Author Archives: Kaitlyn Pankratz

A DND Adventure in the Bighorns

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With the mountains stretched out in front of her, Penny Stricks heads out for another day of adventuring. The days have been long and arduous, but she is experienced now, and has the support of the Botanical Guild of Chicago and countless more, including her trusty companion Dalia, behind her. Many would balk at these wild forests and rural grasslands, but she’s here on a mission: to collect seeds from crucial native plants so they can be used for conservation and revegetation. She understands the importance of her goals, and will do anything to fulfill them.

Sourdough Creek

Travel through the mountains is easy [20**]; Penny is more than familiar with mountainous terrains, and has her trusty carriage to help her move more quickly. But when the roads become too rough, she abandons her carriage and sets out on foot. Dalia heads off in a different direction so they can cover more ground, but they can always contact each other with their sending stones.

Mountain views with a *modern* interpretation of Penny’s carriage

As Penny moves along, getting closer to the area she hopes the plant she wants to find, Chamerion angustifolium, is (based on the guidance of the closest town’s apothecary owner), she sees what may be another species she’s interested in, Erigeron speciosus [10]. But, as she reaches down to check on it further, it comes alive. Rather than being the aspen fleabane she was hoping it would be, it’s E. glabel, a notoriously similar looking, but dangerous and animated plant. Penny is startled, but not surprised or unprepared; this sort of thing happens a lot, especially with the more difficult to distinguish plants (don’t ask her how many times she’s been attacked by something she thought was slender wheatgrass). Her preparation and familiarity means that she gets to attack this dangerous plant first [7 vs. 1], and she’s able to take it down with one fell swoop of her sickle [17].

The terrifying Erigeron

Penny recovers quickly, and keeps on her way. After walking for a ways more, with occasional stops to check out more cool plants or as her swarm of bumblebees pollinate some flowers, she believes she’s approaching her desired location [17], so casts Locate Animals or Plants. The spell easily leads her to the large patch of fireweed, ready to be collected from (though whatever isn’t can easily be readied with a use of druidcraft).

Fun finds along the way

With the help of her bag of holding and a little bit of mage hand, Penny makes quick work of collecting from the population, and makes plans to meet back up with Dalia to rest and recuperate by the fire after a long day of adventuring. There’s plenty more to be done in these mountains, though; many more plants to see and seeds to collect, and Penny can’t wait.

Collecting Adventures

[**numbers is square brackets are actual rolls I made that dictated Penny’s adventures; for example, the first roll was to get through the mountains, I rolled a survival check with advantage because she was traveling on her favored terrain and she rolled a 14 and then added 6]

Penny’s character sheet
Penny’s spells

*DND Terms (much like science, the DND space is full of jargon, let me decode some things for you):

  • Proficiency: there are various things you can be proficient in, and it basically means you get to add your proficiency bonus to whatever rolls you make to use those things, the bonus is determined by your level (how experienced you are)
  • Ability Checks: roll a 20 sided die and add (or subtract) the number found in the skills box for whichever skill you’re rolling
  • Advantage: roll 2 dice instead of 1
  • Difficult Terrain: rough land that halves your speed as you travel over it
  • Druidic: a druid is a nature magic themed character
  • Spell slot: you get a certain number of allowed casts of each spell level (determined by power/difficulty) determined by your level, they reset after every “long rest” (8 hours of sleeping); cantrips are lower powered spells that can be cast without using a spell slot

Making Friends on the Bighorns

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My second month working in the Bighorn National Forest has meant becoming “friends” with a whole suite of new things. First and foremost, the list of species we’ve been given to guide our seed collection is slowly starting to take shape in front of me and my co intern in the mountains, Nick Gjording. We’re starting to connect the plants’ names, their appearance, and where they’re found (surprise, surprise, Erigeron speciosus, common name Aspen fleabane, is most often found in stands of aspen trees!). It may have taken a while but we’re getting to familiarity, though there are still many times where we have to take a plant specimen back with us to the office to get the opinion of the forest botanist (those needlegrass species just look so darn similar, and don’t get me started on trying to key out asters).

Asters blooming (left) and a failed attempt to key out a different Aster species (right)

The month of July has meant introduction to even more blooming plants as well. Getting farther on in the growing season means that we can look for more than just vegetation and finally have some flowers as reference (if you’ve ever successfully identified a plant you’ve never seen before just based on the leaves please show me your ways). But in come the flowers of plants like Chamerion angustifolium (fireweed) and Liatris punctata (dotted blazing star) and an increase of color on the mountain.

Liatris punctata
Pedicularis greonlandica
Asclepias speciosa
Some of my favorite colorful additions to the mountain

Getting into July has also come with realizing that we may not even meet some of the plants we were hoping to become friends with because the mountain range is just too high in elevation. Though this growing season has been more delayed than usual, thank goodness for the two canyons on the mountains for managing to be lower than 6000 feet. They have meant that we have already made our first seed collections of the field season.

Me collecting seed from Koeleria macrantha (June grass) in Tensleep Canyon

Time passing also brought an opportunity to get closer to my forest coworkers. That includes figuring out what random conversation starters to use during the many hours Nick and I spend driving around the forest looking for plants (though any conversations we begin are bound to get interrupted by some kind of plant sighting). We also had the opportunity to work on stream surveys and camp with the combination aquatics/botany crew working on the mountain.

Stream survey adventures at Big Willow Creek, ft. Alison Dooley, the forest botany tech, collecting some Carex to key out (right)

Getting later on in the summer also means some other friends are coming onto the mountains. In fact, a moose and her (maybe one month old) calf spent a whole afternoon near our stream survey area. They had a great time chomping down on the willows near the bank, which were only present thanks to the restoration work of the aquatics team. By the end of the work day, it almost felt like the moose and her calf were extra coworkers helping out with the surveys.

The newest employees at the Bighorn National Forest

July in Wyoming is also something special because it’s cowboy season. The past couple of weeks have seen the cows coming onto the mountains for grazing (in specific agreements with the Bighorn range department). This has already meant some extra friendly faces but also means impeded roads, and a more complicated scouting process. Being in the cowboy state may mean that we have to plan carefully to make sure we’re not entering a cow grazing area, but it also meant I had the opportunity to go to my first rodeo, which felt very Wyoming (and if you have the chance, watch some Indian Relay Races, you won’t be disappointed).

Shell Ranger Station
WYO Rodeo
Why did the cows cross the road? To get to the plants on the other side (the same can be said about botanists)

The warmer days have also brought bugs, some desirable and some not so much. The mosquitoes came out full force on our camping trips, and the flies are truly something else. I was not expecting that one protocol I’d need to develop during my internship would be how to get all of the flies out of the car when we’re leaving an area, but Nick and I are becoming experts. Arguably, a highlight of one of our weeks was going to an almost 10,000 foot high ridge, where the flies hadn’t invaded yet. Countering the mosquitos and flies are countless butterflies, beetles, and bees. In fact, there’s nothing like a quick break from looking at plants to watch the bumblebees do their thing.

Our high elevation reprieve
The cutest creatures on the mountain

So as this month comes to a close, I reflect on how many new friends I’ve made, and look forward to the ones that are coming next.

Me with some of the friends I made in Tongue River Canyon

The Hardest Game of I Spy You’ll Ever Play

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Imagine spread in front of you is an open I Spy book. You look at the list of objects you’re supposed to be finding in the chaos and … you don’t even know what any of the objects look like. This is kind of how it has felt for me transitioning from the dry deserts of New Mexico and Utah to the flora in the Alpine Meadows and stands of Pine in Wyoming.

The Sandia Mountains of NM (left), Mount Timpanogos in UT (middle), and Tongue River Canyon in WY (right)

A whole new suite of plant species spreads in front of me that I am somehow supposed to identify, find large enough populations of, and collect seed from. For the past weeks I’ve been searching for specific plants (alongside my co intern in the Big Horn Mountains, Nick Gjording), only a couple of which I’ve seen in the wild before. That’s not even mentioning the grasses that make up half our species list that blend in nicely to the background of the I Spy page in front of us.

My time so far in the Bighorn National Forest has been spent driving to hopeful plant locations or desperately scanning out the car window (remember those in car I spy games when your sibling would inexplicitly say “I spy with my little eye, something green”? … yeah). When the time comes to get outside, and I hopelessly scan the ground for the plants on our list.

During the furious scanning back and forth, between checking grass ligules and looking at the hairs on yellow asters, something amazing happens. When you look so closely at a defined area, you start to notice all the little things that are so easy to pass over. It’s like finding a tiny figure of your favorite dog breed or seeing the cutest rubber ducky on the I Spy page. Some of the highlights in our adventures include spying a light pink Lupin plant (they’re normally a dark blue-ish purple here), a patch of liverworts (which, as a Bryophyte enthusiast myself, was especially exciting), and a multitude of interesting new-to-me plants. I even spied some Yucca, a plant familiar from my “hometown” experiences I didn’t even realize grew this far North.

My co-intern caught in the act of photographing the pink lupin right after I did (upper left); a very exciting patch of liverworts, species Marchantia polymorpha (upper right); the cute white flowers of Apocynum androsaemifolium (bottom left); and my familiar friend: Yucca glauca (bottom right)

And occasionally, a miracle happens, and you manage to find a suitable population! In the weeks of planning and scouting that have already happened, despite how early in the growing season we are (especially in those higher elevation areas) coming up on those populations is a satisfying feeling like no other.

A field of wildflowers on the Bighorns and example of what we end up looking at all day

In one case, we spent a couple of days searching for Eriogonum umbellatum, only finding one or two occasional individuals. Then, within the next few days we came across two independent and large populations; all that hard work paid off. Later I’ll get to return to these populations, hopeful that nature will have taken its course, and everything will have aligned so the plants can have bloomed, been pollinated, and be producing seed. Hopeful, I write down the location of the population and cross my fingers that I won’t miss that slice of time when the seeds are ready for us to collect.

In this real-time, real-life I Spy book, I’ve somehow managed to take a list of unknowns in the large and very green spread in front of me and find what I was looking for, and even more that I wasn’t expecting.

But the season is only beginning. Imagine that in your book more frustration, excitement, and unexpected finds lay in front of you. As the season progresses, you know that things will only get easier; that list of unknowns will slowly but surely become more familiar and understood. The list at the bottom of your I Spy page is no longer full of nebulous, unrecognizable words but a list of familiar and perhaps even crossed off treasures. You’ve now completed maybe the first page of the I Spy book that you’ll continue to work through for the rest of the field season, and you can’t wait to intimately know that crucially important list of objects, their unique locations, and the beauty that surrounds it all.  

A rare moment of me NOT looking at the ground or taking pictures of plants courtesy of Nick