We tend to constantly reflect on our lives thinking we haven’t accomplished enough and I am, of course, not the exception. Today, I feel like expressing my appreciation for the experiences I’ve been fortunate to have. I have felt at home here in Cedar City and have met some wonderful people. I get filled with joy as I sit back in the car seat and realize how blessed I am to be able to see many of Utah’s beautiful places.

I was able to visit Richfield to do some seed collecting. Little did I know how amazing this experience would be thanks to Dustin Rooks, the Botanist for the Richfield BLM Office. I got three days of beautiful scenery and great stories. If that wasn’t enough, I got to meet Dustin’s amazing family, enjoy his great cooking, and got to taste elk for the first time. What made this a very enjoyable experience was Dustin’s company. Not only is he a great father, husband, and cook, he is an extraordinary botanist!

I continue my internship with an open mind and welcome the rest of the extraordinary experiences to come.

Fall in Montana is lovely.  Being from Michigan I didn’t think fall could get much better with our mixed-deciduous forest, but Montana is up there.  The air is crisp, the willows and aspens are turning, the bears are getting ready to sleep.

We wrapped up all the seed collections for Seeds of Success, and I have been working with the Range Staff.  We implement new studies in watershed areas where the streams have been impacted by cattle grazing.  This helps us make sure our management techniques are working.

This photo is from a day in the field. We had to walk past this person’s private land to get to our study area and I got this shot of these beautiful horses.

Last week, my mentor and I spent a few days at the Special K Ranch in Columbus, Montana.  The ranch is a non-profit where 32 residents with disabilities live and they learn different skills such as how to care for horses, sheep, cows, plants, etc.  They have a massive hydroponic tomato hoop house and they sell the tomatoes to local grocery stores.  They also have a large garden of vegetables they sell at market.  Along with that, they have a contract with the BLM to grows out native seeds from our SOS Collections. We can then use those seeds for restoration and other purposes.  It was a real treat to go to the ranch and stay the night.  I got to see other fellow CLM Interns in the process and it was nice to talk about the summer.

The residents of the ranch were all so warm and sweet to us.  Here is Andrew, their newest resident from California.  He liked showing us tricks where he’d dance around and throw his hat in the air and try to make it land on his head.  He, along with several others, helped us break the ground for a new plot of land where we will grow out plants of the seeds we collected to have a local source for coming years.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in Montana. The experience of the Chicago Botanic Garden Internship has taught me so much I will bring with me to my coming experiences. I didn’t even know what a ‘Range Specialist’ was before coming here, and now I’m basically a ‘Range Technician’ myself.  The issue with cattle grazing and public lands is a very heated topic with environmentalist and ranchers often battling it out.  I’m grateful I got to work in a very prominent cattle ranching area to broaden my scope of how I see the issue.

Here is another sweet photo of some horses I saw while working in Horse Prairie near the Lemhi Pass, Montana.

Best,

Leah Murray-  Dillon, Montana 2014

We’ve been here quite busy for the last few weeks with a few outreach events, deadlines for fire rehabilitation monitoring reports, and seed collecting on top of that. Seed collecting is a fascinating process though – it is not a usual practice of work flow when you have a goal, means, and you work on it until you reach a certain result. On the contrary, it is more like a continuous process with an unexpected work load and unpredicted results. We’ve been doing our collections since April – May, through the whole summer and now, in late September there are still quite a few species which are about to be ready. To some extent, it is perhaps the result of the Great Basin climate and plant organisms coexistence – a huge amount of warm days in a year with such limited resources to use. And as a consequence, we have a big time differentiation between different species bloom and physiology peaks. In April we planted few sunchokes around our house and a couple weeks ago, in the middle of September, they just started to bloom. I should say that I’m not the best plant keeper, but for them to flower in September or not must be a tough decision to make. Same in the field, some ephemers and early spring annuals give their second growth right at this moment, which is probably a usual but very interesting phaenomenon at the same time. I guess autumn is a great season not only in boreal zone with deciduous forests and their colours but everywhere, with its own surprises and peculiarities. Until next time!

Andrii,

Carson City, BLM

Our beautiful sunchokes

In Boise, Fall is officially here. It seems to have occurred overnight–the days are shorter, brilliant foliage paint the mountains and streets, dry leaves rattle in the wind, and the weather has finally dropped from 90 to a cool 65.

With the final days of this internship we have one last big collection push to gather seeds of some higher elevation and late blooming plants. These particular plants seem to be a bit more of a challenge as they drop seed quickly but also do not mature uniformly within the population. But the dynamic duo is always up for a challenge!

Speaking of which the managers and co-workers in our office have made it their challenge to expose us to a variety of natural resource tasks other than botany. This is something I appreciate greatly and have loved most about the Four Rivers Field Office: they understand how interconnected and multi-faceted natural resources is and want us to get involved in as much as possible.

This past weekend was National Public Lands Day and Zander and I helped with the group project down in Little Jack’s Creek Wilderness in the Owyhees. It takes two hours to drive down there and we both were amazed at the support for NPLD and how many volunteers showed up–particularly young people. Around 40 people attended the event all together and we helped build trail and take down fence in a recently acquired parcel that was added to the wilderness. Ages 3 1/2 to 60+ were in attendance and all had a passion for spending time on public land. So often we get caught up in the data collection, the numbers, and the land-status maps and it was so reassuring to know that what we do at the BLM really does matter and so many people really do value these lands. This up coming week we have coordinated a planting event at a popular area called Dedication point. After many days out in the field with just our crew, usually picking plants in silence, I am looking forward to working with the volunteers as a change of pace. We have 1,000 plants to work with, so we certainly will be busy!!

Here are a few photos of what we have been up to lately:

One of our collection sites is up on Bogus Basin–a popular ski resort just outside of Boise. Seeing these fall colors and ski slopes just puts a little extra pep in my step!

National Public Lands Day in Little Jack’s Creek Wilderness of the Owyhee Canyons.

We helped Bruce Haak and BLM Wildlife Biologists Jill Holderman in building a raptor trapping station for banding during the migration. Here we caught a juvenile Coopers Hawk in a bow net.

Dedication Point–a scenic canyon where we will be planting tomorrow!

We took a trip out to learn about fire effects in riparian areas. On our way we passed through the very end of Hell’s Canyon. The vertical walls told such a geologic story: the white layer here is ash from the Mount Mazama volcanic explosion–the one that created Crater Lake in OR.

While doing riparian work we have seen so much wildlife and wildlife sign. From bugling elk to aspens clad in bear claw marks to new reptile friends. Here is a Western Side-blotched Lizard.

Last week, I climbed into my tent after a long day of fire monitoring. As I slithered into my sleeping bag, I heard a soft drizzle, much like the sound of a very full rain stick. I looked down to see seeds pouring out of my shirt. Months of seed collecting have honed my rapid estimation of seed quantity. So, I watched, amazed, as several thousand Sisymbrium altissimum seeds flowed out of my sleeves, my pants pockets, and the linings of my shoes. Further inspection revealed tumble mustard seeds had made it into my ears, under my fingernails, and were even stuck between my teeth (like that unfortunate poppy seed no one will tell you about).

To work in the field is to not only study but to interact with the plants that I so love. I don’t just read about the widespread weediness of cheatgrass, I feel its needle-like seeds scratching away at my ankles. I don’t simply learn how medusa head is spread, but have had my wool socks co-opted by this adventurous grass. Everyday I fight hard to avoid become a vector for the aggressive graminoids I so despise.

The more time I spend with invasive plants (and their super villain cousins the noxious weeds) the more my ardent hatred is replaced by a healthy respect and even admiration. These foul little plants each have suites of adaptations that allow them to spread rapidly, grow quickly, and, unfortunately, disrupt the ecosystems I am in Nevada to protect and study. That fact (and the blisters they are giving me) makes us sworn enemies. But I can’t help but admire these precocious plants.

I took a side trip to Yosemite to see the seeds of this very large, very native plant; Sequoiadendron giganteum.

We’re coming to the end of the Summer of Mishaps here in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Our project was to raise larval sucker fish in floating cages with the hopes that the controlled predator-free, high oxygen environment would improve their survival compared to the rest of the lake. Anyone who has read my blog posts will remember that at first we couldn’t find any adults to get eggs from and had to resort to plan B, collecting larvae from the river during a week of late night fishing. We spent months constructing our cages, only to realize that we needed to rearrange them when we tried to attach our nets. We spent nearly every day checking the water quality in the cages and were prepared to give the cages oxygen via portable aerators but the oxygen would dip on weekends or days off. The hundreds of fish we saw swimming around in our cages turned out to be invasive fathead minnows. When we quickly pulled up one of our nets several weeks ago to check our fish, we saw an estimated ten suckers total and that was before we found that river otters had chewed a hole in every one of our nets and presumably had a fish banquet.

To sum it up, hopes were not high that we would find many suckers when we emptied our cages to tag and release them.

We were wrong.

We only had time to empty one of our nets out of three today because we had eighty-seven shortnose and Lost River suckers. Eighty-seven! Eighty-seven beautiful little fish that we spent all summer raising and nurturing and finally got to release into the wide world of Upper Klamath Lake. I feel so proud. We have four more cages to empty, two at Tule Lake and two at Upper Klamath and for the first time in months, I am optimistic.

Suckers recovering nicely from having identification tags inserted in their stomachs.

A sucker!

Be free!

Today we stared releasing our fish! We had a surprising amount too. A few weeks ago we had estimated about ten suckers per net but today after pulling one net and removing all of the fish, we had around 80 healthy suckers to tag and release! We put PIT tags in them to track them over the next few years and see how many of them make it and spawn and live happy lives. To do this, we used an anesthetic to knock them out long enough to get length measurements, species determination, and put tags in. Then we held them in a recovery bucket full of aerated water to make sure none of them had adverse effects from the drugs or the tags. We had zero mortalities which was great, and we released them at the edge of a patch of vegetation so they could have some protection from predators. Now we just have four more nets of fish to tag and release over the next week or so, so hopefully we have just as many fish in those nets!

Getting measured before getting tagged.

Waiting for release in the recovery bucket.

Freedom!!!!!!!!

After monitoring many fires through fields of cheat grass (Bromus tectorum), tumble-mustard (Sisymbrium altissimum), and charred pinyon pine (Pinus monophylum), we set up our last and final fire monitoring plot. This week, we finished our last fire monitoring plot. As we finished up our last plots, westward blowing afternoon winds rushed through the valley towards our fire monitoring plots, bringing with them walls of thick smoke from the King Fire in California. The King Fire is a large fire that is currently burning east of Sacramento and Lake Tahoe and has been burning for almost two weeks now. As of September 24, the fire was 38% contained and had burned over 90,000 acres. Although this fire is no threat to the Carson City district, the westward blowing winds blanket the Washoe and Carson Valley with a thick layer of smoke. Often visibility has been reduced so much that it is impossible to see adjacent mountain ridge lines.

A plume of smoke rises more than a mile into the sky across Lake Tahoe.

The sun shines orange as it barely is seen through a thick cloud of smoke from the King Fire in California

A majority of my last month of field time has been dedicated to Intensive Stream Monitoring in The Bodie Hills Wilderness Study Area. It has been a unique and adventurous process to locate monitoring plots that have not been read in over 30 years. I have become familiar with the use of a metal detector as a field tool, and am now more understanding of the placement of rebar as permanent plot makers. These plots have been useful in the development of my cross country land navigation skills, use of maps over GPS units, ability to find a location using 1, maybe 2, old photographs and hand drawn plot schematics. Many of these plots required multiple miles of hiking to get to, thus they also allowed me the opportunity to spend a few nights camping in the Bodie Hills, something I have wanted to do all season. Overall stream monitoring has been a nice way to culminate my field season and has taught me a variety of new techniques and skills, as well as taken me to some remote places to scout/collect native seed.

Every time I submit my timesheet, I get to watch the hours remaining in my internship tick down towards zero. 6 weeks left. 5 months seems like a nice long time when you’re getting started, but by the time you’ve settled into your new home, made friends, joined the softball team or whatever, there’s almost no time to enjoy it. Time to start looking for something new. I suppose it’s probably still a little early, blogwise, to start reflecting but these last six weeks are going to be spent thinking continuously about the end, and the vast, empty space beyond it. It’s the curse of the early twenties; the daunting uncertainty of complete freedom. The cliche is “I don’t have anywhere to go!”, but that’s the opposite of my problem; I have everywhere to go. I can pack everything I own in my car and drive as far as my will can take me. That should be exciting but to me it just feels scary right now. Every decision and its impact on the person I am becoming is painfully evident to me, and I’m tempted to run away to some remote corner of the world and forget about building a career for a little while. I imagine I’m not the only twenty-something that feels this way.

For now, though, I should enjoy what time I’ve got left in Cedar City. I still haven’t gotten bored of driving out into the middle of nowhere, glancing down at my GPS, then looking up to see a nighthawk bursting out of the brush, walking ten miles of seemingly invariant desert, or even just sitting down and taking it all in for a while.

I’m glad I’ve got 6 weeks of that to look forward to.