Hello my lovely fellow interns,

Since we last virtually spoke (as in I post and you maybe read), I have been doing a lot more work with invasive and rare plants.  I’ve familiarized myself with NISIMS and conning ArcMap/ArcPad into doing what I want and have been out to Chicken, AK (tiny town southwest of Fairbanks) and Coldfoot, AK (even tinier town (10 people at last census) north of the Arctic Circle) collecting NISIMS data.  Mostly we are focusing on white sweetclover and bird vetch so I’ve gotten really good at identifying white and purple blurs along the roadside as we cruise by in the trucks in the rain.  White sweetclover and bird vetch are both marching quite steadily up the Dalton Highway, which leads way north up to Deadhorse, the northernmost city in Alaska accessible by car (about 8 miles from the Arctic Ocean).  This is obviously bad news.  White sweetclover grows pretty much continuously from Fairbanks (Dalton Highway milepost 0) to Coldfoot (milepost 175) and beyond.  Bird vetch is less continuous so we were focusing on that—recording where it is and how dense it is.  We found it as far north as milepost 196, yikes!  After we gather data the hope is to develop a management plan to figure out how to handle this problem.  The Dalton is used mostly by the oil industry to haul supplies to and from Deadhorse and the oil infrastructure on the North Slope (in fact it used to be called the Haul Road) so you can probably see how invasive plant species might be abundant there.

Dalton Highway leading north into the Brooks Range

The rare plant front is progressing a little more slowly.  We learned that the GIS rare plant data that we have is fuzzed and thus not very useful for navigating to sites to monitor rare plants.  Now it seems we have resolved the problem so I will soon be able to get out to the field, hopefully tracking down some of these populations to monitor them and scouting areas where new populations might be hiding.

For the month of August I will also be working with another wildlife biologist in the office to re-visit some plots that were monitored pre-2004 fire to see what they look like post-fire.  Said biologist had been noticing that spruce forests are not regenerating post-fire as they used to and instead earlier succession environments are persisting.  Hopefully the data we collect here will help shed some light on this situation.

The latest adventure I’ve taken part in was a 38 mile float/raft trip down the Fortymile River, southwest of Fairbanks.  I tagged along with the office realty specialist and his intern and learned how to conduct mining compliance inspections at long term mining campsites along the river.  I also used this time to do invasive species inventories at these campsites.  I was surprised (but encouraged!) to find no invasive species at any of the 14 sites that we visited.  Despite some rain and cold, the raft trip was one of my favorite thus far—floating down the river was obviously lovely, I was able to learn how to raft from some experienced mentors and our three person team took part in several adventures such as rescuing a sunken hovercraft and helping guide a suction dredge down a series of rapids.

Beautiful view down the Fortymile

Doing mining compliance inspections

Suction dredge floating in the river

No invasives but plenty of gorgeous native plants…

Labrador Tea, Ledum palstre ssp groenlandieum (among many other taxonomic synonyms)

Cloudberry/Salmonberry, Rubus chamaemorus

Bog Blueberry, Vaccinium vliginosum
And most delicious!

Bluebells, Mertensia paniculata

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.