I’ve had a very memorable season this summer with lots of great memories. I want to thank CBG for such a fun opportunity! The end of the season has come, and I have submitted our season’s work! We shipped out all of our leaf tissue for the ERUM plants as well as our Modoc Plateau tissue. We also submitted a ton of seeds! A massive box of just seeds was shipped out.

Our last week of the job, Beth and I went to wilderness first aid training in Bend Oregon! It was very fun and we ate some good food, as well as staying in a very nice pink hotel:).

We learned a ton about wilderness first aid, and it was some extremely valuable information. I am very grateful that we got to do this training. We learned how to bandage and pack wounds, as well as pop back in dislocated joints. We learned how to properly assess a wilderness injury and situation. We did a lot of simulations with injured people and fake injuries with fake blood and bruises! I had a great time having a serious stomach injury and not responding to my rescuers :).

Thanks again for a great season! It was so amazing meeting all of you and I hope to cross paths with all of you again someday!

This last month was quite the adventure! I went all over Nevada looking for ERUM and collecting seeds. We collected quite a few seeds from a number of areas in Nevada and Idaho. I also went to Reno to help with the common gardens. We went downtown after we finished work and saw this amazing art!

I also went on a GLORIA project trip and monitored the top of mountains. I learned a lot from experienced botanists. We also found ERUM up in the alpine habitat and went back last week to collect, and got two different varieties of ERUM seed collections!

One of our locations that we used for camping in Nevada was Angel Lake, which had a lot of ERUM and was also a beautiful locations.

We found a ton of beautiful campsites in Nevada!

Beth tried to take a panorama of our campsite and ended up with this monstrosity of a photo… Anyways, it was another great month, and hopefully I will get a lot more seed collections in this next month before the end of the season!

Lately I have actually been doing my job! We have finally started sampling tissue and collecting seeds from around Idaho which includes Oregon, Nevada, and California. Our Erum hunts have been fun! I had no idea how many different types of Eriogonum there are or even just variations of ERUM itself. I have taken tons of pretty pictures over the last month or so and I’ve been to so many cool places! I’ve been to Modoc Plateau a couple of times, and we also went to Ketchum, which was beautiful! Recently I traveled all over Nevada, finding different collections of ERUM.

I am getting quite good at backcountry driving. I was not too well versed with the subject coming into this job, but I have been doing it more and more, and it is actually really fun! I like the challenge of dodging rocks and potholes and trying not to get the truck stuck in mud.

I also went on a GLORIA alpine monitoring trip which was super fun! We climbed sheep mountain and I learned a ton of new plants from some super experienced botanists. I also discovered my new favorite camp snack. When I get lazy and don’t want to cook at all, I simply make myself a tasty cold cheese burrito. It is surprisingly good, although my fellow interns protest it.

The truck that we have dubbed mountain goat just reached 100,000 miles! We stopped and celebrated on the side of a mountain. Overall, this past month has been a ton of fun, and I have really enjoyed being out in the field more searching for plants!

The first month of this internship has been adventure at every turn. We started with helping the forest service technicians with common garden experiments. We have been studying how certain plants are growing, and the amount of herbivory that is present on them. We have taken breaks to look for Lomatium dissectum and Eriogonum umbellatum.

LODI

ERUM

It has been fun hunting for our target species, and we were able to find some LODI and ERUM up at Bogus Basin, but there were not enough seeds to harvest. All life was going well until things got a bit crazy. We went to Modoc Plateau to get tissue samples of various target species from a range of different wetland sites. We were cruising along, making good progress and driving through some pretty intense backcountry roads. It was day 3 of our trip, when we were not careful enough and ended up getting stuck in a huge mud bog! It took us a day to be rescued, and even then we had to work together to pull the truck out of the mud. It took a ford F-250 to help pull a ford F-150 (Mountain goat).

All in all it was a great bonding experience, and a memory I will never forget. You live and you learn!