Greetings from Grand Junction! While my mentor was gone for a week I had the awesome opportunity to go out in the field to help work on various projects, such as a migrating birds survey and the famous Sagegrouse Habitat Assessment Framework. But now I’m back in the groove of surveying different areas for the threatened Colorado Hookless Cactus (Sclerocactus glaucus) with a fellow non-CLM intern. We’ve been hiking these mountain bike trails in an area called Tabeguache for a race in August called the ‘Epic Bike Race’ and for the Colorado Mesa University Bike Race. Unfortunately, we did find one right on the edge of the trail so I’ll probably have to monitor that during the race. We’ve also been looking for them in the North Desert in Grand Junction which is a highly used OHV recreation area. Imagine steep rolling desert hills interspersed with pipelines and oil drills. We’re stuck with a small manual 4-WD truck so it seems like we spend more time trying to get up hills and getting stuck than looking for cactus. But on our first day we got lucky and I spotted these monsters from the window:

These are the largest we’ve seen yet and the biggest clump of them together! It was pretty exciting. So that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing. Putting on my cactus glasses and getting dizzy from staring out the window for them. On a side note: I went to Moab to visit Canyonlands and Arches National Parks last weekend and it was 107 degrees! I can’t believe how hot it gets here. When we hike we have to leave at 6am and it’s still blistering hot by 10am. Hopefully we’ll get some monsoonal rains this weekend…

Lindsey Bargelt
BLM Grand Junction Field Office

Hello from Twin Falls Idaho!
After my first month and a half of this internship I am proud to say that Habitat Assessment Framework (HAF) sites for sage-grouse are completed! We as a monitoring crew worked very hard performing these monitorings. We oftentimes camped out in order to complete all of the HAF sites we needed to before it became too hot and dry in the Southern Idaho Summer! Monitoring these HAF sites was a very dilligent and sometimes tedious endeavour. For these HAF sites we measured the point-cover and perrenial forb densities of two 50M transects located 90 degrees from each other. Many of the sites that needed to be monitored were located in rather remote locations and required us to walk over a mile just to reach them. I am very proud of the monitoring crew that I am on for being able to complete these sites before the perrenial forbs dried up. The experience and knowledge that I gained by monitoring these sites is invaluable and will help me to understand more of what a job in natural resources requires.

We as a monitoring crew will now be performing wetland inventory and riparian monitoring. I am looking forward to learning more about where water is available in this desert landscape and learning about the various species that exist in these types of habitats.

Throughout this internship I have gained so much understanding of just how delicate yet adaptable our wildlands are. By being in direct contact with our rangelands I feel like I can understand the effects of different elements on our environment and what we can do to manage them.

Until later,

Holt Bright