An early pic of an aster with the camera strap showing!

A later picture of a pea-family plant, note there is no strap in the picture!

This week I’m actually leaving my internship in Rawlins WY and heading home to Natick Massachusetts.  I’m excited to go home and see trees and fall colors, but I’m going to miss the open spaces and the glut of wildflowers (in the spring/early summer).  I spent a lot of time taking pictures of flowers, and I think I got better as the summer went on.  At first, I kept taking pictures with my finger over the lens or the camera strap in the shot, but I improved.

It’s a good thing that I got better at taking pictures because I saw some awesome plants. Here is a picture of me with Penstemon haydenii which is an endangered species and in Wyoming it’s only found in this one locality. We spent the day trudging back and forth across the sand dunes counting each plant. It was tiring, but well worth it to see and monitor such a pretty and interesting plant.

I’m going to miss seeing all these wildflowers, but I won’t miss riding around in a truck for up to six hours a day so I can see them!  The flora is so different in Wyoming and Massachusetts, but I like them both.  Wyoming may be wide open spaces, but if you focus in on the little things around you  it’s easy to appreciate the flora.

Another thing I enjoyed was collecting Limber pine cones for genetic research.  One person would take the pole trimmer and cut out some cones and another person (usually me) scampers around and finds where the pinecones fall, counts them, and then puts them in a burlap bag.  It was messy, because limber pine cones are extremely sappy (kind of like this post).  I wish I had a picture of these cones to show you, but I was too sticky to take out my camera.

– Elizabeth O’Leary

Rawlins, WY

BLM