This isn't Massachusetts anymore.

Coming to live and work at Kalaupapa National Historical Park has been a great way to ease back in to mainstream American life. Kalaupapa is a tiny community with a unique history located on a very isolated peninsula on the Island of Molokai, “the most Hawaiian island.” I applied for the Conservation and Land Management Internship while finishing up my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco. Having lived here at Kalaupapa for 4 months now, I can’t imagine a better way to transition back to the American culture and workplace.

The history here is special, not least of all because it is a living history. Beginning in 1866 the Kalaupapa peninsula was the site of the forced isolation of Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) patients. Since 1969 patients have been free to come and go; the patients that remain here today do so by choice.

I came to the park to resurvey permanent monitoring plots that were put in place in 1995 to monitor the growth and vigor of native trees and associated understory and overstory vegetation in a remnant tropical dryland forest. Tropical dryland forests are among the most disturbed ecosystems on the planet. In Hawaii only 10% of these native forests remain, and even these are threatened with conversion to other species.

A wiliwili (Erythrina sandwicensis) tree is the center of a permanent monitoring plot.

I am continually amazed at the dominance of non-native invasive species in Hawaii. In the northeastern US, where I call home, invasive plant species in forests are a relatively small concern. Here elevation bands of entire islands

are completely overrun by non-native invasive plants. This is compounded by the loss of pollinator species, and overgrazing by feral ungulates. It makes me appreciate and want to protect the mainland US with its large patches of intact native plant communities.

I’ve had several great opportunities for diversion from my main project. I attended the Hawaiian Conservation Conference in lieu of attending the Grand Canyon Workshop. I was also able to attend NPS wildland firefighter training. On a day-to-day basis I have helped with a variety of other projects at the park including seed collecting and processing, constructing fencing to protect native plants from feral ungulates, and digitizing maps and aerial photos of the park.

Lu'au pig roasting pit with the cliffs of Molokai in the background.

It is a small community down here, but people have been very welcoming. We play volleyball twice a week, and there are very competitive nightly cribbage games- don’t get skunked! We even started a book club. One recent highlight was the community lu’au. I got to help butcher and clean the stomach, intestines, heart, and other inside bits of a pig that was cooked underground overnight. The next night we feasted and danced the night away.

My mentor has been great. He’s very open to suggestions and ideas that I have. He’s been a great help when I need advice and resources at work, but he has also given me the leeway and freedom to explore and do things in my own way. He has opened his home to me and welcomed me to spend time with his family on several occasions. I have gotten a lot of good advice on career options and grad-school options from my mentor and many other people at the park. I’ve also learned a lot about the native Hawaiian perspective on the environment and management of the land. They’ve been here a lot longer than we have and the knowledge they hold could be used in resource management much more effectively.

All in all this internship has been a wonderful opportunity for me and I am very grateful. I would never have imagined I would be working on a tropical forest ecology research project in Hawaii, eating papaya and mangos all summer long. Then again I never would have thought I’d live in a rural village in Morocco and learn Arabic and Tamazight. Life is strange- time to embrace it and go play some volleyball!

-Nathan Johnson

meadow at black rock hot spring

Coming from the lush, green, deciduous forests of Kentucky where every step outside reveals another dribbling creek or hanging vine to push aside, I wasn’t quite sure how I would fare in sagebrush country. I remember back to my first day…I met my mentor and fellow intern and we headed out to familiarize ourselves with the surrounding area of northeastern California and into northwestern Nevada. The dirt roads we followed were splashed with the colors of spring wildflowers: deep purple delphinium, violet lupins, and all the colors of the sunset captured in the Indian paintbrush. We saw pronghorn antelope run up and over the mountain mahogany covered hills and Jack rabbits dart out from under the greasewood in front of the rig. But it wasn’t the wildlife that sold me on this strange new place. It was the wildness of the place itself.
It didn’t take long to be mesmerized by the vastness of this place. This desert. Sure, we’ve got “country” in the South, but this is a new definition of the word for me. This is the Wild West and never before had I looked out over a seemingly never-ending landscape. Never before had I been to a place where I can stand on top of a mountain and fail to see one glimmer of human civilization. That is rare beauty.
Just as I was surprised by my new found love and respect of the desert, every day at the BLM Surprise Field Office has been, well, a surprise! Looking back on the last 3 months, I am amazed by the variety of projects I have been able to participate in as a CLM intern here in Cedarville, CA. Each day I anticipate another amazing opportunity awaits…and to think I still have three more months to go!
As a plant enthusiast, I was especially enthused to find that the first couple of months would be spent searching for rare plants in the Black Rock Desert, specifically within the Jackson Mountain range. This has been our longest ongoing project so far. The work week usually consisted of spending 3 to 4 days out in the field at a time.

View from the top--looking down on potential rare plant habitat in the Jacksons.

We most often camped at our favorite canyon, McGill, because of a deep pool of fresh spring water we could bathe in after a long day of work. Once we located and identified the plants, we collected data such as population estimates, habitat type, and exact location using a GPS unit. More recently, we have been analyzing the data by making maps using GIS and preparing reports.
As I said before, I have been part of a wide variety of projects. So far I’ve seen real cowboys round-up horses with a helicopter at a wild horse gathering, was dropped off at the top of a mountain and backpacked for 3 days on an aspen stand monitoring project, and most recently, went to Burning Man 2009!

A rainbow on the playa pre-Burning Man.

Burning Man is held in the Black Rock Desert on the largest playa in North America (the dry bed of ancient Lake Lohontan) and is part of 1.2 million acres of NCA managed by the BLM. For only a week out of the year, Black Rock City, the home of Burning Man, becomes the fourth largest city of Nevada. Burners (attendees of the festival) live by the “Leave No Trace” motto and are encouraged by the event to incorporate green principles into their everyday lives in the “default world”.
One of the many things that impressed and inspired me at the event was the fact that not one trashcan was provided to attendees and yet very rarely would there be a piece of trash on the ground! FORTY-THREE THOUSAND PEOPLE AND NOT ONE PIECE OF TRASH?! I find the implications of this phenomenon to be incredibly powerful. All burners are highly encouraged never to create M.O.O.P. (material out of place) and the community follows these golden rules for the most part.
That’s where my job came in! I worked with a team of volunteers as an environmental compliance officer to ensure that these principles the event holds dear were constantly in practice. Each day we patrolled Black Rock City ensuring that no serious M.O.O.P. violations were occurring. For example, gray water is an issue that all camps/villages have to deal with. Some have elaborate contraptions set up so that their gray water evaporates over the course of the week. However, sometimes there are issues of gray water leakage or dumping on the playa which is prohibited. Our job was to make sure these things weren’t happening.

The Man!

Needless to say, I saw some amazing, bizarre and beautiful things while protecting the environment and educating people on how to be a green burner. And just as I feel I did my part to spread the word on sustainable activity on the playa, I venture to say I was even inspired and enlightened by the event myself.
So here I am with three two months to go and I continue to learn something new every day. This internship has been one of the great experiences of my life and I cannot wait to see what else is in store for me at the BLM Surprise Field Office!

Alecia Brantley, BLM field Office, Pinedale, Wyoming

Within a few weeks of arriving here, I was entrusted with the job of planning and implementing the monitoring of the endangered Texas Trailing Phlox (Phlox nivalis subsp. texensis) reintroduction project. There are 17 plots, each originally planted with about 100 plants back in 2003. Today, most of them have died but monitoring continues for the survivors. I have really enjoyed working on this project because I’m working autonomously and making my own decisions. I have one supervisor that gave me an outline of what I need to accomplish, but she is there for me if I have any questions. For the monitoring, up to this point, only survivorship trends have been analyzed. However, plant sizes have been recorded since they were planted. I have taken it upon myself to figure out how these measurements can be utilized, possibly in conjunction with prescribed burn dates. Did I mention that this species of phlox can only survive if it is burned dead to the ground every few years? I love that!

The work has been very rewarding. For most of July and August we had very little rain, but by the end of August we had several torrential storms. Because the phlox only blooms in March and April, I had given up hope of ever seeing it bloom. But, with these storms, several of the plants must have gotten confused because they had numerous blossoms on them, even in September! They were pretty pink little things with five perfect little petals.

Working for NPS is giving me a great experience to learn how a federal agency works. Resources management is extremely important here for several reasons. There are oil companies on the preserve land because the companies have the mineral rights. Logging takes place on land directly adjacent to ours. In fact, most of the preserve land used to be timber land. Also, fire is ecologically required in most parts of the preserve, so planning prescribed burns is an essential and large part of the park’s infrastructure. Our resource manager told me that when he worked at Bryce Canyon NP, there wasn’t as much need or a challenge for him because the park was founded in 1924 and all the problems have already been worked out. But the Big Thicket is another story. It became a national preserve in 1974 and has such complicated resource issues that our resource manager is kept constantly busy. He says he enjoys the challenge it here. I thought his was an interesting perspective on choosing an agency or company for a career. Even though he held the same position, the two parks provided much different kinds and amounts of work.