Hello from Missoula,

It has been another busy month here at the Missoula BLM office. While temperatures have been pretty consistently in the 90’s, fire season smoke has not seemed to hit us too badly yet. My fellow interns and I have continued to conduct forest inventory on an almost daily basis, but we have had some chances to search for Whitebark pine (an infrequently spotted species on our lands), and I was able to camp with several other seasonal employees to conduct integrated vegetation monitoring for a week. I continue to have a great time here in Missoula both at work and outside of work, and I am still learning new skills and techniques each week. I have taken many pictures over the course of the month, a few are below!

– Vince Fasanello

It’s just about the halfway point for me and I am starting to get a bit worried about making my seed collection target of 30 species (maybe we shouldn’t have been so ambitious, I am only one person after all and I’m only at about 10). Some days are much less fruitful than others; I just spent about an hour trying to ID a plant that turned out to be the noxious Russian Knapweed, Acroptilon repens (yuck! I wanted so badly for it to be a native!). I guess I still need to brush up on my weed ID skills. I haven’t had the chance to go out in the field with the weeds specialist yet, but I did get to go out on the river and that was spectacular.

So the river of which I speak is the Missouri River, which is about 2 hours north of Lewistown, where I am stationed. One of the largest rivers in the US, it flows for 2,341 miles from the mountains in western MT to the Mississippi River in Missouri. It is a sight for sore eyes seeing so much water after weeks of dry heat that has turned the ground into a solid brick. OK, I lied a bit; Lewistown has a beautiful spring running through town, which is actually the third largest freshwater spring in the world at 50,000 gallons per minute with some of the world’s purest water. I am pretty spoiled with excellent drinking water, but other than that it is pretty dry.

The 149 mile stretch of river on which I boated is part of the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, meaning it is land that will be protected from development forever. The proclamation of the monument was actually made by President Bill Clinton right before he left office and much of it looks the same today as it would have when Lewis and Clark navigated the river in the early 1800s. There are some cattle grazing allotments (grandfathered in) along the river today and that was one of the reasons I went on the river, to help with fence repair. The BLM manages the monument and is responsible for the up-keep of some of the fence lines, especially near the river where the water level fluctuates, which constantly changes the end point of the fences. Lewis and Clark had predicted that the land surrounding the river would be almost impossible for settlement, but yet it happened when homesteaders came in the early 1900s and the remnants can be seen today in the grazing cattle and remaining standing structures. The land surrounding the river is known as the “breaks”, the term for the dramatic draws and cliffs that the river has created in the sandstone over time. We boated for 30 miles upriver while I scanned the breaks for big horn sheep, bald eagles and other wildlife. The 30 miles seemed like an endless journey through almost pure wilderness and I would have missed the sheep completely had Aurora, who manages this area, not pointed them out to me.
Some days when I am out scouting for plants alone I often have no luck in finding a large enough population or only find species whose seed have passed. Lately, what has made up for the lack of plant luck is my luck in coming across bird nesting areas, especially the all-important species of concern. I have been dive-bombed by goshawks, which was very frightening. They would fly straight at my head and I couldn’t help but duck even though they’d veer off at the last minute. I also thought I was going to be carried off by a golden eagle when less than 20ft away, I startled it and watched the massive creature rise out of the grass ready for it to turn back toward me and finish me off. Thankfully that didn’t happen, I just watched him soar and discovered his mother and their nest in a cottonwood. Maybe my mentors are turning me toward wildlife…

Big horn sheep!

Lamb!

Fritillary on Gaillardia aristata

Goshawk eyeing me suspiciously.

Goshawk on the defense

July at the BLM Grand Junction Field Office provided more fun work experiences and opportunities than the ongoing search for the Colorado Hookless Cactus in the North Desert. I was able to join about 20 office employees on a field trip to Pine Ridge, an area near DeBeque where a 40,000 acre fire raged in 2012, the largest my office has dealt with. The purpose of the trip was for everyone to see how fire rehabilitation efforts were working, despite some initial complications, such as the fire happening at the end of a fiscal year so they were not able to chain and re-seed as soon as they hoped to. And then there was little rain for about a year for what they did seed, but things are looking okay for most areas with a few areas dominated by Bromus tectorum, of course. The first thing they seeded was a manufactured sterile grass to just stabilize the soil and prevent erosion (they had a big problem after the fire of ash and soil eroding into nearby water supplies) and even though it was supposed to be sterile it is still around a little bit… They did not re-seed any forbs so it was good to see some globemallow and others popping up on their own!

We have ventured beyond the desert to some creek beds and canyons to search for Sclerocactus glaucus and were rewarded one day with seeing wild horses! They were beautiful but I felt a little bad because as soon as they saw us they immediately froze and didn’t twitch an ear or flick a tail while we snacked nearby for 20 minutes. Eventually the mother and colt continued grazing but the others didn’t dare move at all until we left.

Wild Horses

We also got to help the office hydrologist do a stream health assessment in the Dominguez Escalante National Conservation Area. We did macroinvertebrate sampling and discharge and flow rate monitoring. The water was high from monsoonal rains and it felt soooo good!

Macroinvertebrate sampling

macroinvertebrate sampling

Flow rate and discharge monitoring

I took last week off to visit my fiance who is working in Jackson, Wyoming and my mom drove from NC to meet me there. We went to Yellowstone and Teton National Parks and saw these guys pretty close up (it was scary when one tourist started whistling at the grizzly bear….):

Elk

Grizzly bear

Elk

Baby bison

My mom and I then continued on a little road trip to visit Ouray, Telluride, Mount Evans (where I saw bristlecone pines over 1,000 years old!), Denver, Rocky Mountain National Park, Eagle, and Glenwood Springs. I especially loved RMNP because above the treeline was cloudy and misty and reminded me so much of Ireland and Scotland, and I also finally saw a moose!

Back to work this week!

Lindsey B,

BLM GJFO, Colorado

The past month has been both fantastic and exhausting! Most of my July was spent in the backcountry: I first spent two weeks on the remote Sitkinak Island (SE of Kodiak Island) where I served as a biotech/botanist for an NRCS Soil/Eco Site Survey, then cashed in all of my accrued comp hours to go backpacking in the Bitterroots with one of my best friends.

As is the case for southern Kodiak Island, spruce and alder have yet to reach Sitkinak. This makes ecological site descriptions a bit more complicated than usual: because most of the preexisting descriptions involve alder and spruce or their eventual succession, the communities on Sitkinak don’t quite “fit” the typical community delineations. Though that’s ultimately a task for the senior NRCS ecologist to tackle, I thoroughly enjoyed discussing what it means to be a Reference Plant Community in this context, and the pros and cons of our current methodology for site description.

In the absence of alder and spruce, then, the island is dominated by forbs, graminoids, and occasional Salix sp. which is quite alright with the 500 or so cattle whose ancestors have inhabited the island since 1937.  The Alaska Meat Company currently holds the grazing rights for both East and West Sitkinak, and for you omnivores out there interested in conscientious meat consumption, it’s difficult to beat the degree of “free range” achieved on Sitkinak.

It’s also hard to beat the views that Sitkinak affords. It would seem our NRCS crew somehow pleased the gods, because the skies remained blue for eleven of our fourteen days on usually-grey-and-misty Sitkinak.

Until next time, I’ll leave you folks with a few highlights of the island!

Looking out at Kodiak over an Eriophorum-Sphagnum dominated swale

Looking east toward the northern end of east Sitkinak

Looking east toward the southern end of east Sitkinak

Sitkinak’s primary river

The lagoon dividing the two islands

Solidago-graminoid plains

Diggin’ holes and findin’ plants!

I woke up this morning and went on the balcony to find a pleasant surprise…It was raining! It wasn’t the pouring Midwest rain with which I am acquainted, but it was lovely nontheless.  I looked to the Sierras, and there was a mist hovering above them. It was kind of mystic. I opted to ride my bike to work despite the rain. I mean, there hasn’t been a morning like this since the first week I arrived in Carson City back in February, so I had to savor this rainy morning. Plus I have rain pants, which made that decision easier.

On the business side of things, I would like to officialy welcome our two new interns to the CLM crew, Mary and Arie. Their first day was last Monday, and they’ve already settled in quite nicely. We took them to Sand Mountain (which we have dubbed Butter Mountain) to seed collect Distichlis spicata. We visited a few other places to collect seed, including the beautiful Pine Nuts, where we collected Carex Nebrascensis. We are to receive ATV training tomorrow. Needless to say, we are all super stoked about applying this training out in the field. Well, that’s all for now. Until next time!

Alex

Well fire season has certainly picked up around these parts. The whole valley is filled with smoke from local fires as well as fires from northern California. It makes for some interesting field work for sure. Extraordinarily dry fuels, drought, and lots of lightning don’t help either.

What it looks like outside right now

But other than the fire chaos happening, I’ve been picking up new GIS projects for the minerals department. Mineral deposits are kind of a big deal down here as southern Oregon has plenty of mining history and even some of the towns are basically old gold rush towns. I’ve been digitizing maps of known deposits that correlate to the geology maps we have. We’re doing this to see what valuable areas may be within areas of critical environmental concern. In addition to that, I’ve been writing a lot of reports of the geology of the mining districts down here to help the archaeologists in our Abandoned Mine Lands program. The geology down here is quite interesting and can vary greatly between districts even though the spatial distance between them is small. For instance, one area may be a granite intrusion type area known as a porphyry style deposit, and another may be a volcanic massive sulfide type deposit which is basically a black smoker vent from an ancient sea floor that are now on land.

Studying and learning about the mining history and all the different types of geology around here is becoming quite the interesting project. Hopefully the smoke-filled valleys will die down soon and field work will be a little easier, but that may not happen anytime soon. Anyway, I’m off to Portland to the state office to help out with some GIS projects in minerals this week.

Until next time,

Morgan

BLM Medford

We are in the BLM Monitoring Business and Business is a Boomin’!

Monitoring has been in full swing the last couple of weeks. We have been working long hours, doing three to four plots a day. Towards the beginning of monitoring, we would leave the office at 7:00am, but with the hot temperatures of the day and the huge amount of hiking we had to do to get to some of the plots, we decided to leave for work at 4:00am. You must be thinking, “Justin!? Why would you wake up that early to monitor?” There were benefits for monitoring that early. 😉  The temperature was fantastic and you did not feel tired or hot. When we got to our first site at 5:30am, the light from the sunrise was perfect for identifying many types of plants. Another reason for waking up at 4:00am was to come back to the office early after monitoring to communicate with our bosses and to pay bills.

Bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva)

Some of the terrain was very difficult to navigate. Many roads that were on the maps or GPS were really nonexistent. Most of them were actually cow trails! If the site was not representative of the surrounding overall habitat, we would move the transects to a more appropriate location nearby. If the land had very steep badland terrain with many drainages, we would not monitor that place. The area would be too difficult to navigate, there would be hardly any vegetation to monitor, and rattlesnakes may be present. Sometimes we would camp out overnight, so we would have more time in the field. We could get up to six to eight plots a day if we were camping! O_O One night while camping, Sara and I saw a meteorite crash in the field across from us. The space rock split apart before it hit the ground. That was incredible!

Narrow Leaved Purple Coneflower (Echinacea angustifolia).

We have been crossing off each of the allotment sites we had to monitor, and we could see the end approaching rapidly! Since many of the grasses and forbs were dying, it is a race against time to monitor everything, and fortunately we would achieve our goal in time! Our next move would be to input datum, organize photographs, update files, make maps, and help the SOS Buffalo team with collecting seeds for their SOS projects.

Rescue Rangers!

Sara and I were in one of the most isolated sections of BLM in the back country of Gillette, Wyoming. (We were on the border with the Newcastle District!!) The huge allotment known as Lawver was made up of badlands and ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests. We heard there were many large elk (Cervus canadensis) and mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) present within the area. We were following two track roads through ponderosa pine until I heard a loud sharp gasp from Sara! I immediately stopped the truck to see what she was looking at!! There was a baby elk trapped in a barbed wire fence! Sara rushed out to investigate the baby. The little one was trying to go through a broken section of the barbed wire fence and got stuck. Its hoof was surrounded by barbed wire and raw down to the bone. The back legs were a bloody as well, but not as bad as the front hoof. The elk looked like it was there for a day or two struggling. When we approached the elk calf, it tried to struggle and just gave up. Sara was trying to untangle the wires and I could not pull the wires apart because they were barbed and very tight around the leg. Sara was trying to comfort the little elk while I was looking for tools in the back of the truck. I found some wire cutters and gave them to Sara. They were small cutters, but Sara cut through the fencing around the baby elk leg and freed it!!!!! It ran away into the forest. Sara and I were super happy that we were able to help out. Hopefully, that elk will be okay. We did report the broken fence to our boss, but we had to wait for another one of our bosses to make a report.

Baby Elk Rescue!

Moo Cows, Don’t Bother Me! D:

One of our monitoring sites was located in the Rochelle Hills allotment located near Rt. 51. This allotment was extremely difficult to get to, because it was completely surrounded by barbed wire fencing. We originally wanted to drive through the State land to have an easy route to get to Rochelle Hills. We were searching for an entrance, but we did not find one! What we did find was a herd of cattle. They were red and white cattle that showed higher intelligence than the normal red or black angus cow. The herd was pretty big and we had to drive past them to get to an area that looked like it had a gate. We stopped because one of the calves approached the front of our vehicle and started to lick it. When the other calves saw this they started to surround our truck and lick everywhere. D: We slowly tried to move, but they would not budge!!!! The heifers started to join in! We were completely surrounded by cattle who were licking our truck! Even the bull wanted to join in on the action. When we looked in all of the mirrors, all we saw were cow faces with their tongues!! >_< We had to get out of there! I honked the horn once and moved forward, but they were pretty adamant. Apparently, we were the best salt lick this side of Gillette! After five minutes of gently nudging the cows, they eventually gave up and moved aside. Sara and I were happy to see a gate up ahead.

These cows have found the ultimate treat…our truck! D:

When we arrived at the gate, we found out that it was just a gate for the enclosure corral for the cattle. There was only one entrance/ exit out of the State land and we headed back to the entrance we came through. We turned our truck around to drive back…and there they were. All standing in a line staring at us. The little calves were starting to walk forward towards us, but I quickly drove to the left of the herd. All the cows were following the truck as we drove past them. They were like zombie cows with intelligence and they craved the delicious truck bathed in different bug guts and salts collected from the saline flats we drove through earlier! We avoided them the second time and headed towards freedom. We could not get into Rochelle Hills, but we will find a way in the future to get into the allotment while avoiding the red and white cows.

The cows knew there was one entrance/ exit and they waited for us to drive past them again. Luckily we avoided them the second time around.

Found You, Sage Grouse!

Sara and I were in the Eastern section of Gillette monitoring around different oil wells and storage facilities. There was an allotment known as Antelope Draw. This place was isolated and hard to get to because the two track roads eventually changed into cow trails. When we arrived at the site we did see small sagebrush communities, but the sagebrush was dispersed amongst saline sites where nothing was growing. After we completed our monitoring, we started to drive back to the road and we noticed two birds waddling in front of our truck. They stood there and slowly walked away while staring. They were sage grouse!!! (The ones I remember out in Oregon were a lot bigger and these sage grouse were a lot smaller.) We were so excited to actually see them in our district! Usually we always hear about them, but no one really sees them. They flew a couple feet away from the truck into the sagebrush. I was super excited!! I finally saw sage grouse in this area!! I even made a special note on sage grouse evidence for the site.  Hopefully, the H₂S sites don’t impact the local communities. :/

Sage Grouse  (Centrocercus urophasianus)

And Now…. Your Moment of Zen…

Many bees love the Scotch thistle (Onopordum acanthium) flower. Unfortunately, this forb was a nasty invasive.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to show off the pleasures of the Bishop area to my friends and fellow conservationists, Dean, Sam, and Steve. With the goal of summiting Matterhorn Peak, near the northern boundary of Yosemite, our weekend was based around one main activity, but we accomplished much more along the way.

Dean and Steve arrived in Bishop Thursday evening and we took a “warmup” stroll along the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power built canal and through the desert to check out some local flora and make our way up Agony Hill; a small sandy bump in a valley between 14,000 foot tall mountains, named by the high school cross country team. Albeit small, this mound goes to show how little elevation change it takes to get a vast view in the open landscape of the Eastern Sierra. Agony Hill, just above 4,000 feet the tallest mound in a few square miles, compared to Matterhorn Peak, 12,285 feet the tallest peak in the craggy Sawtooth Ridge range and the northernmost 12,000-foot peak in the Sierra Nevada. We had a good ways to go.

Friday we got a nice early start to a fairly relaxing day. We began with a short bouldering session and followed it up a refreshing swim via rope swing into Gull Lake. Then we payed a visit to the newly opened June Lake Brewery for some after lunch refreshments and foosball, nobody could beat Steve. That evening we finished our drive north to Bridgeport where we met Sam and found a place to camp with the Matterhorn looming in the backdrop.

While no technical mountaineering expertise is needed, this is still a fully strenuous day hike. It is 14 miles round trip and some 6,500 feet in elevational gain that ends in a windswept, craggy summit.  The hike starts with a calming path though fir and pine forest along Horse Creek, but before the 2 mile mark the route cuts off the main trail toward Horse Creek Pass. Shortly after this point the lush vegetation gives way to snow, gravel, and loose, sharp rocks for what feels like a really long time before the mountain of interest and the route up it comes fully in to view. With the varying degrees of physical fitness and route-finding experience, by this point, our group of 5 had become split up along the trail within about a half mile of each other. This allowed each of us to choose our own individual routes to the summit and thus provided some time with a greater sense of serenity and exposure. On that note, if those of you reading this do happen to make this adventure someday I won’t take out any more of the uncertainty than I already have. I will say that we made it and that the burgers and beer at the Mono Village at the trailhead went down with smooth satisfaction.

Tyler    BLM – Bishop Field Office

I only have one more week here in lovely Lakeview. Kyle and I have been getting so much work done. For most of the summer we’ve been doing work for just two of the range specialists (each range specialist is in charge of a certain number of allotments). We’re almost done with everything we can do for them, which is quite impressive, if you look at the long list of work we started out with. It feels good to look back and see how much I have accomplished.

There have been a few more frustrating days where we couldn’t find our trend plots or got stuck in private land behind locked gates. One day I went out into the field by myself and went to a small allotment that is split up into two pastures, but the one I needed to be in doesn’t have a road going through it. So I parked in the upper pasture and hiked up a hill then down the other side, crawled under a fence, and arrived in the lower pasture. Then I spent a few hours hiking around the pasture looking for the two trend plots there. I found one, by a lovely little stream, but couldn’t find the second one. After hiking up a steep hill in 95 degree weather I was ready to give up.

One of my favorite days of the past month was riding a horse for work! One of the range specialists, Lori, has two horses and has been wanting to use them for work. She got the paperwork filled out and we finally were able to take the horses out. All we did that day was ride to a certain point and see if there was water there (of course there wasn’t, we’re in a drought). I spent about 4 and 1/2 hours in the saddle that day. It got pretty uncomfortable at the end, but overall I had a great time. Who else can say that they rode a horse for work?

Another fun day was going out with Anna and Lucy, the two CLM botany interns that I live with. They took me to Sage Hen Butte, a place I’d never been to before. They’ve been collecting seeds for the Seeds of Success program, and that’s what I helped them with that day. The plan was to try and collect cherry seeds and seeds from Oregon Sunshine, or Eriophyllum lanatum. There weren’t enough cherry trees to collect seeds, but we collected Oregon Sunshine and Gooseberry, Ribes sp. I enjoyed seeing what they do and all the work that goes into the SOS program.

Highlights from the past month are: riding a horse for work, seeing my first rattlesnake of the summer, seeing a coyote pretty up close, and caving at Lava Beds National Monument with two of my roommates.

Allyson Schaeffer
Lakeview, OR, BLM