As I write I am starting my second to last week here at the Grants Pass Interagency Office. Kiki and I have completed her FRGE field collection and so have finished going out in the field together. She is stuck in the office while I tag along with whoever needs help in the field.

Kiki and I had one last FRGE visit to do before we went to ESA and it was a wonderful day! The weather was nice and the views were pretty. We walked along a dry creek bed full of dragonflies and through a pleasant oak woodland. Our site itself was inside a stand of Ceanothus cuteanus, which wasn’t very pleasant. But we ate lunch on a decommissioned road under the pines and doug firs. It was a nice day! I’ve really enjoyed visiting rare plant sites with Kiki, we’ve had a great time. I’ll certainly miss exploring the backcountry with her!

Our last site was in the Butte Falls resource area. It looks a lot like this!

The poison oak has started to turn this pretty pink color. It looks harmless! (it isn’t)

This is what we look like after a successful day of back country hiking. BeWILDered. haha

We had to park on BLM land that was right next to someones farm. When we made it back to the truck these cute farm dogs came and checked us out. They were sweet!

Kiki and I started our internship in March so we didn’t attend the training in Chicago. Instead, we went to the Ecological Society of America conference last week! It was in sunny Ft Lauderdale, Florida! Except it wasn’t so sunny, which turned out to be a blessing because it was still horrifically hot and humid. But we had a great time! There’s so much interesting research going on all around the world, it makes me really excited to go on to graduate school!

Our hotel was right on the marina. We ate lunch overlooking the water quite a bit~

And we often watched the sun set over the marina.

Almost all of our time was spent listening to talks at the conference, but we made time to hit the beach one afternoon. The water was really warm.. like a bath. And the sand was hot like coal embers.

This is a bad picture but we took a water taxi back to the hotel from the beach! It was a fun experience.

With our FRGE work done Kiki and I are sometimes enlisted to help with seed collection. The Medford district is huge and very diverse, so there is no shortage of seed to be collected here! Our Botany crew can knock out a collection in a few hours, easy!

The crew is collecting Horkelia in French Flat. It’s a pretty spot!

Kiki was feeling a little hot and exposed, though. This pose is what we in the biz call ‘collection dejection’.

This week I got to help with a trash cleanup project in a place called Reeve’s Creek. People dump their trash here instead of taking it to the dump because it’s cheaper to just throw trash away on BLM land. But it’s also incredibly disgusting. As we were picking up the huge amount of trash in one of the drainages on the side of the road, I wondered if the people knew that some poor intern was going to have to clean up their huge mess one day. Or that their habit of dumping on public lands is a really awful one. Do they feel guilty, I wondered? Do they have trouble sleeping? We packed up four overflowing truck-beds worth of trash and we barely made a dent. Do they know how we suffer when we’re cleaning up their mess? Anyway, it was an awful experience. But my boss Mr Wender said that without suffering we’d never know when we were experiencing happiness. This may seem dramatic but honestly, a few hours of picking up a huge amount of household trash in the hot hot heat is not fun! I would not recommend it!

Someone put old headphones on this cute little stuffed animal to add some whimsy to the event.

The whimsy is lost when the toy is sitting on a throne of garbage.

Anyway, this week I’ll be saying goodbye to Queen Nasty herself, Kiki Fahey. We were the dream team this summer. I never dared to hope that I’d get along so well with the person I’d be spending my work days with, but we have so much fun together! Whether it’s playing basketball with grapes or cherry tomatoes where the hoops are our mouths, singing along with Drake or Janelle Monae or Kiki’s fave Down with the Sickness, or laughing at jokes that are questionable at best, we always had a great time. I’m sad to see her go but I know she’ll do excessively well in her masters program at Northwestern.

She’s Queen Nasty because she eats grapes and cherry tomatoes off the ground.

And you know we’re always playing scrabble!

Next week is my last week. It doesn’t seem real, but I’m excited to be going to home see my family and to have some time to focus on looking at graduate schools!

Anyway, it’s been a hoot and a half!

Lillie P

This past month has been an exercise in nostalgia– we’ve been revisiting our earlier FRGE sites to record a more in depth survey of the vegetation. We’ve also been ‘data mining’, a phrase I’ve never heard. It basically means we spend hours in the office pouring over old rare plant site forms. It’s a hoot~

We still get to see the bird’s eye view of these little towns sometimes~

Visiting our old sites is pretty exciting because we get to see how the plant communities have changed over the summer. At the beginning of my internship the oak trees were just starting to bud and we had to use fallen leaves and acorns to identify them. Now, we walk through fully leaved oak woodlands. It feels magical and it’s a major relief from the harsh and relentless sun.

This hillside is a beautiful oak woodland, but you can’t really tell from this picture.. but you can see highway 238!

Not all of the sites we are revisiting are our old sites, however. Some are contractor sites that we don’t have site forms for. It’s been interesting to go to these new sites, especially ones that had quite a few FRGE plants. Seeing flagging with nothing under it strikes me as funny, for some reason.

We found a dried up seed FRGE seed pod underneath a dried up FRGE plant. It’s been lovely watching these plants go through their life cycle!

One of the sites we went to was in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. Stacy joined us, and along the way we were walking on a decommissioned road that was paved with Calochortus greenei. It was exciting to see this rare and beautiful plant! But commingled with it was a startling amount of invasive and noxious weeds. I wondered how different the road would have looked if it had been left to nature’s devices rather than turned over and seeded.

A very pretty plant! The cup the petals form is so deep, I was surprised. It’s a warm little hiding place for bugs!

We’ve been seeing a lot of pretty lilies on our hikes this time around! They’re so big and beautiful, they lift morale instantly!

This lily is tall! We’ve seen some that are taller than me! (But, if we’re being honest, I’m a pretty short Lillie)

These lilies have huge flowers!

Our hikes don’t go quite as deep into the backcountry as they used to, but we still work up a sweat and see interesting things. Kiki and I have had a busy field season, so it’s odd to be in the office so much. It makes me nostalgic for the days when I would complain about how sore my feet were and how much plant material was in my hair. Our longest hikes were the ones we avoided for our revisits, but I almost wish we would have gone back to some of them. Almost. One thing is certain– office days don’t provide much material for good blog posts.

This trunk is interesting to me, it reminds me of Freddy Krueger’s face.

This bee impostor sat next to me all during lunch one day.

You can’t stop Kiki from climbing trees and pretending they’re horses.

We always make time for selfies.

It’s berry season here in southern Oregon and we have been reaping the benefits. Blackberries grow all over town, making it easy to stroll around in the evenings (tasty free snacks are good incentive for casual exercise). We stumble on blackberries, thimbleberries, and strawberries on our hikes as well. These boost morale even more than seeing the pretty lilies! There’s nothing better than a handful of wild strawberries after a hot hike.

These blackberries are a bit more tart than the ones in the store. Kiki says it’s because they’re not totally ready yet but I like them this way~

Wild strawberries are the most delicious food to eat. Just thinking about them makes me swoon~

On our off time, Kiki and I visited a lavender festival. It was very hot but we cooled down with some delicious lavender ice cream. We walked through the growing fields and reflected on how hot it was that day. The lavender plants were very pretty though!

There were quite a few different varieties of lavender but they all smelled the same to me.

We also went on a backpacking trip to the Devil’s Punchbowl! It’s a big snowmelt lake at the top of a mountain. The hike was pretty, with blankets of twin flower (Linnaea borealis) lining the sides of the trail for most of it. The punchbowl itself was very bowl-like indeed– it seemed as if the devil’s hand might reach over the rim for a taste at any time. The water was cool and refreshing~ I recommend it!

The sign is spooky, especially in the middle of the woods!

Our cute little campsite~

We, of course, made time for scrabble on our journey.

There’s nothing like a game of scrabble next to a beautiful lake.

I went home for a week to see my sister before she moved away for graduate school. It was really nice to be at home without any responsibilities, but I’m glad to be back.

Officially, I went home to see my sister. But seeing my dog was a huge bonus.

I’ve now entered my last month here. My heart aches to think about it!

Lillie Pennington

Grants Pass, OR

Three months have gone past with startling rapidity, can it be true that I only have two months left here in Grants Pass? It’s enough to make a girl want to cry! (but not really because it’s hot and I need to conserve water)

This past month, Kiki and I embarked on a new adventure– only to return to our old haunts with relative quickness. We were tasked with revisiting Cypripedium fasciculatum (CYFA) sites, especially small sites, as an algorithm projected the species might become extinct at these sites. We visited 15 high elevation (>3400 ft) and 15 low elevation sites that in the past had 10 plants or fewer to see if the algorithm holds true. The plants are inconspicuous in that they are just green leaves, much like the rest of the vegetation in our forests here. But the leaf shape is quite conspicuous, which made our hunt a little easier.

Cute little CYFA leaves. Sometimes they can be pretty small and hidden, so Kiki and I spent a lot of time at every site to make sure we didn’t missing anything~

Most of the plants we found were vegetative, but we did find a few flowering. The blooms are humble and subdued, it’s a very quiet plant.

CYFA in bloom~

As part of the project, Kiki and I also went to a handful of larger CYFA sites that had over 30 plants in the past. At one site we found 313 plants! It was wild and mildly overwhelming to count all those plants.

Our largest site had clumps of CYFA growing together. I thought it looked odd and uncomfortable.

We couldn’t believe how many plants we found! It was a very exciting day.

The CYFA habitat is a lot different from our old FRGE friend. CYFA tends to grow in moist areas with high overstory coverage. Usually there is a stream nearby. Our CYFA sites were mostly beautiful, but sometimes they required some bushwhacking to get through.

Some of our CYFA sites required us to climb through dense shrubbery to look for the little plants. This is Kiki performing that task.

We found no CYFA under these shrubs. Kiki isn’t happy about it.

While hunting for CYFA we stumbled upon two separate occurrences of Cypripedium montanum (CYMO), an orchid that is more rare and also more beautiful than CYFA. It was very exciting!

Bold and beautiful, making a scene, married to the stars– Cypripedium montanum.

Kiki will stop at nothing to get the perfect picture. She was covered in ants after this.

We saw a lot of cool things on our CYFA treks but for some reason did not take too many pictures. I guess we’re too hardened and jaded to record our journey anymore.

Phlox adsurgens, woodland phlox. Very pretty, the most gentle pink plant. A soothing flower to see.

A cool bug. A little jewel.

Our local seeds of success expert, Stephanie, invited us to join her on two separate occasions. We helped her collect Alopecurus geniculatus and Agoseris grandiflora on top of upper Table Rock in the hot hot heat. It was a fun day! On top of Table Rock isn’t a bad place to be. We also helped her to collect Danthonia californica, an oatgrass, in the hot hot heat of French Flat. Another beautiful place!

Kiki and Stephanie collecting on top of Table Rock.

Our crew collecting at French Flat.

Our CYFA task is completed and we’ve gone back to FRGE for the time being. Kiki is getting her Masters (!!) and her project involves FRGE habitat assessment. We’ve been revisiting our FRGE sites to collect in depth data about the vegetation, especially tree cover. This project will be part of a larger vegetation mapping project.

Our mentor, Stacy, joined us in a pretty area to help us with shrub identification! She is a great botanist and patiently helped us as we learned new species.

We saw a harmless little snake trying to stay warm in a sudden cold front. Super cute!

Kiki and I made a trip out to Prairie Creek Redwood State Park and hiked the James Irvine trail to Fern Canyon. It was so beautiful! A lovely hike, I highly recommend it.

Fern canyon! What a place.

We love the Pacific! (Even if I can’t take good selfies in front of it)

Of course, we still make time for scrabble.

and look haggard while we’re at it

Stay cool out there y’all!

Lillie P

The FRGE hunting continued this past month with mild success. It seems to be a bad blooming season for our elusive lily, which is unfortunate because we have a huge FRGE task force this year. But the plants do as they please and we are helpless in the wake of their unwillingness to bloom.

This is me recording data into my GPS after an empty site. Can you see the dejected hunch in my shoulders?

Disappointment aside, the sites that we’ve visited are mostly stunningly beautiful. We had the opportunity to camp out at the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument to have more time to get to our sites out there. The monument is probably the most wild place we’ve been to– most of the roads have been decommissioned to allow for wilderness to take over. Mt. Shasta loomed in the distance as we hiked along mountain streams to our sites. Outside of the Monument, Kiki and I hike through oak woodlands and mixed conifer forests, along mountain ridges and down in the valley, over downed trees and through thick stands of Ceanothus and manzanita. At the end of the day there’s usually a litany of complaints streaming from my mouth because I’m tired and my feet hurt and my hair is a plant detritus magnet, but it’s incredibly rewarding and relaxing to walk through the great outdoors all day. Even when we don’t find plants– which, truthfully, is more often than not– I’m glad to have the opportunity to experience so many different places that are relatively wild.

Our lunch spot close to one of our last FRGE sites in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. Mt Shasta rises mightily in the distance.

We hiked through this area quite a few times to get to sites deep in BLM land without any roads. It’s beautiful!

This mountain overlooks the town of Gold Hill– easily one of my favorite spots in the field office.

This is us enjoying the view, we love it!

We had to climb high above I-5 one day. This is our view, with the town of Rogue River beneath us.

Fritillaria recurva with a backdrop of mountains. Kiki is quite the photographer, I think!

Of course, some of the best sights are of the pretty wildflowers. This is Collinsia grandiflora, my favorite so far.

One thing that is surprising to me is how little wildlife we see. Sometimes there are turkey, sometimes there are deer, but usually there’s just lizards! Part of me is thankful for this– we have seen bear scat and bear tracks, and once we saw mountain lion scat. I’d be terrified to see a mountain lion in the wild! Kiki and I have both scared turkeys off their ground nests (on accident! we were probably as scared in the moment as the turkey hen), and that’s the closest encounter we’ve had.

A turkey hen’s ground nest. I suppose turkeys aren’t as susceptible to poison oak as we are.

Kiki and I have a great time out on our own, sometimes I wonder if people can hear our cackling in the distance and worry that some wild beasts are coming to lay waste to their towns. We’re a great team, I’m really happy I get to work with her! (Also she tends to make cookies on the weekends and we get to enjoy them at lunch during the week)

This is after a particularly rigorous hike– please excuse any haggardness you detect in our appearances.

The work week really wears us out, but we made time one weekend to check out the Rogue River. We hiked along the Rainie Falls trail to the biggest rapids on the river. It was a beautiful trail!

The Rainie Falls trail follows the Rogue as it winds through the countryside. It’s a lot more magnificent than my phone camera can capture~

Scrabble is still our dominant weekend activity, though. I’ve even managed to win a few times! I think Kiki is starting to view me as a real competitor.

Seen here: the posture of defeat

We’ve been lucky to not stumble upon too many people out on our treks. One day, though, we were visited by old man willow..

Kiki, our resident gagperson. Sometimes it just makes sense to put lichen under your hat like a wig.

We’ve visited all of our FRGE sites and will be moving on to Cypripedium fasciculatum, the clustered lady’s slipper orchid. I’ll miss our pretty lilies!

FRGE in its prime– strong, sturdy, vibrant. A sight for sore eyes, as they say.

FRGE in its twilight– weak, frail, dull. Slightly monstrous. The stuff of nightmares, truly. It looks like the cold hand of death reaching from the grave.

Til next time!

Lillie P

Hello from Grants Pass, Oregon!

I started a rare plants internship here late in March, almost April. I’ve been here just over three weeks, now. This is my second time participating in the CLM program– last year I was stationed in Susanville, CA focusing on seeds of success. Now I spend my days hunting a federally listed plant, Fritillaria gentneri.

Fritillaria gentneri

My partner, Kiki, and I have been tasked with revisiting 150 gentneri sites during the blooming season which is April through June. I’d say we’ve done forty or so sites. That may not seem like a lot, but some of these sites are hard to get to! Spring has sprung before my very eyes since I’ve been here, which means we stumble across blankets of wildflowers during every hike, but it also means we have to quickly check our remaining sites before they dry up!

There are also plenty of Madrone trees to climb on. Kiki swears up and down that climbing a tree increases the accuracy of the GPS. I’m dubious.

Grants Pass is nestled in the valleys of the Cascades and it really shows in the work. Kiki and I can be found crawling along slopes all over the area, hunting our precious lilies. I affectionately call it ‘billy-goating’, because goats are so good at climbing up scary steep rock walls. Likewise, Kiki and I have to be good at climbing up scary steep grassy or forested hillsides! Thankfully, there’s usually a manzanita or oak to grab on to for stability.

I’m not sure if this picture adequately captures how steep and terrible this hillside is.

The plants themselves can be quite conspicuous, or they can be shy. Sometimes a bright flash of red stands out from the landscape, sometimes it just blends in with the poison oak. It just depends! A lot of the sites are lily-free, which at first was discouraging, but it just makes the victory so much sweeter when a lily pops up! (even though it is totally out of our hands, finding a gentneri feels like a huge victory!)

Can you see the lilies~?

Kiki and I take time to explore the area on the weekends– last week we went to the redwoods at Stout Grove! They’re quite a sight. We had a great time climbing around on the trees that had fallen, and the river that runs next to the grove is so blue!

Kiki and a redwood.

Since most of our days are filled with intense hiking, sometimes we just want to relax by the river and exercise our minds with a rousing game of scrabble!

I lost..

Until next time~!

Lillie P

I’ve finished working at the Eagle Lake field office in Susanville, California. A lot of things have changed since I started in June. I cut my hair, for one. But more importantly, I’ve grown a lot as a person. Working here has been my first experience living away from home and completely supporting myself, and it’s my first time working an actual job at an actual workplace. All of my other jobs have been centered around the fact that I was a student working for my own or other universities. As a human adult working in a professional capacity with other human adults, I’ve had to learn to tone down how silly and obnoxious I can be sometimes because it’s not conducive to getting work done. I’m glad I got to learn this special and important lesson as an intern, because interns are allowed to be silly and mess up sometimes (right?).

Being away from home has also shown me how much I value my family and friends there. In my past experiences I either haven’t been farther than a few hours from my home base or I wasn’t gone for very long. I don’t mind being far from home, but I do appreciate my friends and family more now.

As for skills I’ve gained, I’m a lot more confident in my ability to learn and recognize an abundance of plants. I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing the plants of our field office, and I think I’ve gotten pretty good at looking for special status plants as well. I’ve learned how to navigate the treacherous backroads that are made mostly of lava rock and misery, and I’ve learned how to use a GPS. Working with three other interns has sharpened my group work skills (I hope they agree).

One learning experience in particular stands out to me: We were driving in the Skedaddle Mountains, and it was my first time driving in the backcountry with the jeep. I’m not sure if the Skedaddles were the best place to learn, seeing as the road was mostly a mountainside full of rocks and other treacherous obstacles, and I bottomed out a few times. But I quickly gained sharper eyes to detect snags in the road.

My fellow interns are fun fun people. We’ve had a blast in the field, joking with each other and sharing lots of laughs. I’ll treasure the memories we’ve made because honestly, we’re hilarious. Also our mentor, Valda, is the best! She’s so fun and helpful, I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor.

These past few weeks we’ve been working in the office for the most part, which has been almost entirely unpleasant. Because of this, I know that I’m not cut out for the windowless cubicle life, at least not yet. Sometimes after being in the office I’m more fatigued than when we’ve been out hiking all day! I used to think I’d be able to do any job as long as it was something I believed in, even if it meant working in a cubicle, but goodness gracious I don’t think I can do it.

After this, I’m not really sure what I’m going to do. I love scientific research and I’m planning on going to graduate school, but not until 2017 at least. Until then, I want to experience as many places and fields of work as possible. I’ve got my eye on urban sustainability currently, so I’m hoping to scare up some sort of internship with the city planner’s office when I go back home. We’ll see how that goes~!

I’ll miss this job every day, though. The people are great, but the work is even greater. The beautiful places I’ve been to and experiences I’ve had are irreplaceable, and I’m so grateful to have had this opportunity.

Woah! It’s September and my colleagues and I have done about thirty-five seed collections. Our squad has been pretty successful in scouting populations and collecting from them efficiently. Sometimes we do two or three collections in a day! I don’t actually know if this is impressive, though, I just feel like we’re doing alright.

We collected birdsfoot trefoil while a storm rolled in over the desert. We were completely safe, of course, and left the area before it got too serious!

When collecting in the rain it is important to wear the proper protective gear– in my case a dashingly fierce, hot pink rain coat.

We have three sites that we collect Eriogonum nudem, a pretty plant that is tall and easy to collect from. When put on as a headpiece, it makes an impressive nature crown. Try it out next time you see it!

This mint was a beautiful collection. Not only was it delightfully fragrant with maybe one hundred seeds per flower head, but this population was located in a pine forest overlooking Eagle Lake.

Sometimes collections are frightfully comfortable– Rachael was able to recline of the soft ground as we collected trefoil in a riparian area.

While collecting california prickly poppy– quite possibly one of the most prickly materials on this planet Earth– I stumbled upon the tiniest and most precious creature. A horny toad!

We’ve begun earnestly hunting for Mountain Mahogany, a fun collection if one can find trees producing enough seed to beat it off the branches. The experience is altogether unpleasant, however– the seeds are covered in tiny fibers which will work their way under one’s clothing and into one’s flesh. Very itchy.

I’ve got about seven weeks left at this internship. It’s truly shocking how fast it’s gone! I’m sure the coming weeks will be just as full of adventure as the preceding ones.

Until next time!

Lillie P.

Hello!

I’ve been working in the Eagle Lake BLM office here in Susanville, CA for maybe two months now. Probably more like a month and a half. I work with three other interns, and we’ve had so many wonderful adventures! We’ve done over thirteen seed collections so far, and we have monitored quite a few special status plant populations.

The landscape is very rocky! Lassen County, where we work, has a volcanic legacy that manifests in surprisingly and often suddenly rocky terrain.

A picture of me at my first ever plant collection, purple sage. It’s a very fragrant plant!

We often refer to the plants we are collecting by their NCRS (maybe that’s not the acronym?) code, and this is me with one of our favorites, CRAC.

We often run into grazing livestock on our journeys. This mama cow is squaring up in the road to fight off our jeep. Thankfully, the confrontation ended peacefully– the cows moved off to join the rest of their herd in the adjacent field.

Rachel, Jill, Andrea, and I got to go to the horse corrals and see the wild horses that are up for adoption. We got a tour of the facilities. It was a very informative day!

It’s always exciting to see the real thing, though, even if the horses are a nuisance and tear up the landscape. They’re so majestic! But there are quite a few out there, beyond this picture there were maybe fifty horses in the dry lake bed we were visiting.

An exciting thing happened! We were driving and I spotted the freshest little calf on earth. He was so new, we accidentally frightened his first steps out of him, I think. It was magical!

I am really enjoying myself and this job. We go on so many adventures every day, it’s almost as if we’re not working! (But we definitely are working)

Anyway, until next time!

Lillie P.