Our pool of office seasonals has increased from two to five! Hector and I have been joined by two weed technicians, Lisa and Jabus, and a range technician, Daniel. Lisa and Jabus are also under my boss’s supervision so we spend quite a bit of time together. Although we don’t see Daniel as much, we’ve managed to coerce all three of them to help us collect seeds at one time or another.

My mentor had gone to Montana for two weeks of training, so work was a bit different. She left us with a nice list of projects to accomplish in her absence.  Hector and I spent a lot of time collecting seeds. The four of us (Hector, Lisa, Jabus, and myself) teamed up to scout Buck Canyon for Penstemon grahamii (Graham’s beardtongue) and Penstemon scarious var. albifluvis (White River beardtongue). I was grateful for the time I spent earlier this summer hunting for penstemon as I felt more confident independently identifying the white, shaley slope habitat the species prefers. It continues to boggle my mind, though, how important habitat is to species identification here in the Uinta Basin. I’ve never taken such slight habitat differences (e.g. shale color) into account before, only having previously been concerned with different biomes.

I found a whole hillside of fat cacti one day while scouting!

Our view as we scouted for Penstemon.

I’m not usually a negative person, but I have collected what I deem to officially be the worst plant to collect seeds from:  Hedysarum boreale (Utah sweetvetch). When we first scouted the population, we found a nice patch of beautiful, healthy plants with lots of purple flowers. When we returned to collect seeds, though, the nightmare began. Not only had something predated upon a lot of the big, healthy plants we had hoped to collect from, but the seed pods were covered in small, sharp spikes that wreaked havoc on fingers if you tried to pry the pod open to determine if the seed present was healthy.

Spiny seed pods of Hedysarum boreale.

This less than fun seed collection has been nicely counterbalanced, though, with what has probably been the easiest and fastest collection Hector and I have done so far. The two of us were checking out previously vouchered plant populations on Diamond Mountain when we discovered that our patch of Machaeranthera grindelioides (rayless tansyaster) was ripe for the picking! It was late in the afternoon and rather hot, but we decided to get as far as we could on collecting it that day and come back tomorrow if necessary. It took us 30 minutes to collect 10,000+ seeds. As it’s an aster, plucking M. grindelioides was akin to collecting dandelion puffs and each inflorescence yielded at least 20 seeds. It was great!

Our view from Diamond Mountain, looking toward Split Mountain and the Green River.

One of our last work days in June was spent completing ATV training. I was rather skeptical of the training at first as we were required to complete a 2-hour online course on ATV’s as well as read two packets of information and regulations which, to be honest, were rather dry. Actual ATV training, though, was fantastic! Although we were required to be dressed in pants, long sleeves, and helmets, the BLM shares an RV with other local government agencies and, as the Vernal Field Office had signed it out for the day, we were able to duck inside of its air conditioned confines during any textbook parts of training. The hands-on component was by far the most fun, though.  In high school, I worked for an agricultural crop consultant and it was my job to ride an ATV around farmers’ fields, documenting weeds and taking population counts. I loved riding an ATV, but most fields were pretty flat and boring. For our training, though, we had a course set up for us that included weaving, swerving, U-turns on a slope, and side slope traversing. The last session was a ride along with the instructor who took us over terrain we hadn’t been practicing on so it was a nice test of the skills we had just learned.

ATV training!

Hector, myself, Lisa, and Jabus in front of the RV.

The final blog-worthy experience I’ve had this past month was rafting down the Green River. I’ve been down the White River two times now and have camped both times, but one day on the Green River was definitely superior. The White River is rather murky and isolated while the Green is nearly crystal clear and much more popular. The “B section” of the Green River also boasts a bona-fide set of rapids so our botanical team was accompanied this time by two Forest Service river rangers and our office’s two Recreation guys who safely rafted us through the rocky rapids. Hector and I scouted for potential SOS collections while Lisa and Jabus surveyed the weedy spots.

Stay cool, fellow interns.

-Dani

Vernal BLM

We made friends with some wild horses.

Lovely cattle sitting on our road on top of Blue Mountain.

“None of Nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.”

-John Muir

Hey there! I’m a bit late posting this. And by late I mean like 3 or 4 weeks, so my bad CLM internship. Guess you know who’s busy working! So much has been going on lately. Fire monitoring, a lot of seed collecting, and educating high school kids, which is what I’m going to talk about, but I warn you, this blog will not be as long as my previous blogs.

So late June and early July, we were working with “Dean’s future scholars,” or, the DFS students. They had been working with the Carson City botany team, as well as other BLM specialists. We took them on a variety of trips with us, each day showing them different aspects of our job. We took them seed collecting in Smith Valley and Sand Mountain. Sand Mountain is a beautiful sand dune system about a half hour east of Fallon, NV. Not only are the sand dunes such a unique ecosystem, but the Stillwater range nearby is quite beautiful. It was great to take them there. We also did fire monitoring in Washoe Valley, and got to introduce them to a variety of techniques to assess the impact of fire on vegetation and soil. We also did a utilization exercise with them that none of us, not even our supervisor, had ever attempted prior to this summer. We basically took grass clippings,dried them, got the biomass, and used a variety of formulas to investigate the utilization value. It is difficult to explain in a blog, so I won’t get into it, but we put a lot of work into it, and it ended up a success! This data is actually going to be used by the BLM because the particular grass species we worked with didn’t have a utilization value, so it was great to do that activity and have the students be a part of that. Ultimately It was a cool experience working with the DFS students, and we hope they enjoyed it as much as we did.

Hello!

Finally after weeks of running GUD feeding trials for kangaroo rats I got to get up close and personal with these little guys! Another group of researchers is conducting genetic studies on kangaroo rats and the endangered giant kangaroo rat and they invited us out to lend a hand trapping and of course to hold any that they catch!

They look a lot like a hamster, have the tail of a rat, and hop like a kangaroo (hence the name!) After catching the kangaroo rat they were weighed, tagged and hair samples were taken for DNA analysis.

We didn’t have much luck trapping. We only caught one kangaroo rat (the one being held in the pictures) but that was still quite exciting!

A few years ago, I started keeping a bucket list. Being a predictable person, about half of it is just places I want to go hiking. The rest of the list ranges from the mundane (cook Thanksgiving dinner – check) to the cartoonish (throw something into a volcano – not yet accomplished), and it keeps growing about as quickly as I can tick things off. I bring this up because when I came out to Palm Springs, I made a desert bucket list composed of all the things I want to do before I leave, and I am sad to say I have less than a month left to work on it.

But stars must have aligned, because recently I’ve been able to make good progress on my desert list. This weekend I felt my first earthquake (check), which still counts even if I initially thought it was just a particularly heavy truck driving past my apartment. And then the week before, I was lucky enough to get to help our office’s interpretive specialist with some family outings, where I caught a scorpion (check) and saw my first ever wild sidewinder (check). Somehow, the kids were even more excited to find the rattlesnake than I was, and I had to step in and keep them from poking at the poor potentially lethal critter. It was an amazing time, and seeing kids excited to learn about nature never fails to make me smile. Hopefully I managed to get at least one kid interested in botany by showing off how desert willow fruit bursts open and releases a puff of winged seeds into the wind, but my bit on how to identify the features of an animal skull was predictably more of a crowd pleaser.

At work, we got to go out and see the Salt Creek (check), the waterway that connects my oasis to the infamous Salton Sea. I spent a fair while poking at the thick layer of salt covering parts of the creek: as water evaporates, the salt precipitates out to form a surprisingly thick crust – much like a horribly unpleasant crème brulee. But despite that obvious hardship, the water itself is teeming with life: pond skaters, tadpoles, swarms of brilliantly colored damselflies laying their eggs in the water, tiny fish that dart out from cover just long enough to grab an insect. It is absolutely amazing to see that this tiny trickle of salt-saturated water, surrounded by so much empty space, can support so much life. Reading that desert life is dependent on rare water sources is one thing, but it’s entirely another to go to an actual oasis and see first-hand just how stark the contrast is. That’s one experience I am very thankful to be able to tick off my list.

I’ll be taking care of a few more bucket list tasks in the coming weeks (Joshua Tree, here I come), but my work time has been occupied with the usual end-of-field-season duties. I have herbarium samples to prepare and mail, a heap of data to enter and start to analyze, maps to make or update, and a next adventure to arrange. It was great to meet so many of you at the workshop, and I hope you all enjoy your internships as much as I have.

Joe