Hello to all, I am writing my first blog entry for my internship for the BLM in Rock Springs, WY.  I’m late to post, but I figure late is better than never…right?

It has been 4 weeks to the day since I arrived in glorious Rock Springs from the Pacific Northwest.  As I am a man who very much loves water, trees, and the ecological diversity within those areas, Rock Springs, at first sight was distressful.  First thing that popped in my head as the sprawling oil plants creeped over the horizon, a high influx of large trucks appeared on the road, and I hadn’t seen a stand of trees (or much green at all, aside from the sprawling dull green of sagebrush) in two and a half hours was, “What have I done?”

Well, I can tell you all in confidence and truth that I am really warming up to this place. I am happy to experience the new environment, culture, and opportunites that Rock Springs will provide me. I’ve found the bike shop, the grocery store, the laundr-o-mat, the rec. center (with a climbing wall and full size swimming pool), and the Bitter Creek Brewery! Now I just need to buy a moutain bike so I can join some group rides around the area, which I found pretty easily by talking to a few folks with bikes.   

More about my actual job- I am acting as an Invasive Weed Inventory Tech. (I guess is a good designation for my position), and though I have yet to perform much inventorying I have been in the field many times with my supervisor, a botanist, as well as the fish & wildlife guy, a hydrologist, and a range specialist. Much of our days have been spent observing riparian areas (mostly creeks and springs) that are either involved in reclamation projects or proposed to be. As the weed inventory intern, I have been asking Jim (my supervisor) what pretty much every plant is that I couldn’t figure out myself, and learning quite a bit.  After just two weeks of reading, observing, and studying the plants a bit I am confident in identifying the local invasives in question. I am currently taking a few free GIS courses online, which is a nice perk through the BLM as an intern as well!

As more interns have arrived here, I’m starting to feel a bit more at home and at ease with my small yet drastic change in lifestyle.  As this is my first post, I’m keeping it short. I’m also a mycology dork so here are a few really nice pictures of lichens. There will be many more photos in the future, you just have to wait. Good luck to all, have fun and learn something. 🙂

Didn't get a chance to identify these...yet!

mucho diversidad

Xanthoria elegans (I think)

 Daniel Revillini

Rock Springs, Wy

BLM-CBG Intern

 This is beef country.

In addition to the grazing, there is also a fair bit of oil and gas drilling and some bentonite mining in this corner of Wyoming. Cody is located in NW Wyoming at the base of the Rocky Mountains at the Eastern entrance of Yellowstone on the North Fork of the Shoshone River. While the town itself is full of trees and now tourists, the surrounding range is sparsely populated other than by sagebrush and grass.

In the Cody BLM Field Office, I am interning under the direction of the biologist. Major projects for this summer include sage grouse monitoring, fence inventory as part of a pronghorn migration analysis, installing fence reflectors to reduce sage grouse collisions, rare plant inventory, and sage grouse.

My internship began in April while it was still fairly wintery. We began with sage grouse monitoring. In April my day started well before dawn. We drove in the early morning darkness to sage grouse leks so that we were there just as dawn broke and the grouse began strutting. Watching dawn break on the range is really stunning. Everything wakes up slowly with the increasing light and warmth. The grouse begin to stir, erect their tails, fluff up their breasts, and begin to use their air sacs to produce their otherworldly mating calls. The sagebrush landscape is stunning drenched in the reds and yellows of dawn. As the day becomes light pronghorn, rabbits, and wild horses begin to stir and can be seen across the landscape.

May was divided among different projects. When the weather was good (when it wasn’t snowing) I worked on completing a fence inventory in a pronghorn migration corridor. Unlike deer and elk, pronghorn tend not to jump over fences, but rather kneel and squeeze under the fence. Unfortunate for pronghorn, the Big Horn Basin has a long history of sheep grazing and a quite a bit of sheep fence constructed of impenetrable net wire or several barb wire strands close to the ground. Over the years most of the grazing has shifted to cattle, but the sheep fences remain in some areas. The fence inventory was an excellent opportunity for me to really get to know the field office and the range. Most of the vegetation was still dormant in May(or under snow), but I was still able to begin to familiarize myself with the local flora and fauna. I also got real good at using the GPS, to collect fence corners for the GIS database, and using topographic maps to locate fence lines, some long since removed.

Jason Clark
Cody, WY
BLM

Blog 1

Selected log excerpts:

Day 1

May 27th

This is Amazing.  Leaving Anchorage, from sea level, fields of mountains rise .  Out and expansive.  Going north, an eastern sun checkerboards the slopes white and black.  Sharps ridges and steep slopes provide the contrast.  The sun is just rising.  From 30,000 ft they are nothing but sheep.  Mnt. Mickinley shepards the flock from far above.  May still looks like winter.

The sheep disperse.  Pebbled lakes star the flats, rivers add stripes.  The hand that made these was not concerned with order.  This feels like the frontier.

I am changing my unknown to my discovered.

There are 17 people on my flight to Nome through Kotzebue, 1/10 full.  It’s weighted down with the necessities, food, goods, mail, someone’s new bike.  There’s no other way.

We fly up, over the Yukon River, through the interior, just past Nome and into the arctic circle.  Am I supposed to feel anything other than the novelty of so-far-north?  Above the Seward Peninsula, the Kotzebue sound is still iced and cold.  This is the Arctic Ocean.  The land stretches out brown with frostbite.  Kotzebue lies at the end of the longest coldest finger-no roads to the mainland.  Few depart at the Alaska Airlines hangar, their breaths tell the temperature.  US mail and cargo is unloaded.  Only 11 continue to Nome.This is still winter.

Leaving Kotzebue I see the town’s length, shorter than the runway and only three blocks deep.  I’m told Nome, just 30 minutes south and west, is a fraction larger.  Before we get high above the clouds that have formed in the ‘warming’ of the day, we’re south of the circle and above the Seward Peninsula.  A snow-blanket full of spring holes covers tundra, hills, mountains, and blurs the coastline.  There are no trees, little life.  I will get a second spring.

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Day 2

May 28th

I’ve been here in Nome for 36 hours.  Like any experience that comes with a place it is hard to put to words.  A first description I would give would only be a first impression unto you and thus temper the rest.  Each detail is only part of the whole, and the order they come is no particular indication of importance or significance.  That being said, I like Nome.  The people I have met have been nice.  They smile and say hello, wave from their trucks, shake your hand well.  As a point of reference there are only 3,500 of them, most are native Alaskans.  Children are everywhere, on bikes, playing basketball, walking unaccompanied.  As for the adults, most are busy, walking here or driving there.  Few sit and watch.  There are tourists, not many of them but they come for the birds.  I don’t know much about the birds but I’ve heard there are a lot of them, and there must be because this is a very long way to come.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks has a satellite campus here in Nome, known as the Northwest Campus.  In some regard or another I will be working with their Reindeer Research Program and the BLM, but how is not yet clear.  I’m living in the University Bunkhouse, 208A East Kings Plaza, for the moment alone.  There are three bunk rooms and master bed room with, what I would suspect are, Greg Finstadt’s belongings (more on him after I meet him).  There are maps on the wall, guns in the closet, couches, pots and pans and a fridge with, until today, little more than reindeer medicine in it.  It has been well lived in and as long as there’s kitchen and a bed its good enough for me.I’m excited here.  Now that I’m here there is nothing to lose by being fully here.  Exploring town, discovering all of the new, living everything is fun.  Nothing new is ever dull.  I’m enthusiastic about being here.  This is not just a work experience, it is an Alaksa experience, a too-far-north experience, a new-place-and-people experience, a learning experience, a living experience.  The work I will do will constitute a significant part of my time here, but it is just a fraction.  While I’m tentative to predict anything, I’m certain of this.

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Day 8

June 3rd

And just now, finally, I’m starting to get an idea of what I’m going to be doing.  From what Greg says it’s a terribly daunting task.  Greg’s been here for ages;  there’s no one better to introduce you to the herders, make you understand the place and teach you everything you need to know about the ecosystem than Greg.  He lives this and loves sharing it.  The BLM is responsible for assisting the reindeer herders in generating range management plans and it sounds like they’re having me start it because no one was qualified and felt up to the task.  No one has made one before for this area so I’m walking on new ground, and no one wanted to make one which tells me I need to watch my step and look for all the help I can get.  Laurie (BLM) has asked me to generate three plans for different herds but Greg says he would be more than happy with just one.    With the amount of material that’s accumulated on my desk today alone, piles of pressed plants, Federal handbooks, textbooks, and other reading material that I have to get through and know and understand by the end of the month, I’d say my job is daunting and finishing just one plan would make me very proud.  So, in short, I’ve got a hell of a lot of work cut out for me.

As for Photographs, I know family and friends would like visuals to put their imaginations to rest but they will be posted in some time.

I’m standing on a wind-blown bluff overlooking a mountainous ocean coastline, hip-high grasses brushing against me in the light afternoon breeze.  Backpack on my back, a similarly-clad office-mate is standing on my left, likewise looking off into the impressive landscape.  “Two hikers lost amid nature’s wonders”— it’s the type of scene you’d see on wilderness maps or on landscape posters.

Actually, it is one of those scenes.  A hundred yards behind us and up on a higher hill is a BLM photographer, capturing the moment for use in future King Range promotional materials.  It’s the second day of this unexpected tangent in my CLM internship—Zach Marine, landscape model.  “I move to California and just fell into a modeling gig,” I’d jokingly explained to my parents.  Still, it’s hard for me not to be awestruck by the fortune I had to not only hike a beautiful trail (the Lost Coast Trail) and camp overnight while being photographed doing it, but to do all this while getting paid.  This is part of my job!  Maybe I should look into this modeling thing more seriously….

Hiking, not modeling

Cut to three weeks later.  I’m in the office working on my computer and our NEPA planner comes up and hands me the draft version of the King Range Wilderness Plan.  On the cover is a familiar coastline vista with the backs of two every-man hikers in the foreground.  “That’s me!” I say.  Then the even cooler part sinks in—as I look through the document I see all the maps I made, 13 in all.  As amazing as the opportunity was to model for the BLM (I never thought I’d be writing *that* clause), the real serendipity happened a month earlier when there was a significant need for someone to produce the maps for this wilderness plan which was running desperately close to its deadline… and the GIS specialist was out of the office for the next three weeks.

For me, who had wanted to learn more about GIS and gain applied experience with it, it was the perfect opportunity.  Now seeing those maps in the draft plan brought home how cool the whole experience had been.  I had learned something I had wanted to, I had helped the office fill a need they had, and I had produced something that will be of benefit to the public as they evaluate the wilderness plan or put it into effect.  I couldn’t be more delighted.

Plus I was on the front cover (or at least my back was), and that was pretty cool, too.