Good golly it’s the last month of my internship already. The seasons have definitely changed, as evidenced by the fact that I spent today doing fieldwork in the snow. It seems like just last week that it was 80 degrees and sunny. Oh wait –  it was just last week. But despite being cold and wet and wishing it was 100 degrees again, the fall colors in western Colorado are absolutely beautiful.

I’ve been spending a lot of the last month in the office doing GIS work, but I’ve also had the opportunity to go out with different people from the office and get experience doing different types of work. Most recently I went out with a geologist and a bat specialist from the Colorado Division of Wildlife to determine whether bats were utilizing an abandoned uranium mine shaft. After determining the shaft was free of radon, I got to go in and look for guano. Yay guano! Afterwards, the geologist took me around to our office’s paleo sites to see fossilized dinosaur bones and tracks, which was extremely cool.

Fossilized prehistoric mammal tracks

Dinosaur bones!

An abandoned uranium mine shaft

Less than a month left. Sigh. I’ll miss you, Colorado.

I am now more than halfway done with my internship in Grand Junction, Colorado. I’ve spent the last two months doing rangeland health assessments in and around the Dolores River canyon, during which time I’ve spent 3 nights a week camped out in a BLM trailer. Our trailer was nicknamed “the Chateau” and was outfitted with a wine cellar, though some may refer to it as “a cooler full of non-alcoholic beer.” The men’s trailer was referred to as “the servants’ quarters.” Yes, trailer life was great fun. But, the fieldwork part of the land health project is now over. We collected data from almost 100 sites, which involved sampling vegetation and measuring canopy gaps along a 50-meter transect, doing soil stability tests, and assessing soil erosion, hydrologic function, plant functional group composition, and plant mortality at each site. It’s now my job to enter all this data into a GIS database and map the land health status of the entire area.
After spending nearly every day of my internship working in the field, working primarily in the office has been a major change of pace. After I’ve gotten used to hiking around all day, I get pretty restless staying inside and staring at a computer screen. But since I’ve spent the field season only working with a few other people, it’s nice to get to know other people in the office. It’s also very interesting to see all the field data coming together and see how it will be used.
As a side note, I got to spend a week taking a course in MIM (multiple indicator monitoring), which is used to monitor land use impacts on streams. MIM involves sampling riparian plant species composition, woody species height and age class, bank stability, bank alteration, gravel size distribution, and pool and riffle composition. After spending so much time hiking around in the desert uplands, spending a week wading around in a stream was a blast. Although after learning so many upland plants, I found I was almost completely clueless on riparian species.
Another side note: Bear sightings! Three of them! Unfortunately they ran away too quick for me to get a picture.
You stay classy, fellow CLMers.

My apologies to everyone east of the Rockies suffering through droughts and heat waves, because apparently every drop of moisture in the country is being funneled directly into western Colorado. I’m supposedly in the desert, yet hardly a day has gone by that we haven’t seen rain in the last month. We even got caught in a hailstorm last week, which decided not to set in until we were good and far from the truck.

In between dodging hailstones, I’ve been spending the last month working on rangeland health assessment in and around Unaweep Canyon, near the town of Gateway by the Colorado-Utah border. Life has changed quite a bit since I’ve started working down here, since we’re now camped out in trailers four days a week for the next two months. It’s a really, really cool place, especially for geology geeks, because the canyon cuts down into Precambrian rock. It’s also highly unique because there’s a divide that causes water to flow out of opposite ends. This is by far the coolest place that I have worked in so far. The last two weeks we’ve worked our way out of the canyon bottom and gotten up on top of the surrounding mesas, which have offered some really incredible views. They’re also, shall I say, exciting places to work during a thunderstorm.

See you all next month, if I haven’t been struck by lightning!

I can’t believe it’s time to post to the blog again, because that means I’ve been at my internship for over a month now. Time flies when you’re having fun!

Last week was the training workshop at the Chicago Botanic Garden. I finally got to meet Krissa and Marian, who are totally awesome. I also got to hang out with all the other interns in the program, which was like being back in college, except where everyone else loves plants as much as I do. The Chicago Botanic Garden was beautiful.  I learned some really interesting things, and we had a ton of fun going into the city Friday night. Basically the workshop was awesome, although the humidity definitely made me appreciate working in the desert.

As for life back in Grand Junction, my most recent excitement was finding a rare threatened plant, the DeBeque phacelia. It’s a tiny annual forb that only grows in a very specific environment, in bare loose soil on southwest or east-facing slopes. I have never been so excited over a tiny dried-out plant.

In other news, I went wine tasting in Palisade last weekend, which is cool since I never would have thought of wineries in Colorado. They actually have some international award-winning wines. Best part was the tasting was all free!

Also I’m covered in bug bites, especially on my feet. Just thought you all should know.

My mentor Terry holds out a dried-out piece of elk scat. “We’re only looking for freshly deposited droppings,” he says. “The trick to telling if it’s fresh is to see if it has a nice ripe taste. Just try it a few times and you’ll get to know the taste.” I look up at him. Is he joking? Yes he’s joking.

Bear poop!

I’m finishing up the second week of my internship with the BLM in Grand Junction, Colorado, and in spite of my mentor trying to get me to put elk poop in my mouth (he swears he wouldn’t have actually let me do it), it’s already turning out to be an amazing experience. I’m working in some of the most remote and beautiful places I’ve ever been. I’ve seen desert bighorn sheep up close. I’m learning the names of Colorado flora, and by the end of the summer I will have greatly improved my plant identification skills. After spending so much of my life learning things in a classroom, I can’t believe that I finally get to spend every day outside, learning by doing.

Fieldwork can be a bit of a challenge, what with temperatures in the 90’s and 100’s, gnats, and lack of restrooms. On top of that I’m still adjusting to the high altitude, having come from sea level, and later in the season I’ll have thunderstorms to look forward to. However, it’s turning out to be an amazing learning experience. I get to go to work every day and be surrounded by incredible landscapes. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the summer has to offer.

A collared lizard