Within the stillness of a lake the surrounding hills can be clearly defining resulting in picturesque seed collecting. When the beauty around you is magnified within the moments of working, it reminds you that there are few jobs that provided such breath taking views. The lake picture is Walker Lake.  It is known for being dirty and rather nasty because it was used as target practice for missiles. In fact, as the water level lowers missiles are uncovered and have to be removed. While we were collecting at this undesirable lake we got to see the beauty within the ugliness.

Beauty found in the stillness.

On another seed collecting adventure within a riparian area I was privy to many delights. The first involved seeing a frog jumping around amongst that dense foliage of Carex and Juncus.

As we traveled to another riparian site the butterflies were out enjoying themselves on a pair of thistles. Within that same area a caterpillar was discovered munching on some leaves.

A pair of thistles with a pair of butterflies

Hungry caterpillar munching on a leaf.

Again a delightful beauty was found within this riparian area, a pregnant Praying Mantis. Her engorged abdomen displayed be labored breathing.

Beautiful pregnant mantis

After a morning full of fire monitoring, a group of us went seed scouting while the other group went back to the office. I was in the seed scouting group and to my surprise we stumbled upon something odd. A random cellar door in literally the middle of nowhere. Why is this cellar here? All sorts of stories have begun to form in my mind as to what the purpose of this cellar could be. In one story it the secret entrance to an underground laboratory where undesirable experiments take place.

What does this door lead?

These are just a few of the delightful things that I have been able to discover within the Nevada wilderness.

Greetings!

Now that our Emergency Stabilization and Rehabilitation (ESR) plan has been submitted, we’ve moved right along and started writing an Environmental Analysis (EA) for the Buzzard Complex fires!

My main duties, as per usual, are building models to run reports and then making the maps for the Saddle Draw Fire portion of the plan.

One main skill I have gotten from this internship has been becoming comfortable in Model Builder. I had used it a few times in the past, but never on a regular basis. When you are running the same processes over and over again, it saves so much time if you can just go into the model, make a few changes, and run it again. Also, if someone wants to figure out how you came up with certain numbers, they can look at your models and understand what you did.

Beautiful Model

In addition to making these final products, I’ve also cleaned up the file structure which is pretty complex.  Hopefully every folder now is named so that an outsider can figure out what it contains, and if not, I also went through and created a document that has a short description of the contents of each folder in the Buzzard Complex ESR folder (It’s about 3 pages long…).

I see many of you are wrapping up your internships and I wish you all the best of luck!!!  I’m still around through December and I’m excited to see what fall is like out here in the high desert!!!