I forced myself to stop lamenting about missing this or that about a month ago, choosing instead to fully enjoy the remainder of my time in, arguably, the most beautiful place on Earth (Lake Tahoe).  Then, I knelt down to cut open some seeds. Somehow, when I stood up, August was just about over.

As I swam this past weekend, staring at the light dancing in the water, I couldn’t help but get a bit wistful at how fast its all changing. The chill from the water lingers for a bit longer after drying off now. The aspens are starting to show tinges of yellow, heavier layers have replaced t-shirts on my morning bike ride to work, and believe it or not, I got stuck in a snowstorm on my hike last weekend. For me, there’s always a bit of melancholy that comes along with the waning days of summer. In addition to summer being my favorite season, my heart breaks thinking about my favorite off-work activity (reading on the beach until I get hot, jumping in the lake, drying off, repeat) slipping through my fingers. At the same time, watching the seasons change in an entirely new way is so captivating. Another, admittedly much sillier, upside to this season of my life is that this is the first fall I will be “harvesting” anything, which really makes all the seasonal festivities make much more sense.

With autumn now looming over us, Gerardo and I have been very busy, driving around all around the basin in search populations ideal for seed collection. We have shifted into spending all our time scouting in preparation for September, when the whole Forest Service botany crew will begin seed collecting. Suddenly, everything seems to be in seed. Populations we’ve been monitoring all summer are now in fruit, which has been so exciting to watch. Finding more populations after scouting all summer has become challenging, but this makes each new location on our map a bit more rewarding.

We got our first taste of seed collecting last week at Spooner Lake; a new parking lot has been approved for construction in a patch of forest, meaning all plant populations (and their seed bank) will be lost from that immediate area. Because of these unique circumstances, we were able to collect all of the seeds from some of our target species rather than the standard 10% or 20%, saving them from an asphalt-covered doom.  We have yet to clean the seeds, but we estimate that we collected roughly 15,000 seeds! I listened to a great audiobook and spent ~10 hours in a forest plucking seeds off plants. I cannot fathom a better workday.

As the end of summer creeps closer, I find myself more at peace with the change than in past years. While the incoming colder weather may spell the end of my dearly-beloved beach days, it also marks the beginning of the most rewarding part of my internship yet, seed collection! Most of all, I’m looking forward to the idiom, “you reap what you sow,” applying to my life in a somewhat literal sense.

              A couple of weeks ago, I cried about missing the summer storms in the Northeast. Not to say I don’t appreciate the constant 75-degree sunny days, but sometimes I long for the kind of rain that pounds on the windows, and thunder that shakes the house. The next day at work, it started to thunder for the first time since I’ve been here and stopped right after we took out lunch break. That day really cemented the importance of manifestation in the workplace for me.

              Lack of torrential downpours aside, the field season has been going great! The botany crew here at LTBMU has been finishing up our invasive plant removal for the season (aside from when bull thistle rears its ugly head…) and moving towards surveys. In our survey plots, we identify and record every plant species we find. Initially, this was really overwhelming, but it’s been a great way to learn more plant IDs. Our surveys have been concentrated in the burn scars from the Caldor fire in 2021 and are one way to document how the forest is regenerating from this high intensity fire. Although invasive plants have been popping up in patches here and there, the forest seems to be regenerating well, with many native species, like fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium) and quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) gaining a foothold. In addition to documenting regeneration, surveying has helped Gerardo and I find many seed-source populations of target species, like spreading dogbane (Apocynum androsaemifolium) and Anderson’s thistle (Cirsium andersonii). We have also surveyed for several rare and sensitive species, like the veiny water lichen (Peltigera gowardii) and Bolander’s candle moss (Bruchia bolanderi). These surveys involved a lot of crouching in streams and laying down in bogs, but it was worth it to map these cute little plants.

              Last week, we took a break from surveys and seed scouting to work on an exciting collaboration with the Washoe tribe. On a stretch of beach on Skunk Harbor, one of Lake Tahoe’s most scenic shorelines, we constructed an enclosure for Tahoe yellow cress (Rorippa subumbellata). Then, within the enclosure (and surrounding area), we planted 300 small plugs of Tahoe yellow cress grown by the Washoe tribe. Hopefully, these little seedlings will go on to produce a thriving population. Tahoe yellow cress is an endangered species endemic to Tahoe, meaning it grows on the beaches of Lake Tahoe and nowhere else in the world. This little member of the mustard family is primarily threatened by recreation (trampling), so ideally our enclosure will allow the yellow cress to reestablish in Skunk Harbor. After finishing up the planting, we squeezed a quick swim into our lunch break.

              After a few weeks of surveys, scouting, and planting, I definitely feel more settled in. While I miss lush, stormy summers with firefly lit evenings scored by katydids, I’m finding new things to love about summer here in the basin: the sweet, caramel-like smell of Jeffery pine bark (Pinus jefferyi), beaches with perfect turquoise water, freezing alpine lakes surrounded with wildflowers, and the little groves of aspens that remind me of the trees back home.

Last spring, when I decided on the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit for my CLM location, the reality of moving across the country had not yet occurred to me. I was just excited to explore a beautiful place I’d never been! Aside from a couple b’nai mitzvah when I was younger, I’ve never spent much time on the West Coast. As a third generation New Yorker, its nothing short of treason to think about moving out west. The night before my flight, after a healthy amount of crying and hugging my best friends, I started worrying about leaving them, the Northeast, and all its familiar plants.

On my first day in Tahoe, I went for a bike ride to the Forest Service office to get to know the route. I took in the views of the snowcapped mountains, the cool, dry air, and the fields of wildflowers. Smiling and feeling a bit more settled, I rounded the corner and was immediately too close to the second bear I’d seen in my life (the first was as I drove into town). After getting some distance from the bear, I had a little moment of panic, followed by concerns that I’d be late on my first day of work because of a bear in my path.

Thankfully, that problem hasn’t come up (yet). For most of my first week, I worked with the rest of the botany crew to restore a meadow along Burke Creek. With the help of the crew, I quickly began recognizing invasive plants and their native lookalikes. Target species for removal included spotted knapweed (Centaurea stoebe), sulfur cinquefoil (Potentilla recta), and what quickly became my least favorite plant of all time, bull thistle (Cirsium vulgare). If you have never had the misfortune of laying eyes on Cirsium vulgare, picture the most hostile-looking weed you can, covered in spines that end up lining your work gloves. Mess with the bull thistle, get the thorns. We cut off and bagged any bull thistle flower heads before uprooting the plant, ensuring no viable seeds would enter the seed bank this year. As I identified and pulled out weed after weed, I started to feel a bit more rooted in my new environment.

My co-intern, Gerardo, and I then began working with one of our target species, whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), by scouting for viable seed collection trees. Whitebark pine is listed as a federally threatened species, largely due to an invasive fungal pathogen called white pine blister rust (Cronartium ribicola). In our surveys, we are looking for healthy, mature whitebark pines within infected stands. These individuals have likely been exposed to the fungus and remain uninfected, indicating the potential for resistant offspring. Whitebark pines primarily live in the subalpine zone (9,000 to 11,000 ft in elevation), so we drove a forest service Silverado up into the mountains to find them. Aside from the initial terror of driving a federally-owned truck on rocky dirt roads and a touch of elevation sickness, the scouting was a great way to see the Basin; the views from the peaks were incredible.

 As my second week at LTBMU comes to a close, I am so grateful to my past self for making this decision without any consideration of future anxieties. The Basin is one of the most beautiful places I’ve been in my life and every day I get to explore more of it. I am so excited for the rest of my field season! As much as I miss my friends, getting to know the LTBMU botany crew has been so fun and reassuring. I also suspect I may lure some of my friends here with my daily pictures of our field sites. To quote a response to my field photo from this morning, “ur lying and evil and I hate you and im legit gonna look for flights rn. is there a lake tahoe airport? where does one fly into.”

Despite my fair share of bull-thistle-inflicted stab wounds, I am starting to fall in love with South Lake Tahoe, California. I’m definitely not ready to say West Coast best coast, but West Coast…equally great coast!