July went by in a flash. Time flies when your brain is preoccupied with worries about nearby wildfires. The month greeted us with a week of 105 degree days, making fourth of July plans slip away and canceling our pre-scheduled scouting trip to the Feather River District, due to a rapidly spreading fire that sprang up near Oroville, where the temperatures reached 114 degrees. 

Along with the heat arrived the sudden surge of work we had to do as seeds were quickly reaching maturation. We abruptly picked up the pace and had no choice but to begin collections in addition to being vigilant with scouting and mapping and correctly identifying pesky lupines before they all go to seed (Sam and I basically memorized the entire key to the Lupinus genus from how much we had to repeat the process). Inevitably we were going to miss the collection window for a few of our populations, but we tried our best to set our priorities based on each species’ phenology. 

One of our top priorities was Beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax). Despite its deceiving name and appearance, Beargrass is not in fact a grass, but a perennial herb in the monocot Melanthiaceae family, which more closely resembles lilies. Beargrass is one of the most culturally significant plants on our list, as indigenous groups in the area have been utilizing parts of the plant for weaving and food for many years. In addition to cultural significance, Beargrass was at the top of our list for being incredibly well adapted to frequent burning, due to its hardy underground rhizomes. A rhizome, unlike roots, has nodes along it, allowing the plant to reproduce asexually instead of relying on pollination. This, however, could also be a part of the reason why we often come across a population that has not sent up flowers during the typical bloom period— instead of reliably blooming every year, Beargrass flowering time can be difficult to predict, as conditions need to be just right, and other reproduction methods are available to them. With all this in mind, it’s easy to understand our excitement once we finally came across a substantial flowering population! After plenty of dead-end scouting, Sam and I found one massive population beginning to fruit, and got to collect seed from this important species.

Following the Beargrass collection, there were many days spent making our way down gnarly mountain “roads” in hopes of finding more plants on our list before the seeds disperse. Last week this seemingly casual form of exploration, a routine in which Sam and I had become quite comfortable with, gave us a reminder that we should always be prepared for the adventurous nature of fieldwork. By ‘adventure’, of course, I mean all of the thrilling unexpected obstacles that get thrown at you as you spend more time in remote areas. The wake-up call came in the form of our first time getting our truck stuck in the mud, deep in the forest with no cell service, all while wildfires kept rescuers busy and hours away from helping. We had become too comfortable testing the limits of our truck. We had successfully passed through many sketchy-looking obstacles with it— what was one more tiny creek?

We got home, eventually, after several hours of waiting for help, walking around to try to get phone signal, and staring at the vibrant swirls of smoke in the sky. The Park fire had started a couple of days before near Chico, and was already reaching 100,000 acres around this time. All day we had been watching as the sky morphed into strange colors, with large plumes visible in the distance. The way the setting sun interacted with the smoke produced mesmerizing light distortions, illuminating the landscape in an eerie blue-green light as the sky remained dark orange.

A firefighter was eventually able to come pull us out of the mud, after dealing with yet another small fire that had popped up in the forest. We got out, and slowly made our way back home, driving carefully on winding mountain roads in the dark for an hour and a half. The whole way back we reflected on the incident, and gained a greater sense of respect and caution for the chaos that comes with peak fire season in northern California. Next time, we’ll get out and check how deep the mud is before attempting to drive through…

I’m off to a good, but very busy, start to this internship. It has been nearly a month of training, moving across the country (North Carolina to California!), settling in, and having an intense crash course on California botany. 

Having been an east coast, big city person all of my life, arriving out west was a surreal experience. After a busy week of training in Chicago, I flew from Chicago to Phoenix, then Phoenix to Reno, then had my Forest Service supervisor (Andy) pick me up in Reno and drive me the two hours to what is now the quaint little town I live in: Quincy, CA. Andy gave me all the local facts as we made our way through rural mountain roads to reach the ranger station: Quincy has a population of around 5,000 people, and is the largest town in Plumas county. Which means, despite being a very small town, there’s a fair amount of restaurants and events that happen here, because it’s where everyone in the county goes for activities. I arrived at the Forest Service housing around 10 pm, got some much needed rest, and then promptly started my first day of work two days later, that following Monday.

The first week of work mainly consisted of Andy showing me and my co-intern (Sam) around the forest, giving us a tour and also teaching us a lot about California plants. We drove all around to different areas of the forest, hopping out of the truck whenever Andy got excited about a roadside plant for us to try to guess an ID.

Later in the week we started more serious ID practice, using both the Jepson manual and a more specific local flora, to brush up on our keying skills. We walked through all kinds of habitat; rocky outcroppings on mountain tops (where we found some rare plants!), meadows, wetlands, mixed conifer forests. Some really cool species of note we saw in the first couple of weeks include: some HUGE Douglas firs (Pseudotsuga menziesii), Sugar pines (Pinus lambertiana, which produces the largest pine cones in the world), plenty of really cool myco-heterotrophic plants including Phantom orchids (Cephalanthera austiniae), Coral root (Corallorhiza maculata), Pinedrops (Pterospora andromedea), and more.

The myco-heterotrophic plants often have such striking colors to them because they don’t produce chlorophyll, which is what makes most plants characteristically green. Instead, these plants are essentially parasitic, taking nutrients from nearby tree roots by tapping into the mycorrhizal fungi associated with the tree.

Once we got a little acquainted with the plants here in northern California, Andy had us shadow him for a few days to help out with rare plant surveys so that we could continue to practice our ID skills and also have a lot more exposure to help remember all the plants we learned. I was the one transcribing one of our surveys, and we got over 150 different species! I am surprised at how well Sam and I are picking things up, but it still is a lot to remember, and I’m sure it’ll take some time before all the information really sinks in.

Last week, our third, we finally got our own Forest Service truck, which meant Sam and I were able to start going out on our own to begin scouting for plants on our native species list. We got to it immediately, because a few of our species are already beginning to go to seed. It’s been a lot of work trying to organize and plan everything in an efficient way, but so far we’ve developed a good system for staying organized with our data and seeds, and we’re reminding ourselves it’ll only get easier as we get more practice. 

That’s month one in summary! It’s been overwhelming at times but overall very exciting and rewarding.