This month has been filled to the brim with new plants and new places. Since the last blog post Sky and I have kinda settled into the position and have been getting into a groove. Most days we end up going to the Helena side of the forest so we can get plants in a large area which means we’ve been doing A LOT of driving, but hey I get to listen to my music more, so that’s a plus!

Our month started with us going to the Rocky Mountain Front to meet up with the head botanist in the Helena office to help look for a rare orchid that should be in the area. However, in order to get to the right spot we had to go off-trail and really get into the thicker parts of the forest. It was some of the most fun I had on the job! It felt like I was really exploring the forest that I’m stationed in and it made every plant that we found even more exciting than usual. In the end we were able to find the orchid we were looking for along with some other ones!

The week after our trip with Nate we spent some time helping out the trails crew and sprayed some weeds around some campgrounds. Wasn’t my favorite work to do (especially since we ended up spraying a lot of Ox-eyed Daisies, which I didn’t know were invasive until then), but we had a cookout for lunch so it wasn’t all too bad!

The rest of the month was spent doing our usual survey work and seed collections. It’s been interesting seeing how our populations change throughout the season and then seeing how these plants spread their seeds. This job has made me so much more conscious of the different stages of a plants life and how differences in climate can affect the timing of when it’s seeds are released. The higher temperatures in Helena along with the forest fires in the area has made it so many of the plants in that part of the forest are much farther along than the ones that we see closer to the ranger station. This has sometimes been a source of some frustrations since it narrows down the already short window for collecting from some species, but it has also allowed us to collect from some species sooner than we would be able to if we just stayed close to the ranger station.

Overall it has been another good month of my time in Montana, and I’m excited to see what this next month brings!

This first month in Montana has been eventful since the moment I arrived. On my way into the ranger station I ran into a dog that was walking around in the middle of the highway near Monarch and my co-worker Ana and I brought it back so we could call the number on his collar and get him out of harms way. His name was Homie and he was such a lovely dog! He was nothing but sweet the entire time, and even hopped into the truck without any problems! Some other people at the ranger station were heading towards the address on Homie’s collar, so they took him back to his owners.

My first few weeks here was spent doing restoration work in several different locations. It was my first time in Montana so I wasn’t fully prepared for how beautiful the landscape was! Every site had a great view of the mountains, which just seemed to go on and on and it was nice to be able to relax during our lunch breaks and enjoy the view.

On the third week Sky and I spent a lot of time going over the plant list that we were given and finding the flowering times so we could build a rough plan for how we will be collecting the seeds. We also spent a lot of time going through training, which was a bit of a drag, but meant that we were able to go out on or own and practice our keying to see if there were any target species some areas suggested by our boss Victor.

Finally, we were able to meet with the Forest Botanist Nate and he helped us with keying out grasses and learning all of the specific terminology that comes with it. We made sure to go out to different sites to gain more experience and I feel much more confident now in my plant id skills than I did before. We were also able to join him and another botany tech searching for some rare orchids in the Rocky Mountain Front!

So far this season has been filled with many different experiences that I didn’t expect going into it, and I only hope that this season continues to surpass my expectations.