After a week at work in Alaska and a wonderful week back home in Chicago at the CLM intern training I am back in Fairbanks, AK and officially settled in to my new home for the next 8 months.  The first few weeks of my job have consisted of mostly office work and trainings, and so I was quite excited when I finally got the opportunity to go out into the field the other week.  I shall recount that story here.

Twenty minutes before some fellow interns were to go out in the field to fix a water catchment system at a cabin and survey trails, I found out that I would be able to go with them.  Even though the weather was less than ideal, I jumped at the opportunity to get out to the field for a few days.  Despite the rush I was ecstatic to finally be getting out to the field—might have even leaped for joy at one point…

We ended up leaving Fairbanks around 5 for the foggy and damp 1 hour drive to the White Mountains. Upon arrival, however, we discovered that one of the interns had forgotten some essential items—namely water for himself and the garbage can lid that we were to use to replace the water catchment system.  So we ended up driving back to Fairbanks, buying a garbage can lid, then driving back to the White Mountains, arriving back at the trailhead and beginning a ~8 mile, ~4 hour hike at 8:30 PM.  Good thing about Alaska in the summer is you don’t have to worry about the sun setting on you.

At this point the rain had picked up and the weather was generally pretty miserable.  The trail was in poor shape—the majority of it was flooded and areas that had boardwalks or wooden planks were mostly rotted away or broken.  We began the hike, often sloshing through standing water, climbing up and down mountain ridges, over fields, through spruce forest, never able to see much more than 30 feet from us due to the fog and rain.  We forged onward and ended up at the cabin at around midnight, cold and drenched to the bone.  We used the dregs of a few small propane bottles to heat up the cabin a bit, changed out of our wet clothes, read by the Alaska midnight sun for a bit, then fell asleep.

In the morning that beautiful wizard Mother Nature sent bright rays of sunshine through the tiny window of our cabin.  We awoke to an absolutely gorgeous day and even more gorgeous view of the surrounding mountain side and foothills that had previously been entirely shrouded in clouds and fog.  Our spirits much higher, we fixed the water catchment system and enjoyed the views. I took a trip around the cabin area to check for invasive species (none found, yay!) and we started the long walk back.

No invasives, just lots of spruce.

The morning/early afternoon was absolutely gorgeous and afforded us some beautiful views that overcast conditions had hidden from sight the day before.

What previously looked like Mordor is now a pleasant hike.

Shortly, however, that evil sorceress Mother Nature sent from the other side of the ridge an ominous dark cloud that promptly settled above our head, let loose an enormous thunderclap and began to quite violently spit hail at us.  We plodded on. On our way back along the trail, we stopped to take GPS points and denote the condition of the trail, boardwalks, and wooden planks. One of these stops occurred when the rain had briefly subsided.  I counted 57 mosquitoes on just my fellow intern’s legs at one point in time during this stop.

In time we finished the hike, again sopping wet and chilled to the bone once we arrived at our destination, but content on having accomplished something.

Since this adventure I have been back in the office.  Currently I am working on getting up to speed on NISIMS (National Invasive Species Information Management System), and loading data onto Trimbles for an upcoming trip to Chicken, AK to inventory for invasives.  In addition, I am using GIS and some good ol’ fashioned maps to locate rare plant populations that are accessible by trail and/or river float for future monitoring trips.

It has been quite a time of excitement for us lately here in Oregon. The past several weeks have been chock full of seed collection opportunities and other adventures. To start off, last Thursday my partner, Mason, and I found ourselves being evacuated from the top of Upper Table Rock due to a fire that started at the base of the mountain and was creeping toward us. We quickly gathered as much Fool’s Onion (Tritileia hyacinthina) seed as we could before hiking down the two mile trail with a sheriff’s department officer and three other hikers that unfortunately had just reached the top before finding out they had to turn around and immediately hike back down. By the time we reached the bottom, the fire had nearly spread to the top of Upper Table Rock, not far from where I had been standing looking down on the fire just 45 minutes prior.

This week my mentor, Doug Kendig, my partner, Mason London, and I embarked on a week-long tour of nurseries, seed farms, and seed processing facilities. We departed Medford, Oregon on Monday and headed toward Bend ready to deliver nine collections to the Bend Seed Extractory. Sarah and Kayla gave us an in depth tour of their operation, including demonstrations of some of the seed cleaning equipment, seed viability tests, and more. It was a great experience to actually see where our seed goes, what happens to it when it leaves our hands, and who spends their time and energy managing our seed. We left with a great appreciation for everything Sarah and Kayla do at the Bend Seed Extractory.

From there we headed north toward the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. After a short stop to examine the impressive exposed rock revealing millions of years of natural history, we continued our journey north. We later stopped at a quaint little town called Fossil, Oregon. While there, of course, we searched for fossils. There is a public fossil digging area behind Fossil High School. If anyone is ever passing through the area, I recommend the stop. Fossils that are anywhere between a million to thirty million years old can be found in the area.

We stopped for the night along the Columbia River before pressing on the next morning toward Moses Lake, WA, our northern most destination. Our first stop of the day Tuesday was at BFI Native Seed near Warden, Washington. BFI is a native seed increase farm that grows out source-verified grass and forb seed. It was an incredibly impressive and professional operation. Plants from all sorts of different biotypes were represented on this ~1700 acre farm. It was an opportunity to see how individuals of the same species that have become adapted to very different environments share different phenotypes. Seeing these very different expressions of the same species highlighted some of the difficulties of identifying forbs and grasses that we had encountered in the field.

After leaving BFI Native Seed we made a stop at Rainier Seed LLC, another seed growing operation that grows various sourced seed including natives. This farm consists of ~5000 acres in total, including all contracted farming operations tied to the company. We were lead through a variety of fields of different flowering and seeding plants that would soon be harvested and cleaned.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, June 25) we will be attending a restoration tour led by the owner of BFI Native Seed to see how these native plant seeds are used in restoration projects and what the final result can look like. We are quite excited to complete this ever expanding perspective of the native seed network by seeing examples of the seed actually in use for conservation or restoration purposes.

There is still a lot of touring and driving left before we make it back home to Medford on Friday. After leaving the Moses Lake area in Washington, we will be making our way to the Willamette Valley area in Oregon to stop by the Plant Materials Center in Corvallis, as well as possibly other seed farms or native plant nurseries along the way.

All in all it has been a very informative, interesting, and exciting couple of weeks for the Rogue Valley crew! If any of you have a chance to stop by the Bend Seed Extractory, I highly suggest it, as it really helped me to understand the greater system that we are apart of and how I can help make their jobs easier by making simple adjustments to my seed collecting techniques.

I hope everyone out there is doing well.

The stages from collection to cleaned seed

Seed cleaning demo

Searching for fossils in Fossil

Plant plugs and greenhouse at BFI Native Seed

Fields of Oregon Sunshine at BFI Native Seed

Finished clean seed

Seed processing equipment at Bend Seed Extractory

Sunday June 22nd, 2014- I turn 24 years old.

My life has changed more in these last two weeks of my 23rd year than they have in the past 200 before them. All the familiar comforts of home have been stripped away and replaced with a new bed, a new job, and a part of the country unlike any I have ever experienced. After leaving the Internship Workshop in Chicago, my mind was filled with questions and expectations about my new situation. After a week here, some of those questions have been answered, but most of them still remain. I have found my co-workers to be kind and helpful and my living situation comfortable, but exactly what it is I’m going to be doing here still seems to be up in the air. I have met with a number of my neighbors, but between moving in and starting work I haven’t had much time to really get to know anybody here in town. There is so much going on, it’s hard to keep up with it all.

But all these new experiences seem to pale beside the backdrop against which they take place. I am surrounded, at all times, by such… volume. To my immediate east looms Cedar Mountain and the Hurricane Cliffs, so close they make you crane your neck upward in search of the sky. North, south and west roll on for mile after mile after mile. When talking about the American West, my dad is fond of saying, “There’s a lot of there out there.”  I think I understand what he was talking about now. I can see Cedar Valley- the entire Cedar Valley- unfolding before me for forty miles or more, reaching to the horizon where it explodes upwards into the Wah Wah Mountains. Locals tell me that I’ll get used to the view before long, but for now I have learned to live with the sense of astonishment I feel every time I lift my eyes. Every other place I have lived suddenly seems so much smaller, and I wonder if I will find myself feeling cramped when I return to these places. I have been profoundly touched by this landscape, and the more I learn about it and its inhabitants, the more enchanted I become.

Nothing remains now but to learn as much as I can.

Last week the Carson City botany crew had the opportunity to work at the Pyramid Lake Youth Camp, an environmental education summer camp sponsored by the Piaute tribe. Dean lead lessons on vegetation mapping, traditional games, and native stars. Our role was to lead small groups on an exploration of the Hardscrabble Creek area they had just mapped in the classroom. I worked with two motivated young women with big plans for their futures. After a bit of wandering and plant talk, one asked what the colorful stuff all over the rocks was and I had the joy of explaining to a rapt audience the magic of lichen. “I’ve always wondered what that was, and now I know!” The chance to give someone an Ah Ha moment such as that is a rare and beautiful thing.

Carson City BLM

Camping near Sand Mountain during an SOS collection trip.

These past few weeks have been a learning experience! I’ve picked up a bunch of new tricks in GIS and can even navigate the maze of office cubicles! I also got to make some fire maps for dispatch. The workshop was a refreshing change of pace and it was great meeting so many of you! I look forward to continuing on my learning journey!

The mountains are a special place when the beauty of the sagebrush plains has somewhat faded and the warm summer days begin to move in. Retreating to the higher elevations of the mountains is a wonderful way to relive the recent memories of spring in the foothills. Some species of plants are similar to those of the foothills, like Purshia tridentata, however they are shorter in stature and just beginning to bloom in the end of June. The twisted and contorted forms of the Sierra Lodgepole PIne (Pinus contorta var. murrayana) stand like sentinels on the mountain top weathering the harsh winds and storms of all the High Country’s seasons. The harsh conditions and short growing season makes the pondering soul wander how the plants and animals of these habitats and environments endure the rigors of the year.

This past weekend I was able to hike one of the higher peaks on the eastern front of the Sierra Nevada Mtns: Mt. Rose. The snow at the top has just recently come off within the past few weeks and allowed many excited and outdoorsy folks to hike the beautiful 9.8 mile trail and summit Mt. Rose. Mt. Rose is around 10, 600′ tall and the last several hundred feet is alpine environment; one of my absolute favorites when considering plants! At the beginning of the trail and most of the way to the top of the mountain, you are hiking through Sierra Lodgepole PIne forest type. This is a beautiful tree and its forest provides habitat for many interesting and wonderful species of plants. There are many wildflowers that call the higher elevations of the mountains home and each one has a special beauty unique to itself. One attractive specimen was Ipomopsis aggregata and it has long, red tubular flowers that are quite showy. Another wonderful and densely hairy species growing in the forest was Packera cana. Ribes montigenum was also blooming and is a very nice gooseberry species of the higher mountains. Carex sp. were everywhere, especially in the Mt. Rose meadows area where Carex scopulorum var. bracteosa was growing. This is a truly beautiful sedge species and to be able to find it in such a floriferous meadow in the High Sierra was a rewarding experience for sure.

Once into the alpine habitat near Mt. Rose summit the eyes were pleasantly rewarded with small gifts of wonderful species of alpine plants growing in the crags of the rocks. So many different ones are able to call this harsh environment home and cope with the difficult weather in interesting ways. A majority of the plants have very hairy or pubescent leaves, helping to decrease transpiration and build up a thick humidity layer around the leaf surface. Other plants have strongly reduced leave surface area or their leaves are shiny and very thick. Several different plant species seen while traipsing in the alpine included: Ipomopsis congesta, Hulsea algida, Polemonium pulcherrimum, Eriogonum rosense (Mt. Rose Buckwheat!!), Penstemon davidsonii, Streptanthus cordatus, Phlox condensata, Draba densifolia and Ranunculus eschscholtzii. 

These plants seemed to shout for joy as they raised their flowers towards the heavens in hues of color that could only cause one to stop and consider their intricacies in solemn amazement! They seem to live a life remote from most all people; even those who climb the mountain will easily overlook them unless they are aware of the tiny gifts that are beneath their wandering eyes. I am thankful to have seen these plants who dwell in the high country  and ponder the special place they have in the environment. Two friends I was able to see after leaving the summit were very interesting indeed: Draba asterophora and Salix petrophila!!

Carex scopulorum var. bracteosa

Ribes montigenum

Penstemon davidsonii

Streptanthus cordatus

Polemonium pulcherrimum

Draba asterophora – Lake Tahoe Draba!

“It is for all of us to remember that the earth does not belong to us. We belong to it. At best, we are entrusted with a few brief years of life to relish the splendours about us. We are but an infinitesimal fragment of a staggering universe. It behooves us to cherish well those natural liberties entrusted to our care. The humble knowledge that we have no claim upon them other than the honor of passing them on in at least as fine a form as we found them should lend honesty dignity to our efforts on their behalf.” – W. Phillip Keller

Farewell my friends,

Ethan

BLM CCDO

Hello Interns,

Not much is new with me.  I recently took some time off to pursue other interests (wildland fire related), but now I am back at it at the Cosumnes River Preserve.  I am still working on a NEPA/CEQA combination document for a restoration project I am responsible for.  We are creating habitat for the endangered (federally and state listed) California Central Valley-endemic giant garter snake.  These permits are incredibly tedious and time consuming documents to write.  Did I mention how massive they are?  Use your imagination.  You might think that projects designed to benefit native plant and animal species (restorations) would require less federal and state permits than say, (evil) development projects.  This is not the case.  Both types of projects require permits galore, and from a permit standpoint, both are fairly similar.  Every permit requires its own unique vocabulary.  Tomato, tomato- right? WRONG! Good times.

I enjoy when one of the other CLM interns at our field office invites me for a glorious field day of seed collection.

Cheers folks-

Devil’s Peak

I just spent the past week along the Nabesna road. This is one of two roads that snakes itself into the park and it is located about an hour and a half north of the visitor center. My work consisted of driving along the road and pulling off at all of the parking areas and trail-head along the road and doing surveys of the invasive plants. When we find invasives we pull them up if it is manageable, there are some cases where there are just too many of a plant to be able to control it properly. We ended up being able to hit all of the areas along the 48 miles road and pulled about 75 lbs of invasive plants.

This was at 12:07am after the sunset. It stays like dusk then until about 3am.

This past Sunday was also the summer solstice which means the longest day of the year.  Never having been to Alaska was not aware of the celebration solstice can sometimes entail. Everyone was wishing me a happy solstice and there were many activities in the towns close nearby, like local bands playing and free food. Mainly the events are meant to hang out with friends while you all wait to watch the sun set, for my area that time was 11:36pm.

Collecting monitoring points of invasive species that were found along the road

As for this week, I will be helping the park’s fishery biologist with a fish survey in Grizzly Lake. I get to take my first float plane ride to the site and will be spending my time on the water collecting, tagging, and taking samples from the fish. I am really excited to get this opportunity to help out, and I am sure it will be a lot of fun.

Hey everyone,

Well, a lot has happened since my last post! There’s been fieldwork and new sites, weekend adventures and the Chicago workshop, where I met fellow interns and participated in seminars.

I’d never been to the Midwest, so the workshop week was full of fun experiences for me. One of the first things I noticed was that northern Illinois reminds me a lot of the northeast, with its lush, green forests full of trees and plants familiar to me.

The same trees I climbed as a child, the same forests I built forts in, ran through trying to spot wildlife and pretend I was an explorer roughing it through the wilderness and living in nature alone.That was really neat, like a quick taste of home. The gardens in the Chicago Botanic Garden were beautiful, with a place for everyone to enjoy. In between activities and seminars, I liked walking around and getting lost, taking way too many photos and geeking out on the plants. Watching other visitors, there were people of all ages—elderly couples, children, younger people, it seemed like they all found a place in here. Whether it was sitting by a bubbling fountain, walking through the dwarf shrub gardens or my personal favorite, the vegetable gardens and English wall gardens, everyone had that look of contented enjoyment. Perhaps I am projecting myself a tiny bit, but I distinctly remember walking by a pair of older women chatting animatedly on a bench, purses abandoned and gesticulating wildly. They caught my attention because they reminded me of the elderly ladies in Argentina during the afternoon siesta, exchanging gossip from across their verandas or out on the plaza. Giggling like schoolgirls, their banter can always be heard over the silence of sleepy afternoon as they happily share information and camaraderie. I also noticed people walked slower in gardens, like all the needs to rush about and make it to one place or another did not matter within the confines of the sculpted hedges and rose bushes. I liked that. Sometimes I wish people were more like that outside in the real world, journey-lovers versus destination seekers. It’s something I think all of us forget from time to time and I try to incorporate in my own life. Stop and smell those flowers! 🙂

Anyway, besides the garden, I liked meeting my peers, hearing about their work and attending the lectures. My favorites were definitely the population genetics lecture, a topic I find fascinating, especially in plant ecology, and Dean Tonenna’s talk on Numa culture and history. I love learning about new cultures and the artifacts he brought were beautiful. So unique to a people and each basket or jug had a story.

It was interesting how some interns had been at their offices as long as I had, while others had just started a week ago. I tried putting myself in their shoes, remembering what it was to have finished my first week and thought about what I’d like to accomplish now that I’m about two months in. I certainly want to explore Idaho a bit more and learn more of the alpine forbs that we may encounter soon. I also realized that I am not as quick to identify trees in the northwest as I would like (mostly because we don’t encounter them regularly), so I checked out a guide book, which I think will be handy to learn from in case we come across more trees. Haha, and also simply because I like trees.

But going back to enjoying the journey and maintaining enthusiasm for simple pleasures, before going to Chicago, my crew and I bade farewell to our Diamond A campsite. I was surprised at the little tinge of sadness I felt as I saw our Cottonwood campsite shrink in the rearview mirror.  The Diamond A was a rugged allotment, that’s for sure. We had cold, rainy days when the thunderclouds seemed to roll out of nowhere and biting winds that made you want to just snuggle deeper into your sleeping bag.  There were muddy roads and long drives to get out into our sites. But the snowcapped mountains, the new forbs and thrill of being out there in the wilderness were beyond all of that. I loved the warm glow of the sun on my cheek when it managed to break through the grey sky and seep down through the ridges of the rocky canyons. The colors on the cliff rocks and the lighting as the sun lowered in the horizon…indescribable.

Coming back to the camp at the end of the long day, I’m sure it meant different things for everyone. For me, seeing our clunky white trailer, the fire pit and the picnic table in our campsite clearing—I had the sense that I was being welcomed home. Welcome to unpack our gear, change clothes and settle down to id plants, chat with my crew mates or sit by the Bruneau River to watch it roll by. To step back from our narrow focus of the task at hand (our vegetation monitoring) and drink in the vast mountains and landscapes unperturbed by the urban sprawl less than three hours away, feeling the solitary wilderness we were living in.

Even after a long day, I enjoyed an evening walk down the twisted canyon road away from the campsite to marvel at all the rock formations and reflect on the day. I had a special spot further down the road tucked under some junipers, where a twisted branch provided a perfect spot to for a girl to curl up and listen to the river and the birds. As the horizon darkened, the star-filled night and moon caught high up in the cliffs made me feel incredibly small, yet thankful to be a part of the moment.

I’ve always been amazed at how quickly one phase of life can unfold into another and our bodies and minds shift with it. I suppose it’s a testament of the human ability to adapt and hold on to memories of people and places we care about as we move along on this earth. This week we are headed to a new camping site in a sheep corral, which will be a mostly grassy area with—you guessed it—sheep. Our trailer is already there and I’m excited that it will be our new home site. I have yet to live in grassy wide-open area, so can’t wait to experience that. I am picturing this vast expanse of crested grasses rippling in the howling wind and an endless sky of rolling clouds and beautiful starry nights. But then again, that is classic Maria Paula romanticized imagination. Anyway, I’m excited for our new home and adventures!

‘Til next time!!

Maria Paula

Jarbidge Field Office

Twin Falls, ID