Here in Colorado I have been in the office working on a revised monitoring scheme for Phacelia formosula and critiquing the details of the initial monitoring scheme for Corispemum navicula. Phacelia formosula monitoring will be coming up in August sometime with the Corispermum sp. monitoring to follow shortly thereafter. We went up to the North Park area to do some preliminary surveys of the Phacelia sp around Walden and Cowdrey.  We met up with the Kremmling Field office Wildlife Biologist who is also responsible for T&E species, Darren Long, and discussed future plans for the Corispermum sp. and Phacelia sp. in the area. We also tested out the software on the Juno to help with the monitoring of the Corispermum sp. Darren Long gave me a big binder full of past years data and reports for the Phacelia sp. dating back to to the 80’s.

Once I returned to my office the next week, my task was to comb through the binder and try and utilize the information to create a data history of the Phacelia sp.  Unfortunately, as things look right now this is not going to happen because of the type of data collected and the process in which it was collected. The data collection method was not consistent nor was the party collecting the data. So as of right now our historical data and trend information for the Phacelia sp. is spotty at best. The hopes of comparing it to any of the data that was collected by the CO state office botanist are minimal. In addition to the monitoring of the existing plots of Phacelia sp. an overall assessment of Phacelia sp. population presences needs to be coordinated through extensive surveying of the habitat.

In the coming weeks we will be heading up to the Kremmling, CO area to monitor Astragalus osterhoutii and Penstemon penlandii. Heading up Vail to coordinate with the Betty Ford Alpine Garden to get a SOS team established and help them with a collection and familiarize their staff with SOS protocol. Then the following weeks we will be in Fariplay monitoring the alpine endemic Eutrema penlandii for a week and then on to Meeker, CO to monitor a couple of Physaria sp. in the Piceance basin for a week.

Fun filled travels to come here in Colorado.

Regards,

Nathan Redecker

Lakewood, CO

BLM Colorado State Office

Sometimes there’s no escaping the country music in Wyoming. If no other stations come through, you’re assured one country and one Christian station. In light of this, I’ve tried to turn it into a game and a learning experience. So far, country has taught me some spectacular pick-up lines. Lines I only use on my dear friend, Autumn, and which she uses on me so we can have a laugh and sing a little together.

On long days of driving and seed collection, laughter is very important. Sometimes, so is dancing badly in the oil fields. Especially in celebration of the completion of our collections. Tasting edible plants, smelling flowers, hugging trees, and playing with toads are also very important.

Oenothera pallida spp. trichocalyx– Evening primrose population in an area known as Hay Reservoir, near the Red Desert on the eastern edge of sand dunes adjacent to gas fields and uranium mines.

The Blowout Penstemon, Penstemon haydenii, the only endangered plant species in Wyoming, has a distinct vanilla scent.

If you tell me it’s edible, I will taste it. Better than celery, not as good as carrots.

Training at the Chicago Botanic Garden was a wonderful and much-needed opportunity to recharge. So much of the experiences and information have been invaluable back at work in Wyoming. However, stepping away from the work and from the scenery of the oil and gas fields of Wyoming, I found myself referring to the barracks as home. I missed the daily adventures with our neighbors (the bored wildland firefighters), and I couldn’t wait to jump back into community dinners and experience my first ‘Music in the Park.’ Returning to Wyoming, I suddenly had a greatly increased appreciation for the beauty of the rolling hills, the flat expanses of sagebrush steppe, and fell in love with the mountains and rock formations. Even the gas wells start to fade into the background and become less noticeable after a while. (Right, well, that last part is a bit alarming: working in this country has only increased my passion to move to alternative energy sources and reduce my personal impacts on the land. Those oil and gas wells should be painted bright orange with flashing lights so no-one can forget what they are).

Coming back from the CLM workshop in Chicago, we jumped right into collections. In one week, three species were ready to go. We’ve finished six collections at this time. Now we’re back to monitoring and we’ve started prepping the seeds for shipment and the data sheets to be sent to Megan.

We’ve also had a blast volunteering with the Fish and Wildlife Service outside Laramie, WY completing toad surveys at Mortenson Lake. The lake is one of the first sites where the Wyoming toad, Bufo baxteri, has been released and monitored as part of a huge breeding and reintroduction program. Wyoming toad populations faced a steady but rapid decline in the 1970’s. By 1984, with only an estimated 10-25 (depending on which source you check) individuals left in the wild. Pesticide use, the presence of red leg bacteria, and the chytrid fungus are theorized as causes for both the decrease in population size and the decline in fecundity. By 1998, a captive breeding and reintroduction program was introduced by the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department among other partners. This is where our volunteer efforts come in. We spent one day training for surveys and two days conducting surveys. I personally found only one toad but was on the upslope side of the survey site. My partner found 26. All in all, it was a fun and productive few days and I learned so much in such a short span of time. Plus, the Wyoming toad is just too freakin’ cute!

Toads just seem to be wherever we go since the surveys. Another fabulous day was spent working with our wonderful fellow interns from Cheyenne hiking the dunes in the Ferris Mountains and looking for Blowout penstemon. The scenery was beautiful, the company welcome, the surveys were very casual and I suppose successful, and of course, we found a toad on the hike out! We believe it’s a Woodhouse’s toad, Bufo woodhousei woodhousei.

An unexpected find in a creek at the base of the Ferris Mountain sand dunes.

Thanks for reading my rambling!

First I want to say thank you to all of you for either being interns, thinking of being interns, or providing the opportunities that allow for us to be or think about being interns. I appreciate you all and have a lot of respect for the paths that we have all decided to take.

I can’t stop thinking about telling my future kids about what I did out of college. The places I got to visit, animals I got to see, and people I got to meet and work with all because of this internship. As much as I try to enjoy each moment as it comes and goes, there’s something so exciting about the notion of being able to share these experiences down the road. Every time we drive to Midvale or the McConnell allotment or even just driving around Boise I’ll be hit with sudden waves of disbelief. How did I get here?? I grew up in a small beach town north of Boston and thought Idaho was one big field of potatoes. If you had asked me what I’d be doing post-graduation at just about any moment before I had heard about the CBG CLM internship I would have said anything but living in Boise doing sage-grouse habitat assessments in the Four Rivers field office. I didn’t even know what the BLM was until I came to Colorado for college, let alone what a sage-grouse was. And that’s just it, the most valuable thing I will take away from this experience is the vast expanse of new knowledge I acquire daily.

Having been turned on to plant biology fairly late in the game (Jr. year of college), I feel like I’ve only just started building a foundation on which to build my greater plant biology library. Being at the training in Chicago and in our district office with my two extremely knowledgable coworkers (Joe Weldon, Cara Thompson) I struggle with and also appreciate how much I have to learn. As hard as it can be, there’s something so engaging about doing or learning something for the first time. You’re aware of every little thing that’s happening around you and completely immersed in the moment. It’s exhausting and frustrating if you aren’t a “natural” right away, but the reward of looking back once you’ve mastered the new skill and of remembering when you were floundering trying to ID a grass or conduct a transect and seeing how far you’ve come is a great feeling.

I’m proud of myself for having ventured into a completely alien place and job and being one month away and loving it so much.

My goals for this next month are to keep asking questions, not be self-conscious about admitting what I don’t know, and to keep ‘splorin’!!

p.s. Never done this blog thing before so my apologies if I’m missing the mark but hope you all are well!

Signing off from the land of trees.

–

Zander Goepfert

RHA Monitoring To The Max!!!

For the last couple of weeks we did Rangeland Health Assessments (RHAs)! We had to go to a site that was previously monitored the prior year and we had to monitor it again this year. We did all kinds of monitoring! Many of the BLM employees and interns worked on a variety of protocols. We did three point line monitoring transects. We spread out three measuring tapes measuring to 150 feet at 0°, 120°, 240° degrees and read the species composition and the ground type every three feet along the transect. To monitor the sage grouse, we measured the height and length of all the sagebrush in the transect. We wanted to see if this site was a healthy representation for sage grouse habitat.

The Daubenmire monitoring protocol looked at the percentage of annual/perennial forbs, annual/perennial grasses, bare ground, and last year’s plants within a Daubenmire rectangle every ten feet along a transect for one hundred feet. This could help us see the general composition percentage of plants, litter and bare ground of the site we were working on. We checked for all kinds of shrubs and assessed their age. We wanted to see how many shrubs were young, mature, desiccant (half dead…or half alive??), or dead.

The soil and site assessment looked at the soil composition to see what type of soil was on the site. We would dig a deep hole so we could look at the soil composition and soil profile. Typically, the soil was loamy to sandy on each of the sites. We can also tell what kind of soil the site had based on the species composition of the site. For example, we could tell it is a sandy site based on the large percentage of needle and thread grass (Hesperostipa comata) everywhere. One of us would go out and try to identify as many plants as possible on the site. We would develop a list of shrubs, forbs, and grasses for the plant accumulation assessment part of the monitoring. The final assessment to complete the RHAs was the erosion assessment. We looked at the landscape to determine if there were any signs of erosion such as gullies, rills, and pedestalling. Luckily, most of the sites were in good condition beyond the cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) .<_<

Buffalo, WY CLM Interns are always ready for more RHAs!!!

The Rumble in Thunder Basin

Early in the morning the rangeland workers, wildlife biologists, and a few geologists would drive an hour and a half to different allotments in the Northern Gillette region of Wyoming for monitoring. This region looked like the Badlands in South Dakota, but the landscape was covered with a variety of grasses, forbs, and yellow sweet clover (Melilotus officinalis). (I thought it was horrible and funny to see the yellow sweet clover grow on the back roads. Those flowers made the back roads look like the Yellow Bricked Road from the Wizard of Oz.) Many species of grasses were dominate in the sandy-loamy soils such as Western Wheatgrass (Pascopyrum smithii), Needle and Thread, Green Needlegrass (Nassella viridula), Blue Grama (Bouteloua gracilis), and Sandberg’s Bluegrass (Poa secunda) to name a few. There were also introduced species present in the landscape such as Japanese Brome (Bromus japonicus), Cheatgrass, and the repugnant North Africa Grass (Ventenata dubia). (/OoO)/ oh no!!

I swear, this is not a painting. This is real! This was located in the Thunder Basin!

The Gillette Region was well known for resource extraction and it was our main area for RHA monitoring. Coal, oil, and natural gas have been mined in this region for a very long time. Massive quarries could be seen with huge terex rock trucks hauling tons of coal to the transportation areas, so the resources could be hauled away by trains within and outside the United States. Some of the tires on the trucks were about 10-12 feet high! O_O Within many of our monitoring sites we would see many pumpjacks (oil horses) working to extract oil from the ground. Every so often we would see H₂S warning signs and we would just roll up our windows and quickly drive through the area. (We were assured that there was nothing to fear and the dangerous H₂S sites were not active in our area.) ^_^;;

Pumpjack/ Oil Horse

Heather, Sara, Jill and I were working on three point line intercepts one afternoon until we heard a soft rumble. It felt like a small earthquake that only lasted a couple of seconds. We continued with work as usual and twenty minutes later we felt another rumble. All of us were curious what was causing the minor quake and we thought it was coming from the quarries. Kay and Dusty were saying that the small rumbles we were feeling were indeed coming from one of the quarries, which were using dynamite to blast more rock. Those small rumbles in the Thunder Basin were really incredible and bizarre at the same time. (I wonder if I can tell time by the number of explosions I feel in one hour?)

Beyond the man-made small rumbles, Thunder Basin has encountered many severe thunderstorms recently. Flash flood warnings, strong winds, hail, thunder, lightning, and torrential downpours were occurring all over the region we were monitoring. Luckily, we managed not to get caught in any of the thunderstorms. You could even see the hail drop out of the clouds fifteen miles away. One of the field work days was cancelled due to flooding on the main road to Gillette, Wyoming. Another bird transect surveying project was temporarily cancelled due to flash flooding and muddy roads. (Seriously, the country roads after a thunderstorm could get very slippery and muddy. Good bye car washed government vehicle, hello muddy object with wheels… <_<)

Severe Thunderstorm near Gillette, Wyoming.

Thunder Basin was an amazing place to monitor! We encountered shallow explosion quakes, viewed a lot of wildlife, and monitored many interesting kind of habitats. I would never forget this region. Now, onwards to the Southern Gillette allotments for future monitoring assignments!! (/O_O)/

Field of BLM Dreams

One of the days, we all got to take a break and go to an area north of Sheridan, Wyoming to plant different grasses. Our goal was to plant nine thousand Green Needlegrass and Bluebunch wheatgrass grass (Pseudoroegneria spicata) in a prepared irrigation field located along the Tongue River. Many BLM employees, seasonal workers, interns, and volunteers were hard at work planting the grasses. We thought this project was going to take two or three days, but we managed to complete the project in one day!! Everything was all prepared and all we needed to do was visit the site a couple of times a week to turn on and off the water for the plants. Hopefully, we will create a Field of BLM Dreams for future seed collections for restoration projects. 😉

Planting Green Needlegrass!!

Devils Tower \(O_O\)

Devils Tower! Look at all of the phonolite!!

All of the Buffalo, Wyoming CLM interns decided to take a Sunday afternoon trip to Devils Tower! We had a very adventurous day. The tour began at the prairie dog village where many prairie dogs were active and chirping. The little prairie dogs were pretty cute and were playing with their siblings. Next, we took a short hike around the base of Devils Tower and watched different climbers crawl up the sides of the geologic feature. Some of the climbers looked super tired and every so often the turkey vultures would investigate to see if everyone was alive. We saw a variety of butterflies and flowers throughout the hike, which made us stop in our tracks and investigate the species. Later on, we met up with Heather’s friend and we were taken on a small tour of the Devils Tower Lodge. At the end of the tour, we got to walk across the slack line. The process was a challenge, but if you relaxed and stayed focused, you could easily walk back and forth on the slack line…with two poles in both hands. Also, we did not see any aliens…just a lot of alien merchandise at the gift stores. 😀

Time for a Prairie Dog Gif Comic

Whenever Prairie Dogs see a CLM Intern.

I arrived at my internship with the BLM Farmington Field Office almost two weeks ago, which have been filled with a whirlwind of activity. Much of my time has been spent learning and studying the flora here, almost all of which are completely new for me. My mentor, Sheila Williams and fellow CLM intern, Hannah Goodmuth have been incredibly helpful and patient teachers and I feel like I’m finally starting to catch on.

Fellow CLM Intern Hannah Goodmuth (R) and I with a flowering Scabrethia scabra (Badlands mule-ears).

The landscape here is  completely distinct from what I’m used to back on the east coast. The area is dotted with numerous and diverse mesas dominated by Pinyon-Juniper Woodlands, which are adorably referred to as “pygmy forests”.

Despite the ongoing drought in the region, we made our first Seeds of Success collection for the 2014 season. We located a large population of woolly plantain (Plantago patagonica) that managed to flower and produce seed in incredibly dry conditions. I truly enjoyed making the collection; we headed out before 7am to avoid the heat of the day and spent a beautiful, cool morning gathering seeds.

The collection site for Platago patagonica this week. The plants are the small fluffy herbs in the foreground.

With the collection season in full swing, I’m looking forward to getting down to work scouting more collection sites for our target species and continuing to learn more about the Colorado Plateau region.

As most of you reading this will agree, the Chicago workshop was a blast and an excellent learning experience. It was revitalizing to be around other young people and the weather was a nice break from the desert heat. In the short amount of time I made a lot of friends and learned a great deal from the workshops which I am now applying in the field. I felt the Chicago experience really enforced a sense of pride in the collective efforts of all us interns and our commitment to being good stewards of the environment, especially to the plants.

The first day back to the Mohave we met up with some wildlife biologists doing bat research on the lower Colorado River with the Bureau of Reclamation. The location was a small re-forested cottonwood and mesquite forest on Native-American reservation land. This patch of forest was put in place in an attempt to imitate what the floodplain ecosystem may have looked like before damming up the Colorado and altering the periodic flooding which maintained these types of habitats. We set up a series of mist nets along corridors between the trees and spent the next 4 hours or so going from net to net, retrieving the captured bats out of the nets and recording the species, size, and sexual maturation. It was an extremely successful night with 44 bats being captured.

Pallid bat – They eat scorpions

Over the weekend one of the ladies from our office took Steve and I out fishing on Lake Havasu, and although we only caught one fish the whole morning, we got to cruise through the cliffs of the Topock Gorge which was absolutely gorgeous (pun intended). In the Mohave language the word Havasu means blue water and it sure was.

Topock Gorge and the blue waters of Havasu

One day we got sent out to monitor a spring where there was an infestation of a non-native tamarisk down a steep-walled canyon. Along the upper portions of the flat rock there were numerous petroglyphs drawn onto the weathered stone. The enigmatic images were all different shapes but I noticed a recurring image of what looked like an incomplete figure 8, and an even-sided cross. One small drawing even resembled a dinosaur

Petroglyphs

As the mercury continues to rise each day, seed collecting becomes more and more difficult. The other day it reached 113 degrees farenheit during the day and only dropped down to 102 at night. It’s unreal how much water we drink each day. We have been seeing many wild burros and have even caught a few fleeting glimpses of desert mule deer. I can’t even fathom how those animals survive in that heat every day. Until the next hotter week.

Cheers,

~Dean

Whats the vine covering the Palo Verde (Parkinsonia floridum ssp. floridum)?

Its a milkweed! Funastrum cynanchoides

Another month of the CLM internship flies by, maybe even faster than the first. Just as the lull of a steady routine started to take its hold on me; I went to Chicago for a week. It was reinvigorating to be surrounded by so many inspired land stewards, but most of you know that, you were there; you got to feel it too.
For one reason, or many, a reoccurring theme for me over the last couple weeks has been; sometimes you need to leave to realize what you came for. This has been true for situations as simple as pulling out of the parking lot and immediately remembering that the plant press is still sitting next to the desk. Or it can be as broad as leaving the Eastern Sierra for ten days, only to appreciate it that much more upon return. Since this theme entered my mind it has been apparently applicable to many day to day scenarios, but what really spurred it on is this internship. I am still learning from the conference, merely by being presented with circumstances that spark my memory of one of the many things I learned each day. On this idea, I think back to previous jobs and how I’ve progressed, how skills that seemed so simple and routine then, can be so helpful to know now. I recognize this could be interpreted as an over analysis of short term memory, or something of the like, and maybe it is, but to me it’s a reminder that you get more out of every experience than is initially grasped. Never let yourself be bored or take an event for granted.  If it’s not great in the moment, there will be something memorable and useful about it in the future. I’d like to think this is not an attempt to rectify something more optimistic out of spending two full days last week down on my knees pulling Russian thistle, but rather more of an effort to reverse the theme and appreciate what I am doing, beyond the surface, while I’m doing it. Already the CLM Internship Program is moving me forward, but to think of the benefits I will realize in the future is astounding.

Ironically I am submitting this three days late,

Tyler
BLM – Bishop, CA

Hi all –

I believe this is my last required post to the CLM blog before my internship ends. It is refreshing to browse the blog and see so many interns starting out there positions with the various Federal agencies CLM partners with. This internship has been a great experience, getting to know a new part of the country, as well as making connections with scientists leading their field.

I’m happy with the diversity of the projects us interns have been able to work on. This job has built on my past experiences working on large-scale vegetation restoration projects. For me it’s the best way to understand the workings of a landscape, and finding the best ways to bring back native plants to degraded areas is a cause I truly believe in. I’ve been lucky enough to see these landscape-scale restoration projects in action from the tropics to the desert and I can still say there’s always much more to learn.

In this internship I have helped out on several different restoration and ecological monitoring projects. We’ve surveyed and monitored plots seeded with native species in efforts to restore severely burned areas in Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument; installed moisture sensor probes to study water use by two endemic dune species–as well as taking growth and reproductive effort measurements–in Death Valley Natl Park; outplanted almost 2,000 native seedlings across the Mojave desert in common garden experiments, an effort to delineate zones within which seeds can be safely transferred for restoration projects; done nighttime mammal surveys to estimate Golden Eagle prey densities; and finally I helped inventory and measure perennial forage species for the threatened desert tortoise. It’s nice that each one of these projects grabs my interest, but most importantly they helped me develop skills useful in a variety of science jobs–whether it’s in the field, in the lab, or as an educator. It’s a shame the internship only lasts 5 months, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Sam Somerville

USGS Las Vegas Field Station

Henderson, NV

It’s funny how when I got here (Rawlins, WY) all I could see was the vast amount of natural gas wells surrounding many of the places we work in. When I see gas wells I think of global warming, groundwater contamination and possible H2S poisoning. So, I think, “Ugh, this is horrible, let’s get out of here.” But we just kept on going back and the wells just start to blend in after a while. You just get used to them, and rather quickly I might add. So while things are starting to dry up in carbon county somewhere along the way I’ve started to appreciate the high desert: the colorful rock formations, the prairie dogs and other varmints and the roaming ungulates. It’s kind of perdy out here.

June was a busy, busy month which started with a nice break from the gas fields to do our training in Chicago. It was a lovely week of rehydration and greenness and I returned with greater understanding and a renewed sense of purpose for the work we are doing out here. The Garden was beautiful and there were no gas wells to be seen. But then I think, who among us doesn’t use natural gas? We need to demand alternative energy! The pursuit of better and more efficient means of powering our homes, cars and industry has been stagnated by the multi-billion dollar oil and gas industry. Politicians and the legislature have left it up to us to find other, less destructive means of getting power. So I say, let’s get creative people… and listen to Gandhi. “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.”

So, I’ve decided to use my blog to try to affect social change but I guess I’ll tell you a little about my work as well. We saw not one but two federally endangered species this month! Upon returning from Chicago we got the chance to work with some folks from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service doing surveys on the Wyoming Toad (Bufo baxteri). These little guys are distinguished from other toads primarily by the fusion of the cranial crests. The decline of this species began in the mid-70’s and has been linked to insecticide use, agricultural practices and climate change among other things. Our survey was looking at not only the presence of the species but also the presence of the amphibian chytrid fungus as a possible reason for lack of recruitment. The other species we saw was Blowout Penstemon (Penstemon haydenii). It took us about a 3 hour drive on rough roads and a bit of hiking around the sand dunes of the southeastern Ferris mountains, but we saw this little light purple beauty in full bloom hanging on to the dunes. Its’ scent is reminiscent of vanilla. Other than that we’ve just been mastering the slow walk and scan while counting the number of plants collected. The wind and the sun get to be quite beastly out there but I just pretend I’m a native woman collecting seeds for the community gardens, for the survival of my people.
Thank you for reading 🙂

The beautiful flowers of Yucca schidigera.

Although it is my first blog entry, I have been working at the Burns, OR BLM for over a month now. In this time I’ve gotten to see some country. The first week of work, I drove the county border with my fellow intern to get a sense of the area the BLM manages. The Burns office manages millions of acres. They manage land for multiple uses: this includes maintaining habitat for the sage grouse (a special status species), keeping the land healthy for cattle grazing, monitoring special status plant species, and rehabilitation after wildfire, among many other responsibilities. As a botany intern, I work on plant species monitoring in areas that have previously been burned. I also survey areas where there are populations of special status plants.

This past week we spent two nights down at the Hilton. Myself, the other intern, and the seasonal we work with stayed in the eight bedroom lodging in southern Harney County while surveying some burn areas. The weeds crew also stayed there, so I got to meet some of my fellow Burns District BLM employees. They spend six months spraying weeds like Russian thistle from ATVs in all weather and conditions. If it’s a weed, they spray it and don’t care much for the feelings of the plants. Monday and Tuesday of this week were extremely windy and cold. We did burn monitoring and I was glad we were not working up as high as the weeds crew, though the wind still cut through my four layers.

Wednesday we went even farther south to look for a special status plant. Sitting high up in our big truck, I gazed out the windows. The sky is really wide open here, not like where I’m from, where the sky is a thin passageway between trees that caress the sides of the highway. We zipped through Nevada, where the speed limit goes up fifteen miles to a cool 70mph. This was my first time in Nevada, and it doesn’t look much different from Oregon.

After a maze of rough riding on dirt roads, we pulled over. I’ve quite come to enjoy doing special status plant surveying. I get to scuttle about the landscape identifying whatever intriguing plants I come across. This site was dry, dry, dry. The branches of every plant were brittle. The sagebrush, usually light green in color, was tinged with yellow. We did not see a single forb. The area was fairly uniform and after an initial stream of identifications, we didn’t find much that was new. Still we gave it a good, thorough look. I climbed to the top of a hill, ranging out a ways, to see what I could find. As I walked, I kept my eyes on the ground, watching for rattlers. I have not seen a rattle snake yet, but those who know have told us to watch out for them and we’re supposed to kick the bushes before we reach down into them to identify. At the top of the hill the land spread out, rolling and cresting like waves. I took a few minutes to soak it in, then put my eyes back to the ground, and forged onward.

Onward to more surveying. Onward to more plants of special concern. Onward to new adventures.