Hello for the final time!
I’m writing this blog post on my last day as a CLM intern here at the Lakeview BLM field office. Lucy and I have been cleaning out the herbarium, finishing off notes for next year’s crew, and figuring out our plans for the next few months. It feels like yesterday when I drove into town and saw the giant cowboy on the edge of town. Time flies, huh?

I have learned a lot about how the BLM runs and I have made meaningful connections while I have been working here. There isn’t nearly as much public land in Ohio, so it was interesting to see how a federal agency runs and how these people apply their degrees outside of the world of academia. I also have learned that we, as young people, have a very tough job market ahead of us. Today the Secretary of the Interior visited our office and discussed some of the challenges we face as federal land management agencies. She mentioned how agencies have less money in their budgets, the challenges of relaying to the public the importance of our work, and the lack of funding that is going towards programs to recruit youth into federal agencies as the Baby-boomers begin to retire in record numbers. This hit home; this is my problem!

Thanks to this internship, I have gained valuable experience that will hopefully make me a more competitive candidate as I apply to more positions in the future and I have made connections that may lead to new, unexpected opportunities. I am very grateful that I was able to participate in this internship and I highly recommend it!
It has been real Oregon, but I am off to new adventures!
-Anna

August has been a pleasant surprise for us here at the Lakeview BLM office. With the continuing drought and our bad luck earlier in the season, we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to meet our collection goal for SOS this year. How wrong we were! Now we are just two collections away from meeting our collection goal and we haven’t even collected from any of the shrubs yet. And we even got some rain here in Lakeview. Hopefully this is a sign of good things to come, like actually having water in the lakes and not having as many fires. Other than that, I’m still doing my job and having a blast here in Oregon. Until next time!

Hello again!
In case you were wondering, our SOS team here in Lakeview, Oregon has had much more success since my previous post. So far we have about twelve seed collections either completed or in progress and we haven’t had any more cows eating our plant populations. The first part of my internship has been focused on collecting forbs, but now we finally get to start collecting grasses! This past Thursday we made a collection of Achnatherum thurburianum (Thurber’s needlegrass) and next week we plan on collecting Festuca idahoensis (Idaho Fescue). No need to crawl from plant to plant when you can walk by and easily grab a spikelet; it’s the seed collector’s version of a cakewalk.

As for the weekends, I have traveled quite a bit! I got to check Crater Lake National Park off the bucket list along with going to the redwood forest in Crescent City, California and bopping around towns like Cave Junction and Bend, Oregon. I’m so thankful that I work in a place where I’m only a few hours from such great stuff! I’m getting much better at camping and I am continually amazed at how gorgeous this part of the country really is. That’s all I have to say for now and I’ll let you all know how I handle temperatures as they finally approach 100 degrees.

Hello! My name is Anna Freundlich and I am working in the BLM office in Lakeview, Oregon. Here in Lakeview I am going to make seed collections as part of the Seeds of Success (SOS) program and these past few weeks have already been pretty exciting. I graduated May 19th, went home for two days to pack, and then drove from my hometown of Lexington, Ohio for six days to arrive here in Oregon. While we were a bit rushed, my sister and I had a good time traveling across the U.S. From hiking in Wisconsin to visiting Mt. Rushmore to seeing bison on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake we had plenty of adventures. And besides getting lost in California for two hours on my last day of travel, the commute went pretty smoothly.

My first week and a half of work was rewarding and challenging. As one can imagine, the plants here in Oregon are quite different from the plants out east. Nearly every plant is foreign to me, but luckily the local botanist Ian Grinter and my fellow intern Lucy Landis are very patient and are helping me learn the plants out here. Because our Lakeview office is in a higher elevation and this area has been in a drought for the past three years, the seed situation is “interesting”. Our plants normally flower and set seed later in the season, but combined with the drought some populations are setting seeds later than anticipated or are not setting seed at all. My first day in the field Lucy and I went to check out a population of Trifolium macrocephalum clovers, only to discover that there were no seeds for us to collect. We also hit bad luck when we went to collect seed from a population of Lupine; we were dismayed to discover that the cows had beaten us to the lupine flowers. If only we had known that the flowers were so tasty!

But things are not hopeless. Today we went out to Sage Hen Butte in the southern part of the district with some botanists from Alturas. On a hilltop overlooking the mountains, we finally found a site that had potential for seed collections. Here we found many different populations of native plants including Indian paintbrush, multiple species of Eriogonum (Wild Buckwheat) and my favorite plant of the day Lewisia rediviva. This small plant had red stems, beautiful white flowers, and seemed to crawl out from under the rocks. After our CLM training trip in Chicago next week, we plan on making many collections at this beautiful site.

I am looking forward to a great summer and I am so glad I have this opportunity!
Lakeview, Oregon BLM

Favorite flower of the day!