As we wrap up the ending of our season, skeletons and pumpkins have begun showing up in neighborhoods and grocery stores. More relevantly, the cooler shorter days are causing rapid changes in chlorophyll production for deciduous trees adding to the spooky theme. Carotenoids – associated with yellow and orange, and Anthocyanins – reds and purples, are peak transition. Drives through the canyons, specifically Logan Canyon, have been breathtaking. The transition that aspens and maples make happens every fall but, never seems to get old.

At the tail end of our internship, we’ve completed our remaining Native Plant Material (NPM) harvests consisting of Agastache urticifolia (Horse Nettle), Asclepias syriaca (Milkweed), and Rudbeckia occidentalis (Western Coneflower) quickly followed by packaging and shipping them out to Couer d’Alene nursery. Our first time sending seed seemed to take all day but, as the season went on we quickly adapted and have been able to speed the process up so much so that it only take a few hours at most. We’ve come a long way to say the least.

In the last few weeks we’ve mostly worked from home to ensure we tie up any loose ends and end the season with a proper final report for both the CBG and FS crews. This consisted of reviewing our data and polygons via Field maps, editing our mid season write up, and computing basic stats – because agencies love their numbers. Numbers are imperative if we want to receive any kind of funding and continue doing what we’re doing. We’ve also been compiling and organizing all of the materials we’ve used and created in preparation for next seasons interns.

Being the first set in this forest has been both challenging and rewarding but, mostly the latter. We’ve truly accomplished so much in a short amount of time. I’ve learned what it means to be a botany technician, as well as what it takes to be a specialist grade botanist for the FS and what that career path may look like. The skills I’ve developed and experiences I’ve had while participating in this internship have already been added to my resume and will only help me take my next steps as a budding botanist. I’ve also learned a lot about federal agencies and would like to have the opportunity to officially work for one as I progress in my career despite it’s seemingly impenetrable hiring process.

We couldn’t of had the amazing season we did without the botany department and mentorship from UWC. Thanks to our mentor, we were able to work under the other botany technicians on multiple projects of varying sizes, learned how to create high quality federal resumes, and collaborate with many other FS departments among many other projects and skills.

Our final, larger scale task consisted of a teaching opportunity to a class of FS job corps students about the ins and outs of the seed collection crew. After creating our lesson plan and presenting, the following day, we acted as team leads and coordinated a large group for our final seed harvest. It was our biggest harvest yet, as we had 20+ people helping with collection. It was a fantastic way to end our NPM collections.

The wonderful thing about this position was that I was passionate about what I was doing. I’m fortunate to say that I loved what I did and what this work will mean for future restoration projects. I know I’ll look back on this internship with fond memories. Thank you for the amazing opportunity!

Today is my last day as a CLM Seed Collection Intern, and my last day on the forest. To say I am feeling nostalgic would be an understatement. This job has been so fun and rewarding in so many ways! I could write on and on about the experiences that I had, and the things that I will miss the most, but I worry that there isn’t enough time in the world to do all of that. So instead, I comprised a few lists of the things I learned and the things I will miss the most. Enjoy.

Things I will miss:

• First and foremost, MY CO-INTERN! I spent 40 hours a week with her all summer and never got sick of her. Hikes won’t feel the same without her!
• Our truck. She was small, but sturdy- good ole’ reliable.
• The forest. I feel like I know her better now, and she’s still as beautiful as ever to me.
• Sunrises. I never knew what they looked like before this job (sleeping in will be nice though).
• Plants, plants, plants. I can’t believe I got paid to hike all day and look at plants. Life is good.
• My coworkers! FINALLY people who want to talk about plants all day long! They are my kind of people.
• Lastly, feeling like I am making a difference. Restoration work is so important! I want my grandkids to be able to enjoy the great outdoors just like I have. Somebody needs to have the forest’s back, and if not us, then who?

My Favorite Experiences:

• One of the first things we did was a drone survey of Maguire’s Primrose – a plant endemic to a 10 mile corridor on our forest. So dope.
• All of the beautiful mountain lakes we hiked to!
• Finding Lady Slippers – a rare orchid, in our forest. Who knew that orchids grew in non-tropical environments? Not me.
• Beaver trapping. Those little guys are so cute!
• Pesticide applications. ALL WEEDS MUST DIE (especially dyers woad).
• Collaborating with the Weber Basin SOS crew, and finding the biggest mushroom known to man.
• Completing my first large-scale botany survey – the North Zone Aspen Project.
• Collecting Lomatium triternatum– one of our biggest populations, and in the most beautiful location too, on the very top of a mountain peak.
• A mountain lake pesticide application to kill Eurasian Watermilfoil. We used the biggest drone I have ever seen!
• Seeing all of the cute livestock doggos in the mountains.
• Harvesting Milkweed. Go team monarchs!
• Electrofishing. We caught 137 fish in 2 hours!
• Teaching the Weber Basin Job Corp students all about seed collection, and then completing our biggest collection yet with them the next day. We got A LOT of Western Cone Flower seeds – over 45 bags!

Overall, this has been such a rewarding, and fun experience, and I have loved being a part of it!

It’s hard to believe the last few months went by so quickly. I’m sitting here on my last day of work at the Eldorado, and I know that the hardest part of leaving will be saying bye to my crewmates. The tough thing about field work is making friends and having to leave them. The crew depends on each other for most of our social life, and by the end of five months we’ve become a little family-cooking together, sharing food, and supporting one another. We have developed little traditions like going to the farmer’s market every Wednesday and having movie nights on Tuesdays.

While the work of collecting and preserving seeds feels important and satisfying, it’s the people that make me love the work. The silly little languages we create together, and the many days of laughter in the truck make the field season an experience and not just a job. We’re there for each other when things are tough, and we celebrate our successes together.

Spending so much time with some really special people has been a privilege and a joy. I know I’ve made some lifelong friends, and I’m excited to see where everyone’s lives take them after we depart for winter.

For my final blog of the season, I wanted to share some photos of the people that have made this summer so much better!

October has flown by as we come to the end of a fantastic field season. Looking back on the past few months makes this moment bittersweet.

Most of the projects that we have been working on have concluded for the field season, leaving the seed collection of a few straggler species left to end out the month. From here, there are just a few reports to finish writing and the field season will be complete!

My concluding thoughts on this field season are that I learned a lot about the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. Seed collection was a huge part of the job, but I was also given the opportunity to explore many different aspects of the forest. Among my favorite were the revegetation projects, Whitebark Pine and rare plant surveys, and the Lynx surveys. If nothing else, this field season has given me the opportunity to experience some amazing things…views, wildlife, plants, and people. As much as I loathe saying it, I’m going to miss my crew (I am not a people person, haha). The forest botanist Jessie Salix, and my crew leader Riley Crissman, as well as my CLM partner, Mikhaela Ferguson, have all had huge impacts on my life. Although Jessica Pessina and Alex Martin were not a part of the crew for the entire season, they greatly added to the fun and interesting group dynamic. I’m honestly grateful for them and the experience this season has provided me.

As always, a few of my favorite wildlife sightings have included some snakes, a porcupine, and a cow moose and her calf that sadly evaded my camera.

It’s my last week on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. Things are coming to a close very quickly, with finishing up on seed collections and the final report. With only four days left in Montana, I already feel like I miss it. I’m excited to go home and begin my new job, but I’ll miss the community I had built for myself in Dillon. After living here for nearly six months, it was really feeling like home. Considering that I had never even been to Montana before moving here, I definitely struck gold!

I also feel grateful to have worked with such an amazing crew at the Forest Service. Our mentor, Jessie, was so fundamental in giving us interns a well-rounded and engaging experience. I’ll miss going on camping trips with Riley, Joe, Jess, and Alex. I’ve saved my favorite photos from this season for this blogpost. Thank you for reading and keeping up with my posts!

P.S. Cat Update: I could never forget to include an update on Skateboard. She’s doing quite well! We found a campsite back home, so she won’t have to move out of the camper. She’s pretty excited about that. Plus, there will be lots of trees and new birds for her to look at. She’s been begging me to change the channel on her “TV” (the window) for a while now, so hopefully this helps.

I love the fall. Cooler nights and cold air trickling in through the window. I love leaving Hill City in the dark, driving to Rapid as the sun rises. The candy-striped sunrises. The moon following us on the drive.

In the prairie, the green is going. Everything is crunchy and sharp. My roomies and I are covered with little scratches from sweet clover stems and prairie dust. Overnight, like a field coming into a ghostly bloom, spider webs adorn the tops of dead standing stalks, or tunnel into the ground. The city of rodent and snake tunnels built into the litter layer is revealed, like a map of a tiny subway system. And we keep counting plants! Squinting even closer at their crispy, curled features, learning to identify them by their dying traits- Nasella viridula goes red on the stem. Bouteloua gracilis requires an intimate examination of multiple ligules.

The story of the prairie continues to reveal itself in the plants at this time of year. Which is, of course, exactly what we’re researching here. But it is striking to me that as everything fades into beige, the tiny shoots of green that persist, as well as the underground plant structures, have so much to tell us about how these grasses fared over the summer and how they are preparing for the time ahead. The grasses offer lessons to us as humans… How to conserve your resources through a hot summer, how to take advantage of late-season warmth, how to work together with your neighbors to survive the climate crisis.

I’m struck by the love present in our work. Returning to the same individual culms of grass every month since April. Recounting the same patch of grass 6 times over 6 months. Looking at plot maps and seeing every treatment that our team or last year’s team performed at this very spot. Scribbling our details, notes, and nuances in the margins for next year’s crew, so that they can continue to tell the story. How Jackie’s position allows her to bring seasonal techs together on this patch of South Dakota prairie to frolic and learn and record small parts of this great big tragic love story between the plants and the planet and the changing world.

The final month of our field season and our time as interns for the Chicago Botanic Garden has finally arrived. I am both sad that this is the end of a great time that I’ve had in the field in Arizona but excited for the adventures that are next in store. Over the past few weeks, we did a final field trip day at Dude Creek, where we worked with Arizona Fish and Game and the Arizona Conservation Corps Tonto Crew to survey for riparian plants such as alders and sycamores. We also got to see a Gila trout and Chiricahua Leopard frog! We visited Globe for final collections and did some invasive/rare species monitoring near Payson. Currently, we are in the midst of closing up shop and sending our lovely seeds out to their next home in Santa Fe.

Slowly but surely, fall is arriving here at Plumas National Forest. While the days of 105 degree heat and nonstop wildfires are behind us, we still aren’t experiencing the usual crisp in the air, bright orange leaves, and frequent rainfall that is familiar to me as an Easterner. The majority of our trees here in Plumas are conifers; pines, firs, douglas fir, trees that remain green year-round (as opposed to the deciduous, or seasonal shedding, nature of most flowering trees). This results in a subdued sweep of fall colors, making you have to search a little more to find signs of the new season. While the days are hot, my morning walks to the office now require a thick sweater and often a mug of hot coffee as well. The constant sunshine and clear skies are now occasionally interrupted by foggy, drizzly days. We may not have dense orange-red forests, but in some places, pops of color are emerging, reminding me that my work here is rapidly coming to an end.

The hardy evergreen conifers found in Plumas National Forest are a reflection of our regional climate. Located in Northern California, in the Sierra Nevada, means we have arid summers and cold winters. Conifers have evolved to withstand harsher environments, with their sturdy pine needles resisting the cold and retaining moisture better than their broadleaf counterparts. Flowering plants, however, fair better when they go through the annual process of preparing for winter. By shedding their leaves, they are able to essentially “hibernate”, conserving water and energy, and reducing the risk of branches falling off during a heavy snowstorm.

While it is true that most conifers are evergreen, there are exceptions. Our Ranger Station has a few ornamentals planted, trees that are native to the Western US, but not California. One of our most notable planted species is a Western Larch (Larix occidentalis). Native to northwestern states such as Washington, Montana, and Idaho, the Western Larch has evolved to be both deciduous and needle-bearing. This is an advantage to them in their native range, where winters are especially long and frigid. Winter photosynthesis is not optimal in these regions, so Western Larches shed their needles in order to maximize their protection. Having a bright pop of yellow amongst our green Ponderosa Pines is a wonderful sight, and makes me want to explore its native region in the Eastern Cascades!

Another deciduous species I’ve found is Mountain Ash, Sorbus sitchensis, a shrubby plant that has pinnate leaves resembling those of Ash trees. Despite the similarity in common name and appearance, Mountain Ash is not in the same family as Ash trees, it’s in the rose family, Rosaceae. A great example of why it’s important to learn latin names, so that confusion is avoided!

With the end of summer also comes the end of field work. Sam and I spent the past month refining, cleaning, and reviewing our work from the summer. Bags and bags of unprocessed seed were worked through, and countless hours of tedious seed cleaning eventually resulted in a satisfying compilation of all of our work, organized neatly into labeled plastic bags. With most of our tasks approaching completion, I’ve had some more time to reflect on my experience as a CLM intern. I feel tremendous satisfaction and gratitude washing over me as I think back to my first week here, and how I went from knowing nothing about Western plants to being where I am today. I’ve had great mentors, and many great experiences to help me solidify my skills and knowledge. These past few weeks I’ve been mindful of this new “lens” I’ve developed, now that I have a greater understanding of the world around me in this region, a feeling that first drew me into botany. It’s a profound appreciation for being able to see the beautiful details of the natural world.

I’ll miss Plumas National Forest, but I am excited to see what’s next for me and the rest of the 2024 CLM cohort!

-Andrea