My internship would have been over at the end of this week.  I would have to leave my trusty white truck, Floyd, my awesome computer space way in the back by the window, and all the new people I have befriended.  My little prison cell sized trailer would have to be returned to the man who lent it to me and the Chinese restaurant downtown would lose all the income I provide for them.  The Warner Mountains would become memories and their rocky peaks would erode with time leaving only the sand of what I had once known.

BUT…

have worked hard during my time here at the Alturas BLM and I have made friends.  I have shown respect for my superiors and never passed up an opportunity to get new experiences.  As my time here dwindled, I had to make a decision on whether or not to work at getting extended or moving on to the next experience.  Though I hesitated at first, I did ask for an extension, and wouldn’t you know it…I got one!

Networking has always been both a priority and a way of life for me.  My mentor did not have the funds to keep me on any longer, but I have spent time with the supervisors of the nearby BLM offices.  The wildlife biologist atI the Surprise Valley BLM office and I have worked together multiple times and had once asked me if I was going to stick around.  I told him I wanted to and his reply was “I will keep that in mind.”  When my own supervisor could not keep me, I asked if she could talk to Surprise Valley.  Within 15 minutes I had an answer…the answer I wanted to hear.

Everything you do is important to your character.  All you can do is strengthen your weaknesses and invest in your strengths.  I am not the most knowledgeable intern, but I know how to communicate and I know how to listen.  I am not the most assertive, but I know how to work and I know how to compromise.  The more in-touch you become with your own characteristics, the more clearly you can see how you fit in, how you can become an asset to yourself and those around you.

My experience here at the BLM has been a very individual experience.  I am responsible for much of my day to day planning and often there is not a crew out there telling me on the bad days that we just need to finish this much or pointing out the good aspects of the day.  In many ways it is more an exercise in responsibility and maturity.  Though my plant ID for this area of the country has progressed much slower than I would have liked, my confidence in making judgement calls and trusting my instincts has grown considerably.  In getting extended, I feel as though my hard work payed off in more than a good word or reference letter.  The merit of my actions compelled a separate office to take me on and that makes me feel good.

Hello! Greetings from Montrose, CO one last time…

So I have good and bad news. The good news is that I got accepted into grad school! (My poor advisor, he has no idea what he’s gotten himself into by accepting me into his lab…) I’ll be attending the University of Northern Colorado where I will be doing conservation genetic work on the DeBeque Phacelia (only the cutest endagered plant in the history of the world).

DeBeque Phacelia

See!? See how cute it is?? It’s as big as that quater!

Aaaaaand the bad news.. I’ll be leaving my internship and the beautiful town of Montrose far too soon. 🙁

Before I get to the mopey part where I write about how sad I am that I’m leaving I’ll update you real quick on what I’ve been doing. Let’s see…since I last wrote I:

+ Attempted to hike into a magical and mysterious place called “Rose Creek” to do owl surveys with my mentor and the wildlife biologist..alas, the best laid plans fall apart and we never hiked further then the Forest Service boundary (I could go into all the details but I think it deserves more then one blog post)…Rose Creek eluded us and I guess we’re waiting until early next spring before we try again (and by “we” I do mean “them” because I’ll be in Greeley doing the school thing).

+ Attempted to do bat surveys in Tabeguache (Tab-i-watch) Creek and Mesa Creek in the west end. First night in Tabeguache – a million bats flyin’ around, but none dumb enought to fly into the net. (Also, an absolutely perfect night for star gazing, saw about five shooting stars.) Second night in Mesa Creek – harassed by a very bold bear cub (I have a pic of him but it’s on my personal camera, sorry guys!) and forced to break down camp in the dark and move before we could really get started (we would’ve caught bats too, one almost flew into the net as we were taking them down). Alas. The best plans fall apart.

+ Went out with the hydrologist for a few days to do water quality sampling and macroinvertebrate surveys in the west end. Some of the best days ever. Just got to play in the water!

+ Aaaaaand, last but not least, I just finished entering my last HAF data sheet EVERRRRRRR!!! into the computer. 🙂 Big day and I feel very accomplished.

SO that’s that, just about two weeks left here and I’m not sure what the game plan is, though there are rumors that I’ll be electroshocking fish (!) in the west end!

Now time to get a bit mopey..this is my second season in Montrose and it really feels like home now. I work with/for the BEST people ever, and they have really pushed me to be a better biologist/botanist – they challenge and encourage me and were really the impetus for me applying and getting into grad school. I’m not sure I would’ve had the guts to do it without the kick in the butt these people (especially my mentor, Ken) gave me. And along those lines, dear everyone at the CBG – keep up the good work!! Without this intership I’d probably still be a telemarketer/liftie in Gunnison/Crested Butte instead of on my way to being a professional botanist (finger’s crossed anyway). Really, thanks so much for this program and all that y’all do.

And since I’ll be leaving soon I’ve been enjoying the mountains (and my friends) here like crazy before I leave and am stuck on the soul-crushing front range of Colorado (hmm, I’m sure it’s not that bad). I’m proud to say that last Sunday I accomplished a goal I set for myself last summer but was unable to accomplish due to vehicle constraints.. I climbed Mount Sneffels (the silliest sounding 14er in all the state, and one of the most recognizable peaks in Colorado)!!! It was my 6th 14er, and my first one since college. I will now proudly post some pictures of the expereince.

On my way up – I’m on the right looking so ridiculously happy it hurts.

On top of Sneffels – 14,157 ft – with one of the coolest gal pals I know!

The best hiking buddies ever!

I can’t believe that I’m leaving – and so soon! I’m going to miss Montrose so much but I’m looking forward to all the new and exciting things grad school has to offer!

Officailly signing off on my last CBG Internship blog ever –

Brandee Wills
Uncompahgre Field Office – BLM
Montrose, CO

I recently finished my internship with the USGS in the Mojave Desert. My final weeks were spent doing fieldwork at the Eureka Dunes in Death Valley National Park, and wrapping up data entry and analyzing the data we (my fellow interns and I) collected throughout our internship. As we tried to piece together our results into a coherent narrative of the workings of desert restoration, I frequently thought about my experience there and what I would take away from my time in the southwest.

In our internship, we worked on several projects all geared toward understanding the effect of restoration techniques in the Mojave Desert, often for desert tortoise habitat. Because we worked in several areas across four states, we were exposed to the extremes of the Mojave and the challenges to restoration in different areas. I learned about post-fire restoration techniques and monitored their effectiveness, examined the effects of fire on habitat suitability for desert tortoises, and studied the effect of source material on successful plant restoration. Throughout all of this fieldwork, I gained experience using dichotomous keys for plant ID, learned several sampling methods, and learned about the intricacies of a delicate ecosystem – all things I hoped I would learn at the beginning of my internship.

Additionally, I had the opportunity to work in a unique and beautiful part of the Mojave that is the Eureka Valley in Death Valley National Park. It takes over two hours to reach once you are inside the park, driving on dirt roads over mountain passes. I went there three times for a week each to monitor populations of two endemic, endangered plants on three different dune systems. I can honestly say I’m not sure I ever would have seen this valley if it wasn’t for this internship, which would have been a shame because it is a fascinating and beautiful place.

While I am sad to leave the Mojave behind, I am grateful for all I’ve learned throughout this internship and the friends and mentors I became connected with through this program. It’s been a blast, but now it’s on to the next adventure – grad school!

A beautiful sunset in Death Valley marks the end of my internship

Cheers,

Rachel

USGS, Las Vegas Field Office

Things have been nothing short of interesting here in the Rogue Valley. The heat has been on as temperatures have been reaching averages of 104 degrees regularly. We got a bit of relief last week as some cloud cover, rain, and storms moved in, but this has only lead to the birth of numerous lightning fires throughout the state. Luckily most of the fires have been to the East of the Cascades so far and we have not experienced much air pollution from the smoke of nearby fires.

As a result of the weather, and the fact that pretty much everything on the valley floor has gone to seed and dried out, we have moved our scouting for plants into the higher elevations of the nearby mountains. Between 2,000 and 5,000 feet elevation, plants are now either still flowering or going to seed. Scouting the mountains has reignited an appreciation for the geology of this region. At the south end of the Rogue Valley the Klamath-Siskiyous and the Cascades encompass the valley like a large bowl. This leads to a wide variety of habitat niches. Some of the mountains nearby are plutons, large rocky bubbles, essentially. Some mountains are volcanic, others the result of the North American tectonic plate shifting over the Juan de Fuca plate. Most of the mountains nearby are basaltic while others toward the Illinois River valley are mostly serpentinite and yield diverse plant communities all their own including many local endemics.

We have now reached approximately 50 collections, so we are merely 10 collections away from our initial target of 60 collections, which we are sure to exceed. So far we have vouchered approximately 130 botanical specimens. As the season starts to enter its final leg, it seems like we have made good progress and I am satisfied with our results.

This all comes in good time as my Environmental Education graduate program at Southern Oregon University starts back up. I am now in a transition period between switching from the seed collecting world to the outdoor education world as I have to reduce my work time in exchange for taking classes and planning lessons in preparation for our Fall in the Field residential and day programs in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Ashland, OR and the Deer Creek Center in Selma, OR. I have a little over a month to go with the BLM/SOS and I can say that I am pleased with my experience in this program thus far and will look back fondly on this internship. It looks like we will have accomplished what we set out to accomplish and got to explore Oregon’s many wonderful outdoor areas in the process. I suppose I can’t ask for much more than that.

– Jason

Hey!

With fire season in full swing here in Eastern Oregon, the office has been pretty busy this past month. Fortunately, these fires have provided me the oportunity to conduct spatial analyses on what kinds of lands and structures have burned so a rehabilitation plan can be put into place. This involves looking at former restoration plans and determining what the botanists, engineers, etc will need analyzed. Then, I create models using ArcGIS model builder so I can can save the proccesses to be used on a future fire if need be.

In addition to fire analysis, I have been working on creating maps for an Oregon Trail tour an archaeologist in the office is leading. These maps would be for the public going on the tour so they can find their way and also just as an overview of the route. This project has been a test of my cartography skills as I have had to try to find a way to fit a lot of information into an 11×17 map.

In all, these past few weeks have been great and I’m excited to continue my work here!

Vale, OR

Hello, I hope you all are having a fun time this summer. As in my previous post, I am going to talk about our research and my experience at the Provo shrub science lab. Our e-nose research is going well, especially during the summer days. The reason is because we are finding better smell profiles results and a good differentiation between sagebrush subspecies with the hot weather.  Additionally, at this time we are combining chromatographic techniques with our e-nose experiments which seems very promising to complement the identification of smells and chemical profiles of subspecies, and the differentiation between them. I talked in my last post about the plan to present at the SER conference in Redmond Oregon, well, I am finally registered. But we have not just done science in the laboratory this past month, we also starting cleaning some of the sagebrush experiments at Ephraim, Utah. I have to say that my mentor gave me a good lesson on how important it is to just take a break from the lab sometimes, and take a shovel and remove some weeds.

Like in my previous posts, I want to say thank you to my mentor, to all my companions and the CLM staff for all the support, and the CLM program for this great opportunity. There is always something to do at the Provo shrub science lab and I feel lucky to work in this incredible place, with such incredible people.

Hector

Provo, UT

Forest Service, RMRS, Provo Shrub Science Lab

Seed collecting within the Great Basin has provided an environment equal to collecting within a sauna. As the sun beats down and the wind neglects to blow it is not uncommon to find yourself sweating spontaneously. After hours of working within this environment I have become increasingly grateful for the wind. The wind is a beautiful force that has so many wonderful qualities. Not only does the wind provide a wonderful and delightful environment to cool you off, but it is also a great pollination mechanism for many plants. If it was not for this delightful entity many plants would not have developed or even maintained the morphology that they have today. Those traits would have been selected against and the world around us would be a very different place. On that imaginative note, I hope you have a great week.

Hi friends,

We just finished our last Nested Frequency Trend plot last week completing a total of 22 plots. There was a 23rd plot for us to monitor but the plot ended up in the middle of the Preacher Fire, a wildfire to the east of Shoshone burning about 34,000 acres, which is considered large for this field office. A few days after the fire was contained Avery and I went out to see what it looked like. I could not believe my eyes, it looked like we were on a different planet. The fire burnt every living plant out there, not leaving a single stump behind. I guess the conditions were just right, low moisture content in the shrubs root system and a very hot burning fire. Due to the wildfire, this allotment cannot be grazed for another 3 years. A new seeding plan will be created for the burned area and hopefully some of the seed we collected this season will be used.

Fire season is in full swing in southern Idaho. The conditions are perfect; temperatures in the high 90s, heavy winds, lightning strikes, and dry climate. There have been 5 wildfires in the last month burning a total of 44,000 acres. The fire crews have been busy and doing a great job containing the fires and minimizing losses.

Preach Fire, right off the highway.
Photo taken from Google

What is left after Preacher Fire.
Photo taken from Google.

Aside from conducting vegetation surveys, our latest task has been conducting bat surveys! I had no experience caving or identifying bats so I was excited and ready for a new challenge. There are 100s of lava tubes in the field office…A little background on Idaho geology:

Southern Idaho has a unique landscape covered with lava flows, cinder cones, and lava tubes. Crater’s of the Moon National Monument was created from lava that erupted from the Great Rift, a series of deep, open cracks, eruptive fissures, shield volcanoes, and cinder cones. This area is still erupting, in 1983 a 6.9 magnitude earthquake occurred rising the highest point in Idaho (Borah peak 12,667 FT) a foot. This earthquake, instead of creating mountain ranges has triggered volcanic activity. Southern Idaho is full of hot springs because the earth’s crust is stretched and thinner than normal in the Snake River Plane and the Great Basin, allowing heat from the earth to be concentrated near the surface.

Craters of the Moon
Photo taken from Google

Lava flows!
Photo taken from Google

Back to bat surveys. I’ve only gone out once so far and went in around 10 caves. We saw Great Horned Owls, a rattle snake, and one maternity colony of Townsend’s Big Eared bats (Corynorhinus townsendii). This colony was found and recorded last week but I wanted to see a bat SO bad that we went back so I could take a photo.

Corynorhinus townsendii

Cheers!
Alexi

Last week concluded my five month internship at the USGS in Las Vegas, Nevada. I have had an incredible, unforgettable experience working here – it’s hard to believe it’s already over and that I have to say goodbye to my fellow CLM interns and the wonderful crew at USGS that I had the great pleasure of working with.

If you’ve been reading my blog posts, you may have read about the diversity of projects that I’ve been working on over the last few months. At the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in northern Arizona, I helped survey experimental plots that had varying combinations of herbicide and seeding treatments, which were being analyzed for effectiveness for use in large-scale restoration. In the Eureka Dunes in Death Valley National Park, California, I helped monitor two endemic desert dune species by assisting with physiological measurements on target plants. I also helped out with a project which involved vegetation surveys to see see how much forage material was available for desert tortoises that were being translocated to a new area.

However, the project that I believe I spent the most time working on throughout my internship was our “common garden” experiment. At the beginning of my internship (February-March) we established three “common garden” sites to assess ecotypic variation of three different perennial species commonly used for restoration. Over the next few months (March-July) we went back to these sites several times to water the plants to help them establish as well as take measurements (ex. cover, density, reproductive effort) on each plant. This project was very rewarding because it was the only project we helped out with that was in its first year. We helped out with every phase of this project – from digging trenches for the rodent-proof fencing to planting over 2000 plants to working on data analysis in our final weeks. Data collection will continue for another few years, and it will be very interesting to see what findings come out of this experiment that we lent an initial helping hand with!

Taking the plants from the greenhouse to our “common garden” sites!

Fort Irwin National Training Center, where one of our “common garden” sites was located!

I’m so grateful to have spent these months in the Mojave desert. Before arriving here, I didn’t know anything about the desert really, and now upon leaving, I feel as if I know this landscape intimately and I have grown to respect and admire its extremes. Surviving in this environment was certainly challenging, but I have learned a great deal from these challenges. To all the new CLM interns just starting out – I wish you the best of luck with your internships! Immerse yourself as much as possible in your new environments and enjoy!

Thanks for reading!

— Meaghan Petix

Las Vegas Field Office, USGS