiancee and I got a new house in Oregon where she will be starting her PhD. I want very much to go join her and start this new stage of life, but I have obligations to finish the work here. I dont mean to sound ungrateful, I think most people would feel similar in this situation. The important thing is that I come into work early, get my work done, and stay positive about what I to do.

I feel like a different person than when I got here. At the beginning of this internship, I left my home and family knowing that before my work was done, I would have a new home in Oregon. In addition to the experiences and character development I have attained in my internship, I have also said goodbye to my life in Ohio. Many of my friends…will I ever see them again? Some I am sure, but others who can say. I feel like while out here, I stepped out of a world of safety and security and into a world of responsibility. While I am ready for it, I have to wait a little longer while I finish this work.

Keep smiling and laughing, stay positive, and remember, you cant go back, once a time passes it is gone so enjoy it and give whatever you are doing your all because afterwards you can only look back at what you did.

Hello CLM folks, I am going to talk a little bit about what we were doing during the past month in the Provo Shrub Sciences Laboratory. Since my first post, I have talked every time about our smell experiments using the e-nose.  Now, after more than 9 months, we finally took a break from Big Sagebrush smells to continue with our experiments using imageJ applied to Big Sagebrush subspecies differentiation. We are still producing data information, but apparently the imageJ seams to be a good way to analyze some physical characteristics of Sagebrush. Additionally, we starting to collaborate with the USGS to analyze some Sagebrush samples using cytometry. There is a lot of desktop work, but eventually in the next week we will be working outside in the field collecting Sagebrush volatile again. We are two weeks from the SER Regional Conference in Redmond, Oregon, which makes me feel a little bit anxious. As always said in my previous posts, my mentor is teaching me many things, but most important to me, he is inviting me to go forward and learn and explore new things.

Thank you all CLM staff for your support.

Hector

Provo, UT

USDA-Forest Service RMRS, Shrub Sciences Laboratory

With only two weeks left in Kremmling, my internship is winding down. It has been an incredible time here and I am quite grateful to have had the opportunity to work here in Colorado.

Since my last post, temperatures have been dropping and the defrost button has become a morning routine. The trees are changing here to a beautiful golden yellow. I do miss the spectacular colors of upstate New York and the Adirondack Mountains, but I’ll give Colorado credit; the golden Aspen contrast with the evergreen is quite the sight as well. Fall here in Colorado meant it was time for a road trip to Moab to see Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. It was still quite hot, but totally worth the trip. Besides that, I travelled down to Montrose to work with Carol Dawson and her CLM intern for a week doing more rare plant monitoring on Eriogonum pelinophilum.

As this internship winds down, I have had time to reflect on the summer and my life trajectory. Coming into this summer I had experience in the NPS and thought I wanted to work as an Ecologist for the NPS. This summer I gained some more perspective on what it might be like to work for the Feds. After seeing how things are run and the amount of science that is done in the BLM, I’m not so sure it is what I want to end up doing. That’s not to say that I didn’t have an amazing internship though. I learned a whole lot about western plants, got to explore beautiful Colorado, and gained tons of valuable experience in several different fields. I recieved valuable training as well which will only help with other jobs in the future. I ended up gaining experience monitoring riparian areas, grasslands, and rare plants. I also spent a lot of time working the GPS and mapping out noxious weeds sites and spring/wells for grazing. One of the best parts of the internship was the fact that I was given so much freedom by my mentor. He really allowed me to take control and go out by myself most days. It’s nice to be given responsibility and be trusted to get things done. Another great part of the internship was the fact that I was able to tag along with state botanist Carol Dawson and her CLM interns to conduct rare plant surveys. The work they were doing was more of what I was looking to get experience in, and something I could see myself doing in the future.

With that said, I don’t think I could have had a better place to work. Kremmling may be small, but it is surrounded by ski towns and wilderness areas in all directions. The staff here at the office is relatively young, so we’re always having a good time in and out of the office. It also helps having 11 seasonals living at the bunkhouse. Not only are the people and the location a plus, but my job entailed riding UTV/ATVs up mountain sides and camping/rafting on the Colorado River. I had great co-workers, a cool mentor, and beautiful scenery – I think I got pretty lucky this summer.

I am heading back to New York for 2 months just in time for the Fall foliage to see my family and talk to some professors about graduate school. From there I will be heading back to Colorado to work at Keystone resort as a ski instructor and hopefully come back to Kremmling for a few months next summer before I head to graduate school. We will see what the future brings, but I am positive that this internship will play a big role in what my future holds.

Trip to Canyonlands NP

Canyonlands

Canyonlands

Spring Creek MIMS hit hard by cattle

Grassland Utilization Surveys (line transect)

MIMS at Govt Creek

Well inventory

Spraying Black Henbane(Hyoscyamus niger)

Within the stillness of a lake the surrounding hills can be clearly defining resulting in picturesque seed collecting. When the beauty around you is magnified within the moments of working, it reminds you that there are few jobs that provided such breath taking views. The lake picture is Walker Lake.  It is known for being dirty and rather nasty because it was used as target practice for missiles. In fact, as the water level lowers missiles are uncovered and have to be removed. While we were collecting at this undesirable lake we got to see the beauty within the ugliness.

Beauty found in the stillness.

On another seed collecting adventure within a riparian area I was privy to many delights. The first involved seeing a frog jumping around amongst that dense foliage of Carex and Juncus.

As we traveled to another riparian site the butterflies were out enjoying themselves on a pair of thistles. Within that same area a caterpillar was discovered munching on some leaves.

A pair of thistles with a pair of butterflies

Hungry caterpillar munching on a leaf.

Again a delightful beauty was found within this riparian area, a pregnant Praying Mantis. Her engorged abdomen displayed be labored breathing.

Beautiful pregnant mantis

After a morning full of fire monitoring, a group of us went seed scouting while the other group went back to the office. I was in the seed scouting group and to my surprise we stumbled upon something odd. A random cellar door in literally the middle of nowhere. Why is this cellar here? All sorts of stories have begun to form in my mind as to what the purpose of this cellar could be. In one story it the secret entrance to an underground laboratory where undesirable experiments take place.

What does this door lead?

These are just a few of the delightful things that I have been able to discover within the Nevada wilderness.

Greetings!

Now that our Emergency Stabilization and Rehabilitation (ESR) plan has been submitted, we’ve moved right along and started writing an Environmental Analysis (EA) for the Buzzard Complex fires!

My main duties, as per usual, are building models to run reports and then making the maps for the Saddle Draw Fire portion of the plan.

One main skill I have gotten from this internship has been becoming comfortable in Model Builder. I had used it a few times in the past, but never on a regular basis. When you are running the same processes over and over again, it saves so much time if you can just go into the model, make a few changes, and run it again. Also, if someone wants to figure out how you came up with certain numbers, they can look at your models and understand what you did.

Beautiful Model

In addition to making these final products, I’ve also cleaned up the file structure which is pretty complex.  Hopefully every folder now is named so that an outsider can figure out what it contains, and if not, I also went through and created a document that has a short description of the contents of each folder in the Buzzard Complex ESR folder (It’s about 3 pages long…).

I see many of you are wrapping up your internships and I wish you all the best of luck!!!  I’m still around through December and I’m excited to see what fall is like out here in the high desert!!!

As my last few days approach I am adding all of the finishing touches to my internship. It is not as exciting as being in the field exploring new areas and finding all sorts of treasure but it is an adventure in its own. Finishing up and putting together reports at the end of the year is just as important as gathering the data itself.

The most recent project that I have been working on is making herbarium vouchers for the local herbarium, the Oregon State University herbarium, and the Smithsonian herbarium. Some of these do not require being glued down, but a good portion of them do. This is one sticky job!

Looking back on the season brings back good memories. One major highlight being a thistle chop. It required two days of floating down the Deschutes River in a boat and camping all while uprooting Scotch thistle (Onopordum acanthium). Another great adventure was traveling by UTV to a sage grouse Habitat Assessment Framework (HAF) site. I drove the truck and trailer to the unloading site, then got to drive the UTV to and from our destination.

My second year as a CLM intern was just as exciting and rewarding as the first. I was able to live in a new area, work on new projects, make new friends, and gain new skills and qualities to add to my resume. Overall I had a great time and made lasting memories in Prineville.

Where have the last five months gone? It’s my last day at the BLM in Vernal and it’s strange to think I probably won’t ever be back here. Well, in this office, that is. The way it stands right now, I’m going to hang around Vernal until I find a permanent job or I’m accepted to a graduate school program.

That sentence itself demonstrates how much my mindset has changed over the past five months. My original intention for this internship was to gain experience that would enable me to land a seasonal GS-5 position next field season. After that, I had a vague plan of working up the seasonal ladder before landing a full-time, permanent position with the federal government. I worked as a Biological Science Technician (GS-0404-04) for the USGS in South Dakota a couple years ago and since then, I’ve had tunnel vision about working for the feds.

As I stated above, though, that’s no longer my plan. As much as I would love to continue to living a transient life, working as a seasonal for the government, I won’t. Part of it is my personal family situation. The largest part, though, is that I don’t want to. I’ve learned so much during this internship and I’ve definitely felt challenged, but I plateaued around the halfway point. I’ve enjoyed participating in Seeds of Success and helping the weed crew tackle invasives, but I need more challenges. I can bring so much more to the table if given the chance. And it seems the fastest way to be given a chance is to get my Master’s. It’s always been my intention to do so, but this internship has just spurred me to expedite the process.

This internship has also given me more perspective on working for the federal government and I gotta admit, it’s not my dream any more. Don’t get me wrong, I would still work for the government if given the chance. After working in this office, I’ve become more familiar with positions I could qualify for and I’ve made some professional connections so my odds are better. I’ve experienced the downsides to it, though, and I’ve let go of my idolization. My internship has grounded me and forced me to become more realistic. And I’m grateful for it. I’ve been able to use the tools provided by the program to expand my job search to include other entities besides the federal government.

To be clear, I’ve definitely enjoyed this internship! I would (and will) highly recommend it! This has been my first position that’s actually forced me to use a dichotomous key to (sometimes laboriously) key out a species. I’ve learned to identify so many plants, but have also realized that I’ll never know all of them. And while I should be confident in my identification, I should never be afraid to check myself and admit if I’m wrong.

I’ve never actively protested herbicide application to control invasive plants, but I worked in an environmental chemistry lab so sometimes it’s difficult for me to think about where all those chemicals could be leaching. After walking through stands of Russian olive and swaths of teasel, though, I’ve realized that a lot of the time, herbicide application is the only way to control infestations.

Since I’ll be working odd jobs until my next career move, I’ve definitely appreciated the normal hours (and the pay) of the internship. One downside, though, is the copious amounts of driving necessary to cover this area. I’m sure other interns also experienced this, but I am so over driving 2+ hours just to get to a site. I would rather stay closer to the office and hike around, but I realize that’s rather unrealistic in the West.

I’m really happy that I landed a position in Utah as I’ve always been enamored with this state. In and outside of work, I’ve seen a lot of cool things and I’m very grateful for that. I feel like I can move on to other states now and feel content with my Utah experience. As for Vernal itself, however, I haven’t fallen in love with it. I’ve discovered some gems, but in general the town seems geared toward fast food, big trucks, oil and gas, and church – none of which is my scene. After this, I’m aiming to live in a college town again, where I hope I’ll be around more like-minded people.

This has been an amazing experience and I’m immensely grateful to all those who helped me apply for an internship and make the most of it. A big thank you to Nadia, Tim, Amy, Jessi, Krissa, and Rebecca!

Stay classy, fellow interns.

-Dani

BLM

Vernal, UT

“The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”

II John Muir II

The Pink Dino – my favorite landmark in Vernal.